The Nature of Horror

The Helplessness of Horror

Immobilization, freezing, paralysis. Among theoretical accounts of horror, these actions—or more appropriately inactions—routinely hold pride of place in descriptions of what happens when one is horrified (Adams, 2006; Cavarero, 2007/2009; Contesi, 2022; Miller, 2018; Solomon, 2003; Taylor & Uchida, 2019; Twitchell, 1985; Wierzbicka, 1999). Given this inactivity of horror, what kind of relation to the environment—what kind of relational aim or striving—is horror a readiness to achieve? Of the 28 action readiness modes that Frijda (2007) has enumerated, being in a state of helplessness, or what Frijda describes as an “inability to construct meaningful striving” (p. 35), most readily captures the action readiness of horror. As Solomon (2003), for example, writes, “in horror one stands (or sits) aghast, frozen in place … horror involves a helplessness which fear evades” (p. 241). Similarly, Wierzbicka (1999) highlights the experience of helplessness and powerlessness as central to horror, exemplified in the universal semantic configuration I can’t do anything.

Two matters of potential concern and confusion arise from designating helplessness (realized through immobilization, freezing, and paralysis) as a key constituent of horror's action readiness. First, discussions of the emotion of fear proper have long drawn a distinction between the kind of fear that involves active avoidance, that is, flight, and the kind of fear that involves temporary paralysis, that is, freezing (e.g., Arnold & Gasson, 1954; Darwin, 1872/1965; Frijda, 1986; Marks, 1987). As fear-inspiring conditions of imminent threat to physical and social well-being increase to life-endangering proportions, many animal species, both human and nonhuman, undergo an escalating sequence of defensive actions (Azevedo et al., 2005; Gallup, 1977; Hagenaars et al., 2014; Roelofs et al., 2010; Shauer & Elbert, 2010). Known as the “defensive cascade” (Lang et al., 1997), this sequence begins with freezing behavior in response to initial detection of a threat (e.g., a predator), wherein the individual ceases movement while alertly attending to the potential threat (Marks, 1987; Pavlov, 1927). As the threat persists (e.g., the predator moves closer), the individual adopts active defensive postures, usually first fleeing the threat, then fighting if escape fails (Löw et al., 2015; Schauer & Elbert, 2010). When both active defensive postures fail, however, a phenomenon known as tonic immobility often ensues, involving prolonged, rigid immobility, minimal, if any, responsivity to stimulation, and decreased visual receptivity (e.g., eye closure, unfocused staring), all of which are readily distinguishable from the vigilant and motorically primed stance of freezing (Marks, 1987; Marx et al., 2008; Schauer & Elbert, 2010). Prima facie, both the freezing and, especially, tonic immobility characteristic of defensive posturing in fear mirror the paralysis of horror (as Contesi, 2022, has identified). Might not horror, then, be simply a quantitative variant of fear, reflecting either the first or last stages of this defensive cascade?

Clearly distinguishing between action and action readiness is key to addressing this question. In the context of the defensive cascade, both freezing and tonic immobility, as defensive actions (or inactions), are in the service of avoidance for the purpose of protection—i.e., the action readiness of fear. Freezing in the defensive cascade is widely regarded as an information gathering stage to promote more effective avoidance and protection; similarly, tonic immobility is widely regarded as “a process by which mammals feign death in order to evade unwelcome attention” (Schauer & Elbert, 2010, p. 115; see also Marks, 1987). Freezing in fear bolsters a readiness to actively avoid when the time is right. Tonic immobility does present a helpless state but one that functions effectively to shut down the individual and shut out the threat, again for the ultimate purpose of avoidance and protection. The freezing and immobility of horror, however, are in the service of helplessness. Functionally speaking, they leave individuals open and vulnerable to the world; they neither bolster withdrawal readiness, nor shut down the individual, nor shut out anything. In fact, the opposite is true, as we discuss in the next section on the other critical facet of horror's action readiness, namely the gawking impulse (Solomon, 2003).

The second matter of potential concern touches on the question of whether helplessness, as horror's action readiness, is really an action readiness at all. In this vein, Solomon (2003) argues that “horror is detached (or at least distanced from) action…Thus, horror evokes no ‘action readiness’” (p. 243). Hacker (2018) goes even further in suggesting that horror is not itself an emotion but an agitation—a “mode of reaction”—because it does “not involve motives for action…but rather temporarily inhibit[s] motivated action” (p. 14). With respect to horror not having an action readiness, Frijda (1986) has distinguished two types of relational action readiness: action tendencies and “variants of action readiness as such” (Frijda, 2007, p. 34). Action tendencies involve readiness to enact particular actions; both the avoidance of fear and the rejection of disgust are the type of action readiness characterized by distinct action tendencies. However, the type of action readiness that Frijda designates as “variants of action readiness as such”—including helpless, tense, apathetic, and disinterested modes—is a “relational null state,” a variant of action readiness akin to a state of unreadiness by virtue of its “explicit absence of relational activity” (Frijda, 1986, p. 22; Frijda, 2007). Contra Solomon (2003), therefore, the helplessness of horror, like the helplessness of sadness, does indeed constitute a mode of action readiness, just not a mode of action tendency, given that modes of unreadiness are themselves forms of action readiness in Frijda's nomenclature. And although the helplessness of horror may not itself involve a motive for action [consistent with Hacker's (2018) argument], horror's action readiness involves more than simply helplessness. It also involves the urge to gawk—a compulsory motive to bear witness to something. ³

The Gawking Impulse: Spectatorship and Horror

Horror transfixes. What horrifies not only immobilizes an individual, rendering her helpless, but also inexorably captures her attention. Objects of horror compel those horrified to look at them—to watch or, more generally, bear witness to them. Solomon (2003) has described this mode of engagement as the “gawking impulse” of horror (p. 240), and, in this regard, horror is effectively an emotion of spectatorship (Bell, 1844; Solomon, 2003; Wierzbicka, 1999; Woodruff, 2013). Wierzbicka (1999), for example, writes that “One is horrified to see what has happened to someone else…horror is, essentially, the feeling of a spectator” (p. 77). Horror's quality of spectatorship clearly differentiates it from emotions like fear and terror. That which scares or terrifies constitutes an “immediate or proximate danger” to the experiencer and her own well-being (Solomon, 2003, p. 240). For emotions like fear and terror, in other words, the experiencer of the emotion and the victim of the threat posed by the object of the emotion are one in the same person (Wierzbicka, 1999). For an emotion like horror, in contrast, experiencer and victim are often different people.

Take, for example, a horrifying scenario proffered more than a century and a half ago by Sir Charles Bell (1844): “We see a child under a wagon wheel, and in danger of being crushed by the enormous weight, with sensations of extreme horror” (p. 148). The child in this scenario faces immediate threat from the wagon wheel and, to the extent that this child perceives this threat to personal safety, is likely frightened or even terrified by the threat. “We” in the scenario, however, as onlookers relative to what is taking place, experience no direct threat to our own safety. Rather than being scared or terrified, we are instead horrified by the awful event transpiring before us, “having in contemplation the feelings of others, rather than a strict and immediate relation to our own suffering” (p. 148). Of course, experiences of horror do occur for which an individual is both experiencer and victim. One's own victimhood can be regarded with horror, as when one is horrified at the damage done to one's arm as the result of, say, a bear attack. Under these circumstances, horror results from an individual adopting a spectator stance toward herself, toward her own injury, rather than focusing directly on the bear and the threat to physical safety that its attack constitutes.

Horror's spectatorship quality could be construed as suggesting that horror lacks the immediacy and direct engagement with the world endemic to typical emotion perturbations. To be a spectator is to be removed, to be detached from that which is spectated. As Woodruff (2013) elaborates:

If you cast yourself as a spectator, you sit back and watch, insulating yourself from any possibility of engaging actively in the events you are watching. You may, however, react passionately to what you see, but your passions have objects fairly remote from you—the events from which you have insulated yourself as spectator, and the people who are agents for those events (p. 59)

An even stronger argument can be made that the spectatorship quality of horror in no way diminishes the deeply personal relevance of horrifying spectacle for an individual's concerns or goals—namely, her (routinely implicit) desires for “occurrence or nonoccurrence of a given kind of situation” (Frijda, 1986, p. 335). The wagon wheel that directly threatens the child's concern for safety and well-being may not have direct relevance for us, as onlookers, in terms of our own, personal concerns for safety and well-being. But the spectacle unfolding before us does have direct impact on our most basic concerns about what “should be” and “should not be” the case in the worlds we inhabit (Smith, 1983). Horrifying spectacles—the objects of horror—violate our fundamental standards and structures of meaning; they “shatter” our most sacred, deeply-held assumptions about the nature of the world and our place in it (Janoff-Bulman, 1992; Kristeva, 1980/1982; Miller, 2018; Solomon, 2003; Taylor & Uchida, 2019). It is to the objects of horror and, critically, the concomitant concerns they implicate, that we now turn.

“Real” Horror and “Art” Horror

It is common, at least within discourse around the horror art genre, for scholars to qualitatively distinguish between real-life, or “natural” horror, and “art” horror—emotion that is generated in the context of horror art (e.g., Carroll, 1990; Pinedo, 1997; Solomon, 2003; Twitchell, 1985). Specifically, Solomon (2003) has argued that natural horror, by virtue of “forc(ing) itself upon us, unbidden” (p. 233), is and can never be pleasurable, decidedly unlike the kind of horror experience we may undergo when we choose to enter the aesthetic worlds of films and books. Contesi (2022), however, has contended that any difference between natural and art horror is a matter of degree, not of kind. As he has noted, “affects likely need to be moderated in their intensity to be compatible with pleasure in art; and so does horror” (p. 39). For Contesi, then, any systematic examination of horror demands consideration of the affect within both art and non-art contexts.

Certainly, the dynamics of horror art, in terms both of content and viewership reaction, can help to inform an understanding of horror as an emotion. Conditions of genuine shock and helplessness, for example, can arise in the context of horror art, as phenomena like cinematic neurosis attest (e.g., Araújo et al., 2019; Ballon & Leszcz, 2007). Furthermore, the context of experiencing horror art paradigmatically resolves to acts of spectatorship of events and circumstances considered horrifying, like extreme violence and other dehumanizing atrocities (Clover, 1992; Twitchell, 1985). In this way, audiences are positioned, as observers, relative to representations of atrocity in much the same way as people outside the realm of aesthetics are positioned, as observers, relative to real-life atrocity.

Notably, however, spectatorship in the context of horror art seems much more likely to involve the kind of “pure,” detached spectatorship that Woodruff (2013) has discussed, in contrast to the kind of directly engaged modes of spectatorship more characteristic of real-life horror contexts—a difference perhaps only of degree but one that points to the potential for greater, qualitative distinction. After all, experiencing horror art is typically a matter of choice and therefore control—a willingness to engage with an exaggerated and excessive fictional world that habitually moves well beyond realistic atrocity into realms of the fantastical and supernatural (Hurley, 2021; Pinedo, 1997; Solomon, 2003; Worland, 2007). Many characterizations of horror art point to “the underlying irrationality of its scenarios—the certainty that this thing is not real, this situation could not actually occur” as a key criterion for the genre (Worland, 2007, p. 12; see also Pinedo, 1997; Twitchell, 1985; Urbano, 1998). According to Pinedo (1997), in fact, horror films are exercises “in mastery, in which controlled loss substitutes for loss of control” (p. 41).

Horror art likely pleases, in other words, precisely because of the element of control it affords its audience, the control of knowing that “it's only a movie,” or a book, or some other form of art. Yet, central to the definition of horror that we have already outlined at the level of action readiness is helplessness and lack of control. Horror art, then, may well only have the capacity to induce legitimate experiences of horror when audiences lose sight of the art's fictional qualities—when, in other words, audiences start questioning whether what they perceive could actually be real and therefore more personally affecting. Only when control is lost can such art induce actual horror.

For these reasons, Contesi's (2022) contention that horror is “perhaps the characteristic response that is appropriate to works in the genre” (p. 32) seems unlikely, especially given the rarity with which horror art renders its audience helpless and without control. Furthermore, horror art constitutes a relatively heterogeneous genre, which makes any horror that might arise from it difficult to disentangle from a myriad of other emotions. Just within the realm of film, for example, the horror genre ranges from content featuring distortions of the body (e.g., body horror films) and eviscerations of the flesh (e.g., grand guignol inspired gore and slasher films), to content targeting the fantastic and supernatural (e.g., haunting and possession films), to content focusing on madness and anxiety (e.g., psychological horror films) (e.g., Newman, 2011; Pinedo, 1997; Worland, 2007). Such disparate sub-genres of horror art (both in and beyond film) may inspire dramatically different emotions, from feelings of the uncanny to anxiety, dread and terror, to revulsion and disgust. Horror as a genre of art admits of so many different degrees and qualities of both content and emotional reaction, in fact, that it is hard to see horror as the characteristic response, intended or otherwise, for the genre. In fact, horror art's heterogeneity may significantly delimit any coherent way of identifying horror's formal object. However, a specific focus on horror experienced outside the context of art may afford greater coherence for identifying horror's formal object. To this exercise, then, we now return.

Horror and Moral Disgust

A more promising treatment of horror's formal object revolves around its kinship with moral disgust. In itself, moral disgust currently suffers from a heterogeneity of conceptualization in the psychological literature. By Rozin and colleagues’ influential account, for example, the formal object of moral disgust derives from actions that are appraised as compromising a person's status as a human being—where being human occupies a middle ground sandwiched between the divine and the debased and where movement toward the debased signifies that which is morally disgusting (e.g., Rozin et al., 1999, 2016). Other accounts similarly target anything seen to denigrate what it means to be human as constitutive of moral disgust (e.g., Hauskeller, 2006). Despite some prominent challenges to such a conceptualization (e.g., Bloom, 2004; Royzman & Kurzban, 2011; Tybur et al., 2013), most accounts converge around a formal object for moral disgust that involves some form of appraised sociomoral transgression, in which people are viewed as acting in ways that they should not (Haidt, 2003; Hanna & Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018; Rozin et al., 2016).

Appraised sociomoral transgression also figures prominently in many accounts of real horror. Bloody battlefields, decapitations, extreme deformities, slaughtered bodies, tortuous, dehumanizing practices—these are paradigmatic objects of horror both in real life and in the realm of aesthetics (Pinedo, 1997; Solomon, 2003; Trigg, 2014; Twitchell, 1985). All share a violation of either the human body or what it means to be human, i.e., humanity. Terms like “monstrous,” “sick,” and “unnatural” are routinely employed to give voice to the nature of that which horrifies (Smith, 1983; Solomon, 2003). As such, much of what is considered horrifying targets appraised violations of sociomoral standards, with particular focus on the category of humanity and “distortions of what is human” (Miller, 2018, pg. 75; see also Arnold, 2017; Cavell, 1979; Cavarero, 2018; De Rivera, 1977).

Kinship between moral disgust and horror, then, can be broadly defined in terms of transgression and violations of what “should be” (Smith, 1983). Such kinship, however, has precipitated specious part–whole comparisons that effectively collapse horror and moral disgust into a single category of emotion (e.g., Hauskeller, 2006). To wit, Solomon (2003) has argued that “one way to understand the phenomenon of moral disgust is to interpret it not as a secondary or derivative version of disgust but rather as a species of horror” (p. 238). However, substantive differences exist between the two with respect to the nature of transgression and scope of expectation. For moral disgust, transgressions entail appraised threats or tests to a specific sociomoral boundary, and its scope of expectation is constrained by the moral sphere (see Strohminger & Kumar, 2018). In contrast, as we discuss in the next section, for horror, transgressions constitute appraised violations of the very ontological foundations upon which any sociomoral boundaries are built; transgressions in horror are world-involving. In similar fashion, horror's scope of expectation broadens well beyond the moral domain. As such, horror adds a dimension of the “could not” to the “should not” that transcends the concerns and relational meaning of moral disgust.

The “Should Not”—and “Could Not”—of Horror

In her universal semantic analysis of emotion concepts, Wierzbicka (1999) distinguishes horror from all other fear-related terms in the English language (e.g., fright, terror, anxiety, dread) by addressing the quality of inconceivability in horror. This is exemplified in horror's universal semantic configuration I didn’t think that something like this could happen (p. 79). What is even considered as possible cuts to the very heart of horror's transgressive quality. Objects of horror signify something more than just offensive, bad, or wrong; they are appraised as existing outside the realm of what even makes sense in terms of conceivable possibilities. This “could not” of horror—its fundamental quality of inconceivability—manifests across a number of conceptualizations (e.g., Adams, 2000, 2006; Kristeva, 1980/1982; Miller, 2018; Taylor & Uchida, 2019, 2022). By all these conceptualizations, horror targets meaning structures more all-encompassing and foundational than the transgressed sociomoral standards to which moral disgust applies.

What constitutes these all-encompassing, foundational meaning structures? Some psychoanalytic treatments, such as Kristeva's (1980/1982), frame horror as that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (p. 4), with particular focus on threats to meaning structures such as one's existence as a separate ego identity. Other, more recent psychoanalytic treatments, such as Miller's (2018), have highlighted how meaning structures like the “category of humanity” (p. 75)—what it means to be human/humane—as well as the “concept of family” (p. 85) and the moral order are all core to the experience of horror when subjected to distortion or violated. Such framings of meaning structures within the cognitivist language of categories and concepts find their fullest expression in explicit appeals to schema models of knowledge. Janoff-Bulman's (1992) heavily influential theory of trauma is illustrative in this regard, positing that events traumatize to the extent that they are appraised as challenging and ultimately shattering individuals’ deep-seated, “most abstract, generalized knowledge structures” (p. 29) about people and the world as beneficent, trustworthy, and deserving of security and comfort.

Modern treatments of schemas routinely characterize them as functional structures of the mind mediating between incoming information and outgoing action—representational systems of classification that serve to organize and guide how individuals act in and make sense of the world and themselves. Gradually constructed from everyday encounters and experiences with particular objects, events, people, etc. in the world, schemas are not, in themselves, about such particulars per se or simply reducible to collections of particulars. Schemas instead abstract away from those particulars to provide individuals organized, generalizable knowledge, guiding the way they act in and on the world around them (Eysenck, 1993; Neisser, 1967, 1976). Schemas range from the most rudimentary, perceptually grounded categories (like dog and cat) to increasingly higher-order conceptualizations that go well “beyond the information given” (Bruner, 1973). The most abstract levels of schema—Janoff-Bulman's (1992) “grandest schemas”—concern core ideas about the nature of reality and our place in it, indicative of individuals’ most “generalized beliefs about the self and the world” (Taylor & Uchida, 2019, p. 1549). Such beliefs reflect what individuals (often implicitly) consider to be the “natural” state of affairs.

Horror and Schema Incongruence

In Taylor and Uchida's (2019) account, both the emotions of awe and horror derive from conditions of schema incongruence, in which some experience with objects, events, or actions proves unassimilable to individuals’ grandest schemas and thereby challenges the schemas themselves. What distinguishes awe from horror is the specific nature of this challenge. In awe, individuals encounter schematic challenge that requires them to expand upon their current assumptive beliefs without actively contradicting the very structure of those beliefs. Awe thus prompts levels of accommodative effort that result in schema enhancement absent wholesale schema annihilation. In horror, however, schema incongruence “exceeds the limits of comprehensibility or presumed possibility and is thus evaluated as unthinkable” (p. 1550). Taylor and Uchida refer to this level of schema incongruence as “extremity.” Such horror-inspiring conditions prove not only unassimilable to an individual's basic world views but also contradictory to those views, resulting in violation, negation, and ultimate collapse of the views themselves—the “shattering” of assumptions that Janoff-Bulman (1992) depicts as central to trauma.

Like most appeals in emotion theory to the concept of schema, Taylor and Uchida's schema incongruence theory of horror (2019, 2022) views evaluative processes of appraisal through the cognitivist lens of information processing theory. In this view, stimulus information from particular objects, events and actions in the world impinges on an individual's sensory systems and makes its way to the central control structure of that individual, her brain, where the information undergoes active processing and meaning is made. Under this kind of framing, the evaluative process of appraisal, like any form of cognitive activity, becomes a centralized, in-the-brain activity distinct from the continuous, real-time, perception-action engagement of organisms with the world—a “disembodied, ‘wholly heady’ cognitive phenomenon whose function is to evaluate objects and events and steer the body accordingly” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 84; van Gelder, 1995; Wheeler, 2005).

Movements underway in the cognitive sciences to reframe psychological functioning in decidedly embodied and embedded terms—as the thoroughly embodied activity of individuals embedded in a world—have gained increasing prominence in the last couple of decades, with enactivist theories of cognition offering particularly strong condemnations of the overly intellectualized, computationalist approach to cognition that information processing treatments espouse (e.g., Di Paolo, 2009; Hutto & Myin, 2018; Newen et al., 2018; Thompson, 2007). In her enactivist critique of orthodox emotion theory, Colombetti (2014) has challenged the disembodiment of modern appraisal theory along these lines. Appraisal activities themselves—namely, the conferring of emotional meaning onto stimulus information—are routinely viewed as neurocentrically localized, in the head, and clearly demarcated from other, non-evaluative components of the body (Colombetti, 2014). Under these circumstances, bodies may themselves provide information to the appraisal centers of the head and are certainly informed and directed by those appraisal centers, but they are in no way constitutive of the appraisal process itself. In this way, modern appraisal theory maintains a kind of brain-body dualism.

In contrast, Colombetti (2014) argues for appraisal as “organismic sense making, namely as the bringing forth of a world of significance (an Umwelt) on the part of the living organism, in virtue of its adaptive autonomy” (p. 101). Appraisal is an activity of individuals as organized wholes fully embodied and embedded in a world, irreducible to the functioning of particular organs or organ systems. Far from being an internal, behind-the-scenes processing of and conferral of meaning upon information or driver of an individual's action, appraisal is the action of individuals embedded in their worlds (Colombetti, 2014; Dewey, 1895; Di Paolo et al., 2010). To understand appraisal, therefore, requires grounding in the real-time dynamics of individuals as living bodies acting in and coupled to their real-world contexts.

Critics of schema theories and their proclivity for treating cognitive phenomena in disembodied terms have long pointed to the “mythology of inner guidance systems” on which these theories are founded (Malcolm, 1977, p. 169). By this mythology, the organized actions of individuals in context necessarily require some kind of hidden guidance system to explain the organization itself, namely how the individual knows to do what she does. In the context of recognition, for example, Malcolm explains that:

We feel that when a person recognizes something, in addition to the various manifestations or accompaniments of recognition, something must go on inside. This is the “inner process” of recognition (pp. 161–162)

Apart from these more general critiques of schema theory and its construal of the appraisal process, Taylor and Uchida's (2019, 2022) specific schema incongruence theory of horror suffers from the same problems that prior “discrepancy” and “incongruity” accounts of fear have faced (e.g., Hebb, 1946; Kagan, 1974; Schaffer, 1966). Appeals to schema incongruence can, at best, account for the degree of arousal and attention produced through an encounter with an unassimilable object or event. However, such appeals, in and of themselves, offer little explanation for the hedonic value or valence of any resulting emotion (Sroufe et al., 1974; Witherington et al., 2001). In their account of horror, Taylor and Uchida consider circumstances that “undermine systems of meaning” by violating “basic schematic criteria for category inclusion” (2019, p. 1550) as horror-eliciting, yet their account provides no real specificity as to which particular systems of meaning, when violated, lead to horror, as opposed to some other emotion. Schemas, even the grandest of them, are not necessarily of emotional concern to individuals. And even schema that are more clearly of emotional significance do not, by virtue of being violated, necessarily yield negative emotions. Taylor and Uchida's schema incongruence theory of horror may adequately target the “could not” of horror but is critically insufficient for specifying the “should not” of horror.

Schema theory and its attendant application to the study of emotion run afoul both of an over-intellectualization and disembodiment of the emotion process. The meaning structures or “systems of meaning” to which Taylor and Uchida (2019, 2022) and other emotion theorists appeal in explanations of horror represent highly abstract conceptualizations of the world and its inhabitants, built up through categorical generalization and invariance abstraction. Proponents of these approaches routinely refer to such systems of meaning as “beliefs” and “theories,” placing such structures squarely within the realm of ideas and propositional attitudes. Such approaches furthermore promote conceptualizations of the appraisal process as representationally detached from the person's immediate perception-action engagement of her environment. We argue that remedying the over-intellectualization and cognitivist framing of horror's relational meaning necessitates an alternative approach, one that draws on the explanatory traditions of phenomenology and that bodily grounds an understanding of “systems of meaning” in the complex action readiness and tendency of horror.

Solving the Problem of Horror's Formal Object

Reflective systems of meaning such as beliefs and theories grow out of, and are therefore experientially dependent upon, something more foundational: one's own lived involvement within the world, or being-in-the-world (Buhrmann & Di Paolo, 2017; Heidegger, 1927/1962; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962; Sartre, 1943/1956). Direct bodily engagement with one's surround—the “‘lived through’ world which is prior to the objective one” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 69)—constitutes a pre-reflective immersion within the world, an “operative intentionality” or bodily directedness toward objects (p. xx). To be pre-reflectively engaged with objects in one's environment is to know those objects practically, not thematically (Gallagher, 1986a, 1986b; Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962; Zahavi, 2005). Such knowing operates at a procedural level of sense-making and manifests the first-personal character and givenness of lived experience, an implicit, pre-conceptual, non-thematic, non-objectified kind of knowing that individuals do, in practice, as embodied subjects embedded within the world (Ciaunica, 2016; Gallagher, 1986a, 1986b; Zahavi, 2005).

In pre-reflective knowing, objects in the world wholly occupy attention as possibilities for action, whereas the body, as that through which the object is known and by which the object is given meaning, recedes to the status of background. By contrast, in reflective knowing a “psychological distance” characterizes the relation between knower and known such that knowers are analytically positioned against that which is known, in terms both of the world of objects and of one's own body and experience, as an object among other objects (Gao & Zelazo, 2008, p. 226). Whereas pre-reflective knowing is grounded in practical engagement, evident in both performative action upon and immersive spectatorship of objects in the world, reflective knowing necessarily assumes a detached spectatorial stance toward those objects.

This distinction between immersive and detached spectatorship echoes a key differentiation that Wierzbicka (1999) has made in her discussion of the conceptually similar “onlooker” emotions of horror and appalled. In her description of being appalled, Wierzbicka explicitly argues that the experience has a “reflective quality—as if one felt compelled to take note of and reflect on terrible things that happen to people” (p. 95). Nothing, however, in her description of horror suggests that being horrified has any such reflective quality; in fact, her semantic explication of appalled includes the following component, noticeably absent in her semantic explication of horror: “I have to think now: very bad things happen to people” (p. 95).

So, to identify the formal object of horror—its relational meaning—at a pre-reflective level of knowing involves grounding horror's appraisal dimension in terms of individuals’ practical engagements with the world of objects. Furthermore, we argue that horror arises primarily, if not exclusively, from practical engagements with social objects. For many emotion theorists, in fact, the “should nots” and “could nots” of horror fall squarely within the realm of the social, as constituted by social agents and their relations with one another. De Rivera (1977), for example, conceptualized horror as a reaction to social others who transgress group membership—others who are “so distorted that we can no longer identify (them) as a member of our group” (p. 55). Miller (2018) has similarly argued that objects of horror subvert what it means to be human such that “when a person travels too far from normal humanity” and “becomes, categorically, an alien,” horror arises (p. 80; see also Trigg, 2014). For Cavell (1979), horror derives from “the precariousness of human identity…the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may behave, something other than we are” (pp. 418–419).

We likewise argue that horror emerges from transgressions of the social. However, we also explicitly argue—unlike the preceding characterizations—that such transgressions are not of abstract social categories or grand schemas like “humanity” (or what it means to be human) but are instead specific to the practical dynamics of social engagement, borne of one's ubiquitous situatedness within social relationships. Thus, in keeping with what we have identified as the action readiness of horror, we argue that the emotion of horror arises from encounters with social objects appraised as precluding all possibilities for action but one: spectatorship. In horror, the possibility of “inhabiting” another's action—of living another's action and its operative intentionality through one's own body—forecloses. Appraised objects of horror do not admit of being lived through, resonated to, or actively responded to via connection or disconnection, despite being situated as social objects that, qua social objects, should afford a horizon of meaningful possibilities for how one interacts with them. Such objects become divested of meaning, of their operative intentionality, and are rendered inscrutable by virtue of no longer being centers of possible activity for socially meaningful transaction. They instead exist as gaping voids within the horizon of possibilities for acting within the world. They demand, in fact compel, singular attention—the “gawking impulse” of horror—yet forestall any kind of engagement, not even the possibility of social disengagement.

In horror, all one can do is helplessly witness the social spectacle that unfolds. Appraised objects of horror thus constitute overwhelming distortions of participatory social normativity, with what reflects the particulars of participatory social normativity for any given person depending, of course, on that individual's unique developmental history of practical social engagement.

Experiences akin to horror may certainly be wrapped up in more complex reflective systems of meaning, like abstract social categories or grand schemas of “humanity” based on constructed beliefs and theories. But we would argue that such experiences are more appropriately characterized as being “appalled,” consistent with Wierzbicka's (1999) aforementioned distinction. One more experience akin to horror that also depends on reflective knowing and more abstract categorization is that of the uncanny, an experience rarely discussed in modern psychological theory but often conflated with horror, especially in accounts of horror art. We conclude this paper with one final, important distinction between horror and other fear-related emotions: that between horror and the uncanny.