SOURCE: "The Pleasures of Terror," in Extrapolation, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 75-86.

In the following essay, Fowler traces aesthetic conditions for the enjoyment of horror in literature and film, including an undisclosed source of terror, the physical confinement of the protagonist, and reader/viewer identification with a protagonist who is aware of the source of terror but cannot convince others within the story.

The importance of humanity's own cruelty and destructive impulses in the experience of literature and film has never been given anything like the attention it deserves, and the very vocabulary needed to begin discussing the subject—sadism, masochism, suicide—is still contaminated with hospital odors and those connotations of criminal deviation few are likely to assign themselves casually. And yet terror, violence, irrevocable loss, and catastrophic suffering are some of the most obvious properties of literature, and it seems long past the time when a...