Horror Fiction: The Appeal of the Need to Aggress

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

According to communications professor Jib Fowles, we all have the need to aggress, or to be aggressive. He attributes this need to the pent-up frustrations and tensions of everyday life. Typically, people repress the impulse to act aggressively, as society frowns upon eruptions of violence. We are taught to use our words, rather than our fists (or knives or guns). For advertisers, appeals to the need to aggress can backfire, Fowles warns, causing potential consumers to “turn against what is being sold.” Therefore, advertisements often substitute gestures (a raised middle finger, sarcastic “gibes,” or the insistence of getting “the last word in”).

Horror movie directors don't need to be quite as sensitive to alienating their audiences, although even they are not granted total license. In the United Kingdom (UK) and elsewhere, Cannibal Holocaust was banned for its extreme violence. The UK and other countries have also banned The Human Centipede, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Cemator, Peeping Tom (aka Le Voyeur), Friday the 13^th, Dead and Buried, The House on the Edge of the Park, The Devils, Just Before Dawn, Antichrist, Nekromantic, I Spit on Your Grave, Saw VI, Hell of the Living Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, Halloween, Land of the Dead, and Evil Dead. Although some of these films were banned for legal reasons (e. g., obscenity), religious (e. g., blasphemy), or political reasons (e. g., unflattering depictions of a particular regime), most were banned because of the extreme violence of their contents. In particular, the slasher film is often cited by feminists and others as misogynistic, sexist, and chauvinistic, since the victims are mostly, if not exclusively, women and the serial killer is almost always a male who kills his prey using a knife or other “phallic” weapon.

On the other side of the coin, critics who defend even extreme violence in cinema and other forms of fiction, such as novels, contend that such displays or descriptions of violence provide an emotional outlet for the impulse to injure or kill, helping people to vent these antisocial and dangerous emotions. Aristotle is one of the earliest critics to argue a similar point in his Poetics's theory that drama promotes catharsis.

Reading horror novels or watching horror movies has been shown to cause physiological responses, such as an increase in respiration and heartbeat, muscle tension, elevated cortisol levels (cortisol is the 'stress hormone”), increased eye movement, a “spike: in adrenaline levels, and a release of dopamine. Most likely, these responses are associated with the fight-or-flight impulse. If we believe that we can eliminate a perceived threat, we will fight; otherwise, we will take flight. Our physiological responses to fear energize and otherwise equip us to take either action.

In a psychological and aesthetic context, some believe that these physiological responses may be a reason that readers and audiences enjoy being frightened. At the same time, theorists believe, readers and audiences are secure in the knowledge that the events unfolding on the page or the screen are purely imaginary, so there is no existential threat to them.

In any case, it seems clear that the appeal of horror fiction lies, in part to its appeal to the need to aggress that everyone feels but, fortunately, few act upon and fewer still to the degree shown in the most violent horror films or described in the pages of the most ferocious horror novels.