What makes a work be of terror? Terror, whether in its more cinematographic, video-language or literary aspect, is a very peculiar genre because of its objective: to make the person who consumes it fear. Moreover, if we approach a basic taxonomy within the videogame the horror genre, commonly called "survival horror" (the validity of the label already gives for another text), is the only one that does not base its premise on the most mechanical part but in the sensation that must transmit: horror.
However, how can we stipulate which product is of terror being linked to such a particular emotion? In other similar cases, like the comedy that seeks to make us laugh, it seems to be clear. One can say if a movie, for example, is a comedy although it has not been funny. However, in the field of terror is more common to find spectators or players who quickly declare that a certain product is not terror because they have not felt fear at any time.
Needless to say, a product created to create the sensation of terror in the viewer is not linked, although it would be ideal, for the viewer to feel it. Surely there is more than one out there who does not even flinch when he sees The Exorcist and I think no one would ever deny that Friedkin's film belongs to the horror genre. For this reason different authors have approached the genre looking for certain particularities and elements that can help us discern when a work belongs to the genre, or not and in this sense the work of Noël Carroll; Philosophy of terror or paradoxes of the heart is a good starting point.
Carroll part of the basis that for him what is commonly called terror is, in fact, something called "terror-art" that basically differs from what one might call terror or more mundane. For example, suffering a terrorist attack or a car accident is something that terrifies everyone but one would not talk about a horror movie to a film that portrayed the attacks of September 11, 2001. That's why the philosopher talks about " terror-art "and builds part of his vision around the figure of the monster. This concept is, in essence, any being or creature in whose current existence is not believed according to science so creatures of all kinds come in but, and this is important, such beings must be threatening and impure.
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Stephen King, for example, speaks of terror as a ladder of emotions: "I recognize horror as the finest emotion so I will try to horrify the reader. But if I find that I can not horrify him, I will try to terrify him, and if it turns out that I can not terrify him, I'll go for the big thing. " The terror of Clive Barker, for example, goes directly to the lowest echelons, so to speak, of the scale of Stephen King and nothing is saved in the ink, creating all kinds of explicit sensations seeking an answer in his reader.
Choose the vision we choose, and we leave some behind, what we can intuit only with this short introduction is that terror, like so many other genres, has some mechanisms and patterns recognizable by both the viewer and the creator. This means that although we do not feel the expected sensation one can glimpse the creative mechanisms behind a work of terror. The works that seek to convey a sensation, and especially the terror that tends to be linked to the politics of the moment, can lose their impact over time, literally losing the horizon of what was being said at that moment. The spectator who approaches today, in 2018, to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will not interpret the same as the 1974 spectator.
Noël Carroll in his book collects a detailed study on the history of the genre that he calls "terror-art" and in the pages of his book settles a series of elements that he has extracted from all of them. He likes to say that his theory is not prescriptive but descriptive, that is, that it only collects what one commonly sees within the genre and does not mark in stone immovable laws. Structure thus an interesting vision of certain organizational master stories in horror stories recognizing, how could it be otherwise, that each subgenre has its own particularities and that what he collects is nothing more than a first approach to a big brush to the structure of the genre. But this is precisely what makes it so interesting and useful for a first narrative approach to fictional terror.
For the author, one of the most common plots in the genre is what he calls "complex discovery". This plot, like the repeated "master plots" of the script, has a series of steps in a specific order with which, as usual, it can be played later to create different stories; presentation, discovery, confirmation and confrontation.
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