The Philosophy of Horror (review)

With a title that pays homage to philosopher and theorist Noel Carroll’s landmark 1990 study of horror in the arts, The Philosophy of Horror is another in a long line of scholarly anthologies designed to explore and explain the continuing appeal of the horror genre. At the heart of this collection’s diverse selection of essays, unified by an explicitly philosophical approach to textual commentary and interpretation, is the notion that horror thrives by way of a versatile bricolage. Hybridity, variation, and adaptability are manifestations of not only the genre’s ability to remain aesthetically fluid, responsive to generalized patterns of aesthetic change, and the demands of shifting audience expectations, but are equally representative of its continuing cultural relevance as a site for the mirroring of ever-changing social and political tensions. As editor Thomas Fahy writes in his introduction, horror, having become increasingly “expansive and diversified” over time, benefits from a notable capacity to incorporate seemingly conflicting approaches and tones into its substantial dimensions; the genre effortlessly slides between such seemingly stylistic polarities as the highbrow and the lowbrow, the comic and the terrifying, the sublimely profound and the ironically kitschy (4). Yet at the same time, such transformations still take place within a recognizable range of broadly similar themes and narrative patterns, an endless repetition of structures and motifs that Fahy explicitly references as another of horror’s central appeals. “Just as audiences crave the fear [the genre] elicits, they also take pleasure in its predictability,” Fahy writes, citing the sheer fun of it all as at least as equally important to horror’s longevity as its mutability (12).

This critical assumption of the genre’s propensity for both familiar sameness and imaginative heterogeneity situates Fahy’s anthology well within the bounds of a particular form of scholarly approach to horror. As with many standard, contemporary anthologies dedicated to examining cinematic genres, the book seeks to assemble a range of informed, genre-enthusiast voices and then provides a forum in which they might work to persuade and suggest. As he writes in his introduction, Fahy and his collaborators embrace their subject’s multiplicity of “rich, strange, compelling, and disturbing elements” without insisting on any one defining theoretical model, pointing to the continuing prevalence of the genre as proof that such work calls to be done (4). The authors of Philosophy want to continue an “ongoing discussion about the popular need for and interest in horror,” a marketable fascination clear to anyone familiar with the sheer number of horror-related materials that fill screens large and small during the Halloween season (4).

Citing the “popularity” of horror is a strategy of many attempts to wrestle with the genre, both continually legitimizing the study of often marginalized or even denigrated texts (proof that horror still revels in a certain mainstream disreputability) and evidencing an active fascination with, at times even a somewhat troubled but necessary acknowledgement of, horror’s continual audience appeal. Unlike such classic works as Carroll’s treatise or Men, Women, and Chainsaws (1993), Carol Clover’s elegantly argued reassessment of the slasher film, still hallowed and frequently cited, Philosophy of Horror lacks the sustained, shaping vision traditionally expected of an individually authored text. Yet, as with many collections, one of Philosophy’s strengths is this very plurality of critical opinion, representative of a desire to demonstrate the impossibility of containing or “summing up” what horror “means.” In this sense, the book would seem to be tacitly acknowledging the importance of “the spectator,” with all of “its” presumed variation in response to, and use of, the genre. Yet the collection stops short of completely adopting a reception or fan studies stance; the majority of the essays actively pursue reading strategies based on a privileging of authorial (or “autuerial”) intent. Where this plurality of meaning is ultimately found in Philosophy is the diverse range of texts and philosophical approaches adopted by the various authors.

Appropriately, then, the assembled essays consider an array of textual objects ranging over a wide...