On Horripilation
Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) by Darryl Jones
Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018) is a brief but meaty overview of Horror fiction and film since about 1800. Jones is erudite and clever, insightful without being glib. He takes a global comparative view of his materials, stressing themes and motifs. Happily for the reader, he does not recapitulate the already chewed-over work of earlier scholars like Praz, Punter, and Bloom. Sleeping with the Lights On is also an excellent survey of academic thinking on issues raised by works of horror.
I first read Sleeping with the Lights On two years ago. At that time I wrote:
....For most of the very brief book, Jones addresses the market-driven historical vicissitudes of horror film and TV work. As a teacher he's probably learned that students are willing to discuss "True Detective" or "Buffy," but not Melmoth the Wanderer or "Laura Silver Bell." (Sorry to be wearing my Sneering S. T. Joshi hat today.)
I was surprised that the most recognized and influential contemporary stylists of horror prose today get little mention. Stephen King is discussed, as are Victor LaValle and Michelle Paver, but not Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, or Reggie Oliver. Perhaps that's just me, though. Jones is clearly aiming at a short, popular outline, employing sexy tops like "body horror" and "torture porn." His discussions of these topics are sober and thoughtful, and do point readers at the best examples.
This past week I read the latest, expanded edition of Sleeping with the Lights On, which OUP has recruited to its long-running series A Very Short Introduction.
Jones has added an updated final chapter survey of the field circa 2020, which begins:
Where is horror today? Throughout this book, I have tried to stress the cultural proliferation of horror, and its plurality. Horror is tentacular, spreading everywhere. It is Protean, taking many forms. It manifests multiple personalities and has been put to many uses, made to suggest or articulate a variety of positions, ideologies, arguments, and worldviews, not all of them consistent and some of them downright contradictory. While some, including myself, would argue that horror is at its most powerful when it is at its most confrontational—violating taboos, flowing over boundaries, antagonizing respectability—there is no doubt that some of the finest horror shores up traditional worldviews.
Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) is a book worthy of your time and attention. I will be posting some excerpts in the coming days.
Jay
....Horripilation can be a pleasurable experience. In Jane Austen’s quasi-Gothic Northanger Abbey, Henry Tilney reads Ann Radcliffe: ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho, when I had once begun it, I could not lay down again;—I remember finishing it in two days—my hair standing on end the whole time.’ Horror audiences laugh as often as they scream, or laugh and scream at the same time.
The pleasures of genre are, in fact, often akin to those of ritual. They are based on repetition, on the acting out of predetermined roles, on the precise fulfilment of expectations. Horror audiences are often highly knowledgeable, with an acute intuitive knowledge of the codes and conventions of the genre. They often know exactly what to expect, and this explains the enduring popularity of many of the most generically formulaic kinds of horror, from Radcliffe’s Gothic novels to slasher movies. Nobody went to see Friday the 13th, part 8, or Saw 6, expecting a whole new cinematic experience from the one they got when they went to see Friday the 13th, part 7, or Saw 5. Sometimes, this genre-familiarity can indeed lend a ritualistic or even a participatory experience to the work or art, as we go self-consciously through the conventions of the genre while experiencing it, or even start to take part in the work ourselves (like the audience for The Rocky Horror Picture Show). The great success of the Scream franchise (1996–2011), for example, is to a large extent predicated on its audience’s genre expertise. We have been here before....
Sleeping with the Lights On The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018)
