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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