On resilience - Michael Saler in TLS:

‘Between 1995 and 2005 theatrical horror films doubled their share of the market; during the pandemic, horror films and books shattered sales records.
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis is often invoked to explain this flight from real to fictional horror: aesthetic representations of life’s tragedies allow audiences to purge themselves of fearful emotions. This notion of an effective purification of the affects, though, may not convince those who hesitate to take showers after watching Psycho. Recent research from the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University proposed a related but different dynamic: fictional horror provides audiences with a safe simulation of frightening experiences, enabling them “to practice effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in real-world situations”. They found that horror film fans proved more “resilient” and demonstrated greater “preparedness” during the pandemic.’

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‘Such disdain is relatively new if one takes the long view. In Greek tragedies, medieval romances, Jacobean dramas, gothic novels and Victorian ghost stories, the horrific has often been uncontroversial. Ann Radcliffe proposed a qualitative distinction between spiritual “terror” and corporeal “horror” in 1826, but the terms remained synonymous in everyday use.
Horror became easily dismissible only when it was packed into the straitjacket of “genre” from the 1930s onwards. In the US, Universal Studios produced a successful string of monster movies explicitly marketed as horror films, starting in 1931 with Dracula and Frankenstein. There were a few pulp magazines that had “Horror” in their titles around this time, and some comics in the mid-1950s that disappeared after a public outcry, but horror fiction didn’t gain wide recognition until the 1970s, after a series of bestsellers by Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, 1967), William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist, 1971), Stephen King (Carrie, 1974) and Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire, 1976), among others. By the 1980s there were several mass-market imprints dedicated to horror, spawning paperback originals with wonderfully garish covers and generally disappointing contents.’

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‘The sunny American dream of a progressive republic of free and equal citizens tended to repress its darker roots in zealous puritanism, settler colonialism, capitalist exploitation, racist enslavement and gender subordination. Fictional horror has therefore assumed the psychic function of venting American nightmares, which Dauber assesses expertly in this survey of the interrelated field of horrors real and imagined.’

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‘Horror fans want to be exposed to challenging content and to experience feelings they have been taught to disavow or repress. She believes horror is as much about expressing empathy as it is about eliciting fear. She is also in accord with Dauber in rejecting the typology trap, asserting that she is not “interested in compiling characteristics or establishing rules for an unruly genre”.
Her catholic selection of films supports this, but she can be somewhat puritanical in her pronouncements that horror is “perhaps, the last truly sincere genre” and that “Fear is earnest, and it cannot survive camp”.’

Read the article here.

Definitely, fear is earnest, but perhaps earnestness is not always a virtue?

Watching horror, in order to become more resilient. The arts and utilitarianism – a long and not always happy marriage.

But no need to look down upon the genre. You can always say, I watch horror in order to red myself of an ugly past.