Introduction: A Genreless Horror

Abstract

Horror has historically been mired in the conceptual swamp of negative affect. Because its basal meaning refers to ‘a painful emotion compounded of loathing and fear’ (Oxford English Dictionary, 2007), the term has produced a circular scholarship that approaches its definition through spectator, viewer, user, and player feeling, finding therein only what the generic stamp has already proclaimed. As in Linda Williams’s (1991) taxonomy of ‘body genres’, horror is presupposed to be that genre that disturbs and moves the body in thrilling, disgusting ways, and the broader generic implication has been the durable but quasi-tautological sense that ‘horror’ connotes the ways in which various texts inspire such reactions. Accordingly, visual and media studies have largely either focused on the tropes, themes, and things taken to prompt that affective result (e.g. monsters, assailants, terrible places); traced the permutations of such tropes, themes, and things (as a history of elements); or made broad claims for the significance of a genre thusly centered on the elicitation of negative affect – a glossed version of Althusser’s notion of ‘expressive causality’ (Althusser and Balibar, 2009 [1970]), which he attributes to Hegel, in which narrative productions are the phenomenal expressions of cultural essences. (Ideological, psychoanalytic, and cultural studies approaches to horror as the return of [the, some, any] repressed share at least some of this impulse.) This generic approach to horror studies – with its praxis of adjudicating inclusions (and tracing exclusions), taxonomizing rules for membership, and articulating a set of expectations so tenacious that they are secured precisely through departure, self-conscious violation, and postmodern knowingness – has dominated the field for 30 years.