Horror and terror

The horror ( rare: the horror ) is a noun the upscale slang for a heightened sense of fear or horror, which is usually linked to the perception of the uncanny or supernatural. It stems etymologically from MHG BREAKn, " shudder " that, which term is used as a synonym.

The corresponding reflexive verb to gray. In everyday language, is a "That's horrible! " Or " The grayed 's at nothing " common to express a special surprise. Sich " to graulen " or " creepy " is a regular experience childlike world of experience. Where the horror has not faded into a mere metaphor and is fully valid expression, it is typically associated with physical reactions. These range from the so-called goose bumps to express extreme horror, where the person concerned ' hair stand on end " literally. Derived from it are the words cruelty and atrocity.

Cultural aspects

Horror is a response to the disturbing. It occurs not only in archaic cultures, the evil magical or religious significance attribute (see taboo ), but also of rationality and science influenced cultures. With the spread of the scientific worldview, however, made ​​one's admission that something is to him weird, increasingly ridiculous him in everyday life: Such feelings were especially in the wake of the Enlightenment increasingly seen as superstitious, childish or altweiberisch. But that the dread and desire it are not gone, can be tapped from the fact that the cinema has the theme of a particular genre, the horror film donated; partly it is then defused here kömödienhaft or proceedings as " Grusical ". Among the stereotypes of these films but also includes the infidels, scoffers enlightened being disabused.

Seal

In poetry and poetic theory horror and shuddering always played a more or less prominent role as a strong emotion. In the oral tradition of ghosts and scary stories are likely to be as old as the desire to spin tales at all. Of particular note here is the tale of one who went forth to learn what fear the Grimm brothers with the repeated utterance of a man; who can not gray, like all else: " Oh, if I could but shudder! "

In Aristotle's Poetics shuddering ( Phobos ) is next to the compassion or pity ( Eleos ) central moment of the tragic experience of the audience, which is to bring about a catharsis in this. The tragedy as a genre is always aimed in this classical definition on the excitation of horror, which is also considered as an aesthetic pleasure.

Goethe used as a final line of the first part of his fist the word " horror " in the emphatic sense, with Gretchen's cry: " Henry! I dread 's in front of you! " In the second part the motif reappears. In the first act, scene Sinister Gallery, Faust calls before going to the mothers of:

Schiller uses the word as an emphatic finale when his divers all over the world warns to turn away from the joy:

The Black Romance established in return for this classic aversion to the dark and nocturnal with the gothic novel and the gothic novel, the ambitious epic form of literature for the generation of horror. Virtuoso of this genre of horror literature are as Edgar Allan Poe or in the presence of Stephen King.

Other Arts

Examples are in the music, the symphonic poem Night on Bald Mountain by Modest Mussorgsky, in painting The Nightmare by Henry Fuseli ( see above).

Scientific aspects

With the cultural and psychological aspects of the topic to ethnology, cultural sociology and psychoanalysis deal. Folklore and Thanatosoziologie investigate customs that still try to contain the horror of the dead.

• In the phenomenology of religion Rudolf Otto ( The Holy, 1917) is the horror as the related shudder as mystery tremendum an aspect of numinous experience of the divine or demonic.

• Freud devoted the uncanny own study ( The Uncanny, 1919), in which he pointed in regard to its contribution over the counter sense of primal words (1910 ) on the hidden unity of the uncanny with the Secret: The horror of the uncanny here is the fear before the displaced Secret as the formerly well- familiar.

• The bioenergetic therapy by Alexander Lowen knows the term " schizoid Horror": The schizoid personality development is based on the forced and educating and traumatic experience splitting of the ego of his feelings and spontaneous impulses. This leads to a characteristic failure within the personality; as a precursor to schizophrenia shows the schizoid personality is a rational, but emotions and as it were a disembodied I on the basis of a stable, unconscious feeling paralyzing terror.

Other meanings of words

As an intransitive verb meaning " gray" to accept the gray color ( dawn broke already ), see " gray " (his hair turned gray early) and is of gray ( Grawen OHG, MHG Grawen ) derived.