Princess, the age of some people can only be measured by the level of rot in them. And by that measure I’m ancient.
—Tennessee Williams, from “Sweet Bird of Youth”, A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays
I have no use for noble souls; what I need is an accomplice.
— Jean-Paul Sartre, in The Flies
For Beauty’s nothing
but the beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, excerpt of The First Elegy (tr. by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender)
“The discovery of the horror tale at an early age was fortuitous for me. This sort of tale serves, in many ways, the very same purpose as fairy tales did in our childhood. It operates as a theater of the mind in which internal conflicts are played out. In these tales we can parade the most reprehensible aspects of our being: cannibalism, incest, parricide. It allows us to discuss our anxieties and even to contemplate the experience of death in absolute safety.
And again, like a fairy tale, horror can serve as a liberating or repressive social tool, and it is always an accurate reflection of the social climate of its time and the place where it gets birthed.”
– Guillermo del Toro, “Haunted Castles, Dark Mirrors”
“Horror violates the taken-for-granted ‘natural’ order. It blurs boundaries and mixes categories that are usually regarded as discrete to create…’[im]purity and danger.’ The anomaly manifests itself as the monster: a force that is unnatural, deviant, and possibly malformed. The monster violates the boundaries of the body in a two-fold manner: through the use of violence against other bodies…and through the disruptive qualities of its own body. The monster’s body is marked by the disruption of categories; it embodies contradiction. The pallor of the vampire, the weirdly oxymoronic ‘living dead’ signifies death, yet the sated vampire’s veins surge with the blood of its victim. The monster disrupts the social order by dissolving the basis of its signifying system, its network of differences: me/not me, animate/inanimate, human/nonhuman, life/death. The monster’s body dissolves binary differences.
The monster signifies what Julia Kristeva calls the ‘abject,’ that which does not ‘respect borders, positions, rules’—‘the place where meaning collapses’. Danger is born of this confusion because it violates cultural categories. This is why the destruction of the monster is imperitave; it is only when the monster is truly dead and subject to decay that it ceases to threaten the social order. Disintegration promises to reduce the monster to an undifferentiated mass, one that no longer embodies difference and contradiction, for ‘where there is no differentiation, there is no defilement’.”
– Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing
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