Define Horror

horror
• noun 1 an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust. 2 a thing causing such a feeling. 3 intense dismay. 4 informal a bad or mischievous person, especially a child.
— ORIGIN Latin, from horrere ‘shudder, (of hair) stand on end’.
- Compact Oxford English Dictionary

Let us look at, “an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust”. This definition implies that the fear, shock, or disgust must be felt, ie, without feeling either fear, shock or disgust, there is no horror. So what type of feeling should we look for to understand what horror is, exactly?

There are seven senses a writer can use, six for characters: the first five are organic (hear, see, touch, smell, taste). The sixth is the character’s internal feelings and thought processes. Also, a writer can describe a good looking woman from the viewpoint of a red blooded male, and the way in which she is described will give us a feel for whether she is liked or not: “Molten red hair flowing down her shoulders” gives us a different impression than, “hair the colour of madness shivering around her face”, or, “red hair warmed by the sun and coloured like the petals from a summer’s rose”.

These descriptions however, are not what the character feels, but what we are perceiving the character is feeling. It is the seventh sense. So is horror about how we perceive things to be rather than what we feel them to be? Perhaps it would be more apt for the definition of horror to be, “an intense perception of fear, shock, or disgust”.

Literature is an excellent source of perception. I think the trick is to let the reader understand what horrors the character feels, but more importantly, to try impart that horror through the pages so it is the reader, and not the character, who is horrified. Articulating a suffering is different from showing what the character is suffering from. Be telepathic.

Back to our definition, “an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust”. It is not the character that the above is intended for, but for the reader. The character is not horrified. It is the reader’s perception about what is going on. Let me give examples.

A man with a machete in the middle of a city gives a different perception than the same man in the middle of a jungle. Cutting off a leg to save a life on a battlefield is completely different from amputating a leg. The same premise exists, but understanding the differences is part of this perception. What if the person who is having the leg amputated is conscious and being held down by twelve children? – Different again.

Horror is not what happens or even how it happens, but how we perceive it happening through story-showing. Everything we do is perceived in some way. Feelings are either organic or internalised emotions. Perception, however, is a cognitive process which uses our mental faculties through the page to internalise these intense feelings of fear, shock, or disgust. As horror is based on an individual perception, so it is apt to be aware that horror means a different thing for us all.