Aesthetics of Horror

By Chris Cochran

This essay will be on why we love horror movies so much and why the monster has to be so horrific and disgusting in nature. I will also discuss Noel Carroll’s essay “Why Horror?” and tie it in with my views on the movie Aliens.

I focused my response on the horror movie Aliens which is the second movie in a four part series. Aliens is about a woman named Ripley who was the lone survivor from a deep space cargo ship that was attacked by an alien life form after they set down on a distant planet. This time around, she is asked to go back to the planet and help find out why the colony on the planet has been out of contact. Reluctantly she agrees to go back, this time she is joined with a squad a Colonial Marines.

The alien is a vile and disgusting creature that has acid for blood and uses human bodies as host for newly hatched baby aliens to gestate. When the newborn complete their gestation cycle, they burst out of the chests of the human host; this is very graphic to watch. The aliens have gathered up all the colonists, save one a little girl by the name of Newt, and have implanted them all with a newborn aliens. Needless to say, the marines are in for the fight of their lives and Ripley ends up taking charge. What started out as a rescue mission turned into one of survival.

Noel Carroll writes, “[Monsters thus] arouse interest and attention through being putatively inexplicable or highly unusual vis-à-vis our standing cultural categories, thereby instilling a desire to learn and know about them” (Carroll, 281). Carroll also says that, “to a large extent, the horror story is driven explicitly by curiosity” (Carroll, 279).

He is right in this assessment about the monsters. I was captivated by them and I wanted to know more about them since they do not exist in our culture. I was very curious. I wanted to know what kind of back story they gave it, where it came from, and why it was on this planet. Not to mention the fact that I was waiting to see if the hero, Ripley, manages to find the monsters’ weakness and survive the ordeal and with whom she survives it with. As Hume states, “pleasure derived is not a response to the event as such, but to its rhetorical framing” (Hume, 276). And so it was true, my main focus was not on the monster itself, but rather how he fit in with the entire narrative structure of the story. The story was excellent and that’s why this movie happens to be one of my all-time favorite horror movies.

I did find a couple things wrong with his argument though. First off, it seems as though his argument is more generalized and not group specific. There are plenty of people out there who do not like to watch horror of any kind, even if it is only a movie with no real life consequences. Second, the fact that the violence and horror is available to us might make us act on what we see. The more we become desensitized to violence, the more likely we are to condone it. Sure, we say that it’s just a movie or it’s not real, but after a while when we see things happen in real life, we are already desensitized to it and pass by as if nothing had happened.

As I stated earlier, Carroll believes that curiosity key to our enjoyment. Humans are very curious by nature and want to know what is going on. That’s why we slow down when passing a car accident. Not so much in the hopes of seeing dead bodies laying around, at least not me, but rather in the hopes of trying to figure out what happened and what caused the crash. This is also why we watch the news on television. We want to know the back story of what is going on in the world around us. I never really thought about it like this before I read the article by Carroll, but now I’m glad I have. Now I can put things into perspective and understand why I like horror films and why I like to be scared.

The reason the monster has to be so horrific and disgusting in nature is because we do not want to associate them with real life characters or situations. Monsters are fictional and we want them to stay that way. Horror movies are unrealistic by there nature which gives us a sense of peace in knowing that what we are watching couldn’t really happen to us. However, there are some types of horror that really mess with our minds because we can’t make that determination so easily. Take for instance suspenseful movies or horror films that claim to be based on real events. These stories make you think about what exactly is going on and whether or not it would be possible to happen to you in real life.

I think for the most part, Carroll is right on the money with his evaluation of why we like to see horror so much. He uses a lot of good examples from different writers, like Hume and the Aikins, to get his message across. He includes various movie tittles and literature for reference, like The Blob, The Stuff, It, The Fog, The Clone, and of course Aliens, to help the reader get a better understanding of what types of horror he is talking about. Plus, he always refers to the revelation of the monsters in which a discovery is made about them that will help the people fight it and kill it. This revelation provides hope and keeps the viewer interested in what is going to happen to the monster next. This is what kept me going in Aliens. It seemed like they gave away some piece of information about the alien every time they killed someone off. The more I knew about the monster, the more I wanted to see it defeated. Which of course it eventually was in the end (or was it?). And I enjoyed every horrific and graphic moment of it.

All-in-all I really liked this reading. Carroll has a way of getting to the heart of the matter and explained very well what he is trying to get across to the reader. I wish the rest of the articles we read were this easy to understand. Besides, a good horror flick is good for the soul. It gets the adrenaline pumping, the blood flowing, our brains working overtime, and they just make you feel alive!