The pursuit of understanding the world always turns toward mysteries. But the pursuit of beauty acts as balm for this desire to know. In beauty, the mystery is not pursued in order to break it, it is pursued in order to behold it. Beauty, then, does not try to destroy the mystery to find the truth inside, rather it accepts the mystery itself as the truth. Do not try to solve the riddle, whisper its words and cherish the sounds.

From Benjamin Christenson’s Häxan (1922) — From Benjamin Christenson’s *Häxan* (1922)

The Terrible Inheritance

Horror utilizes archetype and symbol more than perhaps any other genre. Its stories are ones of fear, and fear, above all other emotions, is precoded by the collective unconscious. We arrive on this earth with vivid fears. Fears of fanged creatures, of howling in the night, of mist, of spiders, of the dead, of darkness.

We then continue to manufacture new fears out of the stuff of our lives: the traumas we experience and the traumas we witness. Our fears begin with an inheritance and always accrue with the product of our own hard work. But even these fears often maintain direct lines to more ancient predecessors. This is because the traumas that serve as the raw materials to our new fears are only traumas if they realize a fear already there.

And so provoking fear requires the recollection of an archetype already feared. The archetypes are productive inserts for storytelling, borrowed from our shared patterns of fear.

Plato’s world of ideal forms is a world without articles. You don’t come upon a dog, you come upon Dog. You don’t go to a theater, you go to Theater. There are no specifics, only symbols channeling power through a refraction shaped out of the bends and folds that make up the ideal form. These forms are made out of the same mental stuff, bent into their unique shapes — perhaps fear works like this, too.

Our nightmares are the closest guides to thinking this through. How we conjure up the strangest stories leading a path of anxiety to panic to complete and total fright. In the morning, we sometimes wake to find the events of a nightmare certainly strange, but our response is incongruous. A friend of mine recently recounted a recurring dream he had as a child. In the dream, he rises from his bed and goes to the window to see a deer and a dog looking in at him from beyond the glass, their black eyes gleaming. What an interesting response to this image, fear. And yet, the terror always accompanied the dream with each return. The fear itself tells us something of how to read the message of the dream. The stirring beasts beyond the room in the night. Beasts that also stir within us. That call us to some other nature outside of walls and beds and language. The image does not seem frightening to the waking mind, but the image connects the dreamer to the realm of fear, like a key to a forbidden room or a trap door to the undiscovered basement. The fear itself teaches the dreamer that an archetype of fear is speaking.

But a work of horror cannot bring emotion to inform the text. Rather, the text must draw out the emotion. And so, horror cannot add to fear before establishing it. Horror thus calls into being images of an archetype of fear, and can only augment or modify once the link is established.

The Kingdom of Repressed Truth

Horror is an aesthetic pursuit. A work of storytelling. Being an aesthetic pursuit, horror operates around its own conception of beauty — here beauty simply means an aesthetic ordering that is appreciated, be it through paralyzing terror, erotic arousal, gentle gratitude, or any number of states of appreciation. [1] As we have discussed, horror creates this beauty by weaving archetypes of fear throughout the other elements of the text.

Horror trades in the least touched truths, everything that is refused to be true and yet endures. When we sink our fears below the surface of our thoughts, some die, proving to be temporary phantoms of anxiety and paranoia, trifles that come and go. But not all of these fearful thoughts pass forever. Those that do not drown under the water of our unconscious float to the surface again and again, never leaving, never dying. Horror is made up of the things that survive the drowning.

And so any philosophy of horror must hold this position: take account of the unbearable truths, see what you blind yourself to. What unites all horror is that it attempts this one act, returning these dark truths to us.

Horror is the unsettling rise of known and unknown truths from the dungeons where we keep them. Horror is a philosophy, a metaphysics, a spiritual path that speaks to us about the things we struggle to forget. It is therefore a rigorous path, requiring intellectual courage and spiritual bravery. It is the handling of that which must not be handled. Horror reminds us of that which we collectively agree we do not wish to be reminded of.

This path is all encompassing, because the unrefused truths are not disqualified from it, it is the insistence that both refused and unrefused are held together. These truths are brought together in the vessels of their archetypes. The tension arising from that gathering is the magic of horror.

Notes

[1] Not unlike Nehemas’ conception of beauty as a representation of a lack, only because a lack is also pursued.