The paradox of horror asks why people are attracted to horror stories, and how we can experience positive emotions like enjoyment from a genre that typically aims to arouse negative emotions in the audience.
There have been several attempts to solve the paradox of horror. One of the most famous comes from philosopher Noël Carroll.
Carroll’s argument focuses on monsters, which he defines as physically impossible beings that violate a conceptual category (e.g., wolf and man in the case of a werewolf). For Carroll, it is this categorical violation that drives our curiosity for the horror story. Critical to Carroll’s explanation is the idea that horror involves monsters existing in an otherwise ordinary world. In other words, the monster’s existence is as shocking to the characters as it would be to us.
In this video, Carroll compares our curiosity about horror monsters to our curiosity about oddities in a carnival side show. The fear or disgust we experience as part of an horror story are a cost we pay to satiate the curiosity.
If the core of horror is curiosity about a monster, then, presumably, we should be just as curious about an extraordinary monster in an extraordinary world (fantasy). Carroll would say that what matters is that the monster exists in an otherwise ordinary fictional world because the character’s emotions signal how we should feel about the monster. Dangerous orcs exist in Middle Earth and evil wizards without noses exist in the world of Hogwarts; they are not impure or category violations to the characters. For Carroll, that is why Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are not horror stories.
This still leaves some tricky counterexamples. How do we explain home invasion horror films? Are Hush and The Purge a different genre from horror? Moreover, if the characters display repulsion and fear toward a monster that is nonetheless within their worldview, why wouldn’t that be considered horror?
I think Carroll is on the right track in that his theory of horror focuses on the monster and its relationship to the protagonist. Still, it misses the mark.
