COMPLEX DISCOVERY PLOT
Four narrative stages:
- Onset
- Audience made aware of monster
- Discovery
- One or more central characters discovers that the monster's existence
- Confirmation
- The wider community is convinced of the monster's existence
- Confrontation
- Humanity confronts the monster and may or may not be victorious
Night of the Living Dead (George A. Romero, 1968) - relatively straightforward example.
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Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) - contrasted.
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SYMBOLIC STRUCTURES OF IMPURITY
- Fusion
- Simultaneous occupation of two or more normally exclusive categories
- living/dead, human/animal, human/vegetable
- Fission
- Occupation of two or more categories, at different times
- werewolves, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
- or in different spaces
- the doppelgänger
- Magnification/Massification
- Takes an existing source of potential horror and either magnifies it
- giant spiders
- Or masses it
- swarms of cockroaches
- Metonymy
- Representation of something inwardly monstrous, though appearing normal, through association with a recognisable source of horror
- Norman Bates' association with the stuffed corpse of his mother
SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF
- Often in Gothic novels to claim the work was based on "found" documents
- Stoker's Dracula - entirely diary entries, journals and letters by and between book's protagonists
- Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde rely on these devices.
- Continued through horror films
- Genre depends on audience's ability to suspend disbelief
TERRIBLE PLACE
- There's a monster or terrible place convention
- Identified by Carol Clover
- Somewhere which seems like a safe haven but in fact acts to trap the victim with the monster
- Often a house or tunnel
- In Gothic literature, often a ruined abbey or castle
