Author: linealoenhoeiden

1. King (2010) describes Horror as being defined through three basic elements. Explain, using references, what these three elements are. Think of a horror story you’ve read/watched/heard that makes use of all three of these elements and show how King’s definition is at play in that narrative.

According to King (2010) the horror genre is built by three different elements, or as he describes it, horror exists on three different levels. King (2010) writes: Terror on top, horror below it and lowest of all, the gag reflex of revulsion.”
King himself favours the level of terror and tries to avoid revulsion and writes that he is “not proud” if he has to use it to get a reaction from his reader.
He writes on that terror is what the readers mind sees, the unpleasant speculative thoughts our own mind creates. Horror is the underlying emotion of terror, slightly less fine and it “invites a physical reaction by showing us something which is physically wrong.” The third element, revulsion is King’s least favourite and he says that “the ‘chest-buster’ form Alien” fits into the revulsion category.

How does King’s three levels fit into a horror film I’ve seen? Well let’s have a look at my personal favourite vampire movie, The Lost Boys, which is categorized as a “black comedy horror film” (Wikipedia, 2020), though it might not be as scary as many other horror films, it definitely contains King’s (2010) three elements.  
The first and finest element can be found quite early in the movie where ‘something’ is flying over a dark amusement park, a night guard sees ‘it’, screams and starts running to his car. He franticly tries to get in, the camera goes everywhere until the guard (and the car door) is pulled from the car and disappears up in the air. We have a similar scene later one (which might be more classic horror film) where a couple is fooling around (or at least he is) in a car, she hears a sound, he says it’s nothing and the next thing that happens is that the roof disappears and they are both taken by ‘something’.
Moving on to level two we have a scene where we finally get to see the vampires aka the horror element where we see something physically wrong. The handsome teenage boys are transformed into scary vampires with pointy teeth and pale eyes, the light in this scene is set so that their facial features appear more terrifying then what they really are. The same scene takes the movie to a gorier level when we get to see the vampires feed on innocent people.
Now, revulsion! One of the most revolting scenes in The Lost Boys takes place during the last fighting scene, although there are many scenes in this movie that fits into the third level, I think this one hits the jackpot. During the last fight one of the vampires is pushed into a bathtub filled with garlic and holy water, he melts and makes a rather disturbing appearance before disappearing into the tub, but it doesn’t end there. The melted vampire then causes a chemical reaction if you like (or he’s taking revenge) by flooding the house with.. well.. vampire goo and the whole scene is rather disgusting.

Although The Lost Boys aren’t particularly scary it still follows a ‘horror movie model’ and we see a lot of classic elements. After reading about King’s (2010) three levels of horror elements it was rather easy to point them out in the movie.  

Sources:

King, S. (2010). Danse Macabre. Everest House.

4. Stableford (2007) details the historical formation of Cosmic Horror prior to Lovecraft. Describe in brief this formation and how it affected the Lovecraftian School of Cosmic Horror which would soon become the gold standard. Can you see any of these historical movements having an influence in The Shadow Over Innsmouth or The Colour out of Space?

Lovecraft school of witchcraft and wizardry. No, sorry.  Lovecraft school of weird fiction!

Stableford (2007) writes about H.P. Lovecraft and his works of Cosmic Horror and how the genre developed over the years. Lovecraftian fiction is simply explained, stories where the horror arises from knowledge that are too much to handle, though Lovecraft was not satisfied by this and wanted to take his work to the next extreme level.
Clark Ashton Smith helped Lovecraft transition from cosmic fear to a more detailed, full-fledged notion of Cosmic Horror. Lovecraft and Smith pioneered the hybridization of horror and sci-fi, and it was later taken further by Donald Wandrei and Frank Belknap Long.
Lovecraft wrote The Color out of Space in 1927 which makes Cosmic Horror manifest as a kind of ancient, parasitic sheen.
I’ll come back to Lovecraft in a bit but before that I want to talk about some of the other things and authors that influenced the Cosmic Horror phenomenon and I want to start with the sublime.
The sublime originates from the fundamental emotion of astonishment and Stableford (2007) writes that according to Edmund Burke sublimity is associated with danger, power, vacuity, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness and so on. Sublimity always have an element of horror.
Scientific discoveries such as Newtons conception of the universe and the discovery of the Milky Way played a huge part in feeding the writers imaginations. Proto-Meteorogist Adam Walker’s notion that the world of ordinary sensory experience, mundane time calculation and social interaction were nothing, but a network of appearances was also a contribution to the Cosmic Horror development. 
Stableford writes on about how the tradition of Cosmic Horror fiction can be seen as a heroic attempt to communicate the uncommunicable, “by suggesting—in the absence of any possibility of explicit description—the sheer enormity of the revelation that would be vouchsafed to us, were we ever granted permission to see and conceive of the world as it really is, rather than as it appears to our senses: deflated, diminished, and domesticated.”
Next up is the Romanticism’s rebellion against “Classism”, who took many forms, the most outstanding is the nostalgic interest in the fantastic and folkloristic and “its championship  of  the  spontaneity  of  psychological  and  aesthetic  responses against  the  imposed  order  and  discipline  of  formal  representation.”
Then we have the Gothic Horror Fiction which is one of the main extensions into prose fiction.
Stableford points out that Romanticism were a good breeding ground for developing a type of Cosmic Horror who weren’t just supernatural, but also embodied a new exaggerated sense of sublimity and attitude. A good example of this is Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Speaking of Mary Shelly, she was one of several authors who helped push the progress forwards, some of the others were Robert Browning, Edward Bulwer Lytton and Edgard Allan Poe. We also have the work of Gustave Flaubert who presumably inspired what Stableford describes as one of the 19^th centuries most striking accounts of existential breakthroughs of Cosmic Horrors: Jules Richpin’s La Machine à métaphysiqe or The Metaphysical Machine.
Some other influences and inspirational fountains were of course opium and other types of drugs who helped feed the writers imagination.

Lastly Stableford talks about the works of the Lovecraftian School. Now I’d like to mention that Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos were continued by his disciples, in fact he encouraged people to use his motifs in their own work. 
The Lovecraftian School continued it’s work but moved from Cosmic Horror to a more intimate form of psychological stress. It became pointless to them to describe the indescribable, it was to repetitive and ex-Lovecraft authors such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch became more effective when they moved away from Lovecraft’s template.
The arrival of pulp sci-fi switched added an ideological force and the wonder component who used to be horror was switched out with the more important aspect of the modern experience of the sublime. 
Other influences were Olaf Stapleden and John W. Campbell, who took the work in a different direction. Pierre Teilhard’s The Omega Point and Frank Tipler’s reconfiguration of it also triggered responses in the world of sci-fi writers.

The Colour our of Space is a psychedelic Cosmic Horror film where we watch the characters slowly lose their mind. We see some classic Lovecraft elements in the monstrous blobs of various animals and humans fused together into something indescribable and of course in the colourful light that can’t be explained, “not like any colour I’ve ever seen before.” The film shows the hybridization of horror and sci-fi that I talked about earlier but also plays more on the psychological aspects of cosmic horror. We see elements of the sublime in how the family is isolated from the rest of the world (solitude), there is an obvious danger and power they can’t understand or fight against, and we find darkness both in the sense of scenes set at night but also in the characters.
The scientific progress and discoveries a about the universe who inspired various writers can be seen in the ‘bad guy’ who is an alien being or presence if you like. Then again you could argue that the bad guy is actually the human main characters, considering how the ‘thing’ draws out the worst in them and they become increasingly more aggressive towards each other as the movie progresses.
We also see the addition of psychological stress as the movie goes on, the characters are pushed closer to the edge as the entities power over them grows stronger. There is no clear understanding of what the colour/creature is, what it wants or where it actually came from, although we do get a look of it’s home planet which is a nightmare-ish place full of worm-like tentacles. Tentacles or roots are a repeated element in the movie together with horrific scenes where people are melted together with each other. People die and come back to life and are in the end absorbed by the colour.

Sources:

Stableford, B. (2007). The Cosmic Horror.
https://blackboard.aut.ac.nz/bbcswebdav/pid-5308458-dt-content-rid-12699223_4/institution/Papers/ENGL602/Publish/Cosmic%20Horror%20Article%20final%281%29.pdf