Disentangling the paradoxes of fictional emotions and of horror

In recent philosophical discussion, two paradoxes are distinguished. However, distinguishing them points to flaws in the prevalent analysis of the experience of fictional works of art, which I have termed an ontological fallacy.

Fictional emotions

The paradox, here, is: why would we feel real emotions when we are so blatantly aware of the unreality of the events we empathise with? Surely, we don’t want to interfere here, so how are our emotions real?
I have argued that the emotions are real even though the beliefs they are based on do not involve a claim as to the real existence of their objects.
It is, I argued, not part of the essence of emotions to involve a believe in the existence of their object. With regard to represented objects (whether real or fictional), we do not believe we can interfere in the situations, long before we realise whether or not the depicted events are supposed to be real or fictional. In fact, we already know we are not going to be capable of interfering when we enter the theatre, i.e. long before we see what is represented to us.
This is an a priori defining property of representations and forms part of the peculiar phenomenological specifications of our perceptions of any instance of them.

Enjoying horror

The paradox here, is: why would we enjoy watching events that in reality we abhor? This, I think is a conceptual, not a psychological question. Psychologically speaking no mystery is involved here: we can be jealous of victims to great disasters. Only conceptually there seems to be a paradox, which makes it a philosophical paradox to begin with: apparently, it is part of the meaning of the terms involved that together they lead to paradox. ‘Being a victim’ is defined as something bad, to be avoided, unpleasant. ‘Enjoying something’ is defined as a good thing, nice, something to be sought after. How can you desire being a victim and suffering?
These concepts’ being thus defined their combination may puzzle us, but in psychological practice all sorts of combinations are understandable, hence they are intelligible, hence something is wrong with the conceptualisation.

Defining horror

If one were to go through the trouble of defining horror, i.e. of seeking its essence, a good way to proceed is by contrasting it with other apparently similar phenomena. What immediately jumps to mind is films about psychopaths, human monsters, such as The Silence of the Lambs, American Psycho, Henry. Portrait of a Serial Killer, or Man Bites Dog (C’est arrivé près de chez-vous). These can be viewed as horror-movies only if the psychopath’s motivational force is conceived of as non-moral, non-psychological even, i.e. only if the psychopath is portrayed as an animal, and in light of that.
Secondly, one might distinguish horror movies from disaster movies, such as The Towering Inferno, or The Day After, where people are victims of disasters they cannot control. This comparison points us to a similarity and a difference. The difference is that the disaster induced on the victims in a horror movie must be caused by living, or better, self-moving, i.e. intentional creatures, not by causal circumstances as fire or tidal waves. We know from ‘disaster-tourism’ that people are fascinated by natural disasters, as long as they are safe from being their victims.

Horror aesthetics

This brings to mind the aesthetic category of the sublime, which according to theorists like Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant and Jean-François Lyotard, involves the subject in situations he or she experiences to be dangerous or merely too vast to grasp. At the same time, however, the subject feels capable to rationally master them.
[On a side note, whereas, originally, the sublime has obvious religious connotations, but applied to horror movies becomes rather vulgar. Think about it.]

A tentative definition

Horror movies are about victims of creatures acting upon them, but conceived of as natural disasters, rather than as moral agents.

Existential claims

How does believing the existence of the object of the emotion comes into play? There are gradations here:
1. If the fearful thing is standing in front of us, ready to strike, one will probably act according to one’s emotion of fear.
2. Disaster tourism assumes that there is no present danger, or that when it is there, one is safe from it.
3. This is similar to our active choice for bungee jumping, zorbing, etc. experiences. The danger is acute, yet it isn’t.
4. Watching films showing disasters from close-by, with make-believe real victims, has one advantage over 2, in that it gives one information about being a real victim, yet there is the disadvantage of not at all being physically near to the disaster. The experience is wholly in our minds.
5. Watching moral agents afflict disaster onto victims involves empathetic experiences on top.
Existential claims with regard to what is not presently there before our egocentrically perceiving bodies, are consequential to our imagination. If you believe something shown in a film really happened one is bound to imagine oneself as included in the events in a somewhat more bodily, and less cognitive spirit from when one believes it is all just a figment of some author’s mind, however plausible it be.

One can enjoy horror movies as analogous to natural disasters, thus as events pointing to human finitude. Horror movies make us ponder our vulnerability. There is not much more than that in them, nor, by the way, in natural disaster movies. Why would it be paradoxical to want to enjoy the feeling of things one is bound to feel in such circumstances, without really being at risk? The fact that it doesn’t run very deep, or, in other words, that it is of a rather religious, otherworldly nature, does not seem decisive. Once psychology, morality, and their psychological reality enter into our experiences, all paradox evaporates.

Conclusions

The question of why we enjoy horror movies is, then, to be split into two. We apparently enjoy watching how people, i.e. moral agents with a psychology, fall victim to uncontrollable non-moral disasters. Why are we fascinated by victimhood, jealous about it at times? This really is a psychological question.
Our enjoying films about moral evil, in contrast, points not only to a fascination for being a victim, but, maybe, rather to one for criminality: how can a moral agent choose to be motivated to do evil? Could our enjoyment be about finding out subtle things about these motivations? With ‘subtle’, I mean: the psychological reality of these immoral motivations? Art simply is not philosophy.

* Burke, Edmund. 1958 (1757). A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
* Carroll, Noell. 2002b. “Why Horror?” In Arguing about art. Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Second edition, edited by Alex Neill and Aron Ridley,
275-294. London: Routledge.
* Freeland, Cynthia A. 1998. “Realist Horror.” In Aesthetics. The Big Questions, edited by Carolyn Korsmeyer, 283-93. Oxford: Blackwell.
* Gaut, Berys. 2002. “The Paradox of Horror.” In Arguing about art. Contemporary Philosophical Debates. Second edition, edited by Alex Neill and Aron Ridley,
295-308. London: Routledge.
* Gerwen, Rob van. 2002d. “De ontologische drogreden in de analytische esthetica.”
Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 94:109-123. [Reworking into English underway]
* Kant, Immanuel. 1987 (1790)a. Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft). Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company (orig: Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friederich).
* Lyotard, Jean-François. 2000. “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde.” In The Continental Aesthetics Reader, edited by Clive Cazeaux, 453-64. London
and New York: Routledge.

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