As I have been writing this blog I have been trying flesh out a kind of taxonomy of horror. In my Internet roving I ran across this quote of Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s book about writing, where he outlines, rather loosely, his own taxonomy of the horror genre.
“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
― Stephen King
He uses different words, but I think King’s ideas are similar to mine. Meaning is essential, and the part that scares me the most is the idea of everything being exactly the same and yet not. On the surface it is no different, yet the meaning of everything has been radically altered. This is similar to Freud’s Uncanny. That which is familiar yet is not.
Have you ever experienced a moment of Terror as Stephen King describes it?
Horror Struck 