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Mittwoch, 31. Oktober 2018

How Horror Changed After WWI / W. Scott Poole. In: Lit Hub Daily October 31, 2018

What exactly constitutes horror? Being spooked by the dark, and by the dead who might return in it, may have haunted the earliest human consciousness. Ceremonial burial predates all written history; the act apparently represented an effort to placate the corpse so it would not make an unwelcome return. The roots of religion itself may be in this impulse, with gifts to the dead constituting the first ritual.
In fact, much of what we think of as “natural human life” may stem from the terror of death and of the dead. Even sexual desire, and our constantly changing conceptions of gender roles that accompany it, may have much to do with the terror of the dead. The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy. You can test the primal strength of this cultural idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources. Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, the breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd.
Does the fear of death that drives us mean that horror has always been our dark companion, a universal human experience in which cave paintings and movie screens are simply different media for the same spooky message? Not exactly. The idea of death and ruin as entertainment, even something one could build a lifestyle around, appears first in the 18th century in novels like Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796). Commentators called this taste Gothic because the interest in ruins and castles called to mind the Gothic architecture of the Middle Ages.
Our contemporary term “goth,” used to describe everything from a style of music to black fingernail polish, of course comes from those 18th-century goths. The wealthy of that century could fully indulge this new fascination, turning estates into faux medieval manors and forcing their servants, on top of all their other indignities, to appear at parties dressed in robes that made them look like what Clive Bloom describes as “ghoulish monks.” It’s hard to call this precisely a popular taste, as the novels of suspense that inspired these ideas were damned or banned in some places and very few people had a suitable estate, or enough money or servants, for playing haunted house. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/how-horror-changed-after-wwi/

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