The Beautiful And The Terrible – by Lady Eleanor Celtic
Ladies, gentlemen, various and sundry cats, minotaurs, dragons, wizards, and unknowable eldritch entities, it is considered traditional to open one’s addresses to the public by quoting the words of another. Presumably as an apology for having had the arrogance to speak up in the first place.
As this is hardly a traditional venue, of course, I will be flipping that tradition on its head and ending with the words of another. If you want to know what those words are, I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with me for a little longer. (Or commit the cardinal sin of skipping to the end, of course. But they may not make much sense if you do.)
I have held for some time that there is a difference between the terrifying and the horrifying. Of course if we speak in terms of overarching genre, romance and horror both rest almost entirely on the reader’s personal tastes. What one person finds tantalizing, another considers a terrible turn-off. Where one soul might have nightmares about that dreadful thing the doctor did with the needles, another might shrug and wonder when the author will finally get to the good part. But I find any kind of horror tends to fall on one side or another of a dividing line: Is it terrifying? Or is it horrifying?
Of course these terms are mostly held to be synonymous, so I’ll need to clarify. To me, the term terror invokes a feeling of dread and doom, the knowing of some immense weight of shadow and strange intelligence which bends down to gaze upon you from its looming height. Silence and whispering voices, strange song echoing from the deeps. Horror carries instead a dripping feeling, a twisting feeling of not-right and the visceral sensation of disgust. Worms crawling beneath still-living flesh, cancerous tumors and pustules and deep, wordless ick.
Body horror is almost always ick. That is, after all, rather the point. Slasher horror tends towards jump scares and violin chords that scream along with helpless victims – more scary than terrifying. It’s a passing sort of fear, there in an instant and gone almost as quickly. Cosmic horror can fall into either camp. H. P. Lovecraft tended towards the horrifying, with disgusting fungal growths, creatures that were twisted out of humans as Tolkien’s orcs were twisted out of elves, and the monstrous forms of eldritch gods and monsters beyond mortal ken. But one could just as easily imagine starlit gods with no face but the constellations, coronal mass ejections emanating from their backs like burning wings.
Gothic horror tends to emphasize a more glittering, alluring form of darkness – vampires as beautiful as they are deadly, the temptations of hedonism and vanity in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Mr. Hyde’s total abandonment of morality in favor of animal instinct and selfishness. Zombie horror and disaster horror focus on an inevitable, unfeeling threat crushing humanity in its wake and tend towards grossness either through decaying bodies or through the decay of civilization in the face of inescapable doom. Psychological horror relies often on mind games and the sense of unreality, situations in which the character’s sanity comes into question. It could go either way, depending on the nature of any hallucinations, or how doctors attempt to treat the issue if there are doctors in the story. I tend to enjoy how complex interpersonal relationships can get in these stories – your enemy is your truest friend (at least they’re honest) or your dearest friend is your enemy (and you don’t even realize) – but that sort of human conflict could fit into other genres like fantasy, sci-fi, or even romance fairly easily.
Paranormal horror tends to be either ghosts or demons. Being Catholic, I tend to find ghosts more sad than frightening, and demons just distasteful and laughably dramatic in their attempts to shock and horrify the main characters. (Spinning heads and pea soup, anyone?) I also expect there to be a simple answer to the problem. Go find your friendly neighborhood exorcist, preferably a competent, no-nonsense one with a good head on his shoulders, and bake him some cookies for his troubles.
Some may enjoy the ick sort of horror, out of morbid fascination or some similar sentiment. I find myself with the mingled desire to burn it with holy fire and to wipe it off the sole of my shoe. It does not inspire fear. I fear that which feels like it is above me, greater and grander and aweful in the oldest sense – that thing which fills the viewer with awe. I do not fear that which is beneath me.
Through all of this, there are repeating themes; primarily, the concept that anything I find truly terrifying must in some way be beautiful. Numinousness also plays a significant role. (Spiritual or supernatural, surpassing comprehension or understanding, mysterious. Compare the feeling of being told there is a ghost in the room with you, as opposed to being told there is a hungry tiger in the room with you. One of those is far more immediately dangerous than the other, so why do humans often find themselves more frightened of the ghost?)
Now wait a minute, some may say to me. Beautiful? Beautiful things aren’t scary. Beauty is a sunny meadow, strings of flowers hanging from tree branches and dancing in the breeze. The wings of a dragonfly sitting on a still pond. The ancient cathedrals, with their grand arches, marble columns, and stained glass. Beauty isn’t dangerous, and dangerous things aren’t beautiful.
To which I would reply with the image of a panther, sleek and perfectly poised, about to pounce. Lightning arcing through black clouds on the horizon, growing ever nearer as you brace yourself against the howling wind. Or, in a more imaginative setting, a towering faceless figure whose skin is the night sky, covered with constellations – burning wings composed of solar flares and beating with the soundless screams of cosmic wind.
In the words of Brandon Sanderson, “Danger doesn’t make a thing less beautiful—in fact, there’s a magnifying influence. Like how a candle seems brightest on the darkest night. Deadly beauty is the starkest variety.” (Tress of the Emerald Sea, Chapter 20)
Mad Genius Club 
34 responses to “The Beautiful And The Terrible – by Lady Eleanor Celtic”
Good work!
Get Outlook for Androidhttps://aka.ms/AAb9ysg
Thank you! (I’m so sorry for the delay, I only just realized this had been put up here and people were talking about it.)
That was Loki’s mistake…..
Loki’s mistake was misjudging who was beneath who.
whom.
Payback for all the jokes I’ve made about YOUR typos?
Touche. 😛
One hundred percent. Also, hi! Thanks for reading!
My pleasure.
Hadn’t seen you around in a while. Was surprised when I saw you were writing for MGC. Got curious. Sue me. 🙂
Speaking of you not being around: I assume you’re still busy with school? How long until you graduate?
Yep, I’m in the fall semester for my kind-of-sort-of senior year. I could graduate next Spring if I chose, I’ve been doing well enough in classes that it won’t be an issue. The scholarship I earned runs for the full four years though, and I’ve only taken three, so I was considering taking a minor next year. Since tuition is covered by the scholarship, my summer work would only need to cover room and board.
I have always thought the difference between terror and horror was the immediacy of threat. Terror is something that threatens you right now! The axe murderer coming at you, double-bladed axe in hand is terrifying. Horror is something repulsive and awful, but not really immediately (or even necessarily) threatening. The detective coming upon the axe murder’s disemboweled victim scattered in bits and pieces over the alley is horrified, not terrified.
That may just be me, and I am wrong more often than right.
I remember one editor from the pulp era saying something like ‘Horror is when the girl sees what the ghoul did to its last victim. Terror is her realizing that she’s next. Mystery is wondering why it’s happening.’
Hmm. I can see how those terms work there, and it makes sense. Most of what I’m trying to convey is a ‘feel’ thing, so I had to find whatever words seemed to best fit.
I think it was Ruskin who used the term “sublime” to describe something so beautiful and awe-inspiring that it invoked terror, or near terror. The first Anglo-Americans to cross the High Plains of Kansas and Texas in the 1820s described a thunderstorm as “sublime,” beautiful and yet intensely scary. The plains themselves were sublime to people who came from a tree-filled world where the sky was constrained.
Horror seems to grow, rising from twisted similarities, or the increasing awareness or knowledge of something Not Right, of becoming unable to trust what has always seemed real. Terror is sublime, or instant and visceral (the jump-scare, realizing that the ground under your feet isn’t solid and you need to get back from the edge right now).
I tried writing horror once, and sort of managed it for one short story/novel chapter. The genre doesn’t work for me.
If I write horror someone should do a check. It correlates with suicidal depression for me.
It was commonplace. In fact, Ruskin came toward the tail end of it. For instance, landscape not showing human influence could not be beautiful — it could only be picturesque, or sublime.
Burke’s On The Beautiful And The Sublime is good. An exercept:
“On closing this general view of beauty, it naturally occurs that we should compare it with the sublime; and in this comparison there appears a remarkable contrast. For sublime objects are vast in their dimensions, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth and polished; the great, rugged and negligent: beauty should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly; the great in many cases loves the right line; and when it deviates, it often makes a strong deviation: beauty should not be obscure; the great ought to be dark and gloomy: beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid, and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure; and, however they may vary afterwards from the direct nature of their causes, yet these causes keep up an eternal distinction between them, a distinction never to be forgotten by any whose business it is to affect the passions.”
clears throat.
I meant to reply to TXRed
I cannot write horror. The few times I have tried (generally due to a challenge) it quickly devolved into a parody of horror. Either so over the top it is funny or simply into a satire of the genre.
Very well put!
I saw a thunderstorm once while on my way into a hotel, far off in the distance so it was a looming cloud on the horizon flashing brilliantly in the darkness. It made an impression, to say the least.
(I don’t know how good I am at writing horror, I don’t know that I’ve really tried yet. But there are some things that appeal to me that I might be able to portray well without breaking myself to do it.)
That reminds me a little of what my father once said about traveling cross-country back in the 50’s and seeing a tornado in the distance as he went through Kansas. Just the sense of power and terror it exuded even though it never came close to him.
I don’t do horror. Reading or writing.
Though when I was in a writers’ group, I got a few complaints about how I should have warned about the horror in some tales. Always fairy tale retellings.
There was an entire clique of horror movie personnel from the 1960s – director, production designer, two actors – whose line in their heyday and well beyond it was: we don’t/didn’t make horror movies, we make/made fantasy. (the production guy’s version was “our stuff was Disney with a bit of blood” or words to that effect).
Now it might have been somebody’s PR agent’s idea, because these guys were mostly associated with one studio, and the two actors were repped by the same agency for a time, but it was both impressive how long they stuck to that definition of their work, and how accurate it seemed to be when I actually
I’ve read more than one argument that most fairy tales, or at least the original versions, were horror stories. Or at least tales of the uncanny.
They range all over. You will find immense variety.
What was it someone said? Ah, G.K. Chesterton was the one who said, “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
(I thought for a moment it was C.S. Lewis, but his quote was, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”)
Both would seem to apply here. The good kind of children’s stories have a significant threat of some kind, rather than some cute bunnies who are having less fun than the cute turtles today.
That is a misquotation that Neil Gaiman can give an interesting history for. The actual quotation:
“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”
Ah, got it. Sorry for the slip up, I knew he’d said something to the effect, but the first thing to come up when I looked was the mistaken quotation.
Yeah, it’s awful the difficulty in rooting these things out.
I personally draw the distinction between eerie and frightening. Eerie is cool, atmospheric architecture/scenery/people that give off a vibe that something strange and dangerous is going on. It might be a smuggling outfit in Halloween costumes (an old, old trope already when Scooby Doo started parodying it in the late 1960s), a particularly unpleasant extraterrestrial/extradimensional life form, a soap opera of nasty people, a supernatural being, or an unusually flamboyant murderer. Or it might just be a mood. 20th c gothic romances used eeriness as a framework for handing the audience standin a decrepit but imposing house that she was absolved of all responsibility for, and a bad boy (often less bad than his reputation) whom she was also absolved of all responsibility for.
Frightening is that gory, grotesque, disturbing thing that makes you squirm. People who’ve experienced such things in real life often don’t like fictional frights, and that is a valid reaction. People with more sheltered lives sometimes crave the stimulus of fictional frights in the same way that other people crave roller coasters, as a controlled way of dealing with their fears. I’m not really into either, but I get where they’re coming from. And I hesitate to invalidate
The catch is that frightfulness, like shock comedy, is an ever receding target. What frightens a child doesn’t necessarily frighten a grownup, and what is frightening in a relatively sheltered culture, or a less sheltered culture without the technology to depict gory deaths and monstrous beings in a convincing way, will grow less frightening in an increasingly jaded culture with increasingly advanced technology.
People read Dracula (115~ years old) and Frankenstein (pushing 200~ years at this point) and come away more impressed by their use of changing narrators than anything those books were actually doing to frighten the reader. If people watch the two major waves of Frankenstein/Dracula-adjacent movies, the one that’s eighty/ninety-ish years old and the one that’s merely sixty/pushing seventy-ish years old, and have anything good to say about them, it comes down to eeriness of production design or direction, or a handful of actors and actresses who managed to make interesting characters – sometimes poignant, sometimes eerie, never actually frightening for more than a few minutes.
For this reason, I don’t really see any point in pursuing the frightening in my writings. The gothic and the eerie keeps trying to crop up, although how successful it is when it’s done by someone like me, to whom description and mood-setting do not come easily, I don’t know. But it’s something that appeals to me, maybe because of the element of mystery going on, or maybe because it’s about monsters to expose and slay, in a setting just modern enough to be relatable and old enough to be quaint.
That also makes a lot of sense. I really love the gothic and the eerie personally (the image they put at the top is gorgeous!). But yes, the older books are much less dramatic than the sort of things we expect nowadays – less happens in them, and the heroes/protagonists can be much less active than we expect.
(My main complaint against ‘Frankenstein’ is that the titular Doctor spends most of his time unconscious from the stress. As a student, I can relate, and given that he’s either in Pre-Med or Post-Med? Even more nightmarish. But for goodness sake, he went to all the trouble to create an abomination-which-now-lives, he should make up his mind on what to do about it and go do it.)
Actually, I wonder if that’s also an American/Western cultural trait? Expecting our protagonists to go and do things, to be a constantly active force in the plot? The lessons I’ve had in writing said to let my characters be proactive as well as reactive, and to push the plot as much or more than the plot pushes them.
Hello again, Lady El. I didn’t know you were writing for MGC now; good to see you’re moving up in the world. 🙂
How have you been?
Now I’m wondering who the first public speaker in history quoted.
I think you already brushed up against it. You know what kind of threat the tiger is, but you probably have no idea how ghosts really work. Not knowing what you’re up against is its own kind of scary.
Magister Mage! Good to see you too. (Sorry for the delay – as I mentioned above, I didn’t realize this was up until tonight.)
I’ve been doing reasonably well. Trying to keep up with film school. Storytelling, I get. Characters, I get. Technology? Finicky apps and devices with thousands upon thousands of different settings? Get thee behind me, fiends of bewilderment and choice paralysis!
Which… maybe isn’t the best mindset to have when dealing with boom mics, audio mixers, lights, and cameras? I’ll figure it out. Eventually.
(I believe the earliest public speaker on record, according to available sources, is said to have delivered the phrase: “Let there be Light.” Although it’s debatable whether two other Persons, both part of one’s own Nature, can be counted as ‘public.’)
And you’re absolutely right, the unknown is the greatest terror of all. (See my aforementioned relationship with technology.)
Heh. “Ghosts and demons I can handle, but God help us all if I have to change the volume level.” 😛
See, you get me!
The learning curve on DAWs is steep enough. I don’t want to even *think* about video editing and getting everything to synch perfectly.
Welcome! I haven’t been around much recently, and have obviously missed quite a bit.
Just a random aside on the discussion of the numinous, I love that “awesome” and “awful” have the same entomological meaning, but are antonyms.