Books: The Sleep of Reason

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LIVING IN FEAR: A HISTORY OF HORROR IN THE MASS MEDIA

by LES DANIELS

248 pages. Scribners. $12.95.

Up to his chest in the shark's horrific gullet, the victim screams bright gouts of blood as the great beast drags him down to a hideous quietus.

Horror, revulsion, panic overwhelm everyone who witnesses the climax of Jaws. Yet people have paid more than $150 million for the experience. Why? Why in a world menaced by drug epidemics, official corruption, political assassination, terrorist armies, atomic holocaust and pay toilets do human beings feel a longing to be scared out of their skins? What is this perverse allure of the horrible that in all ages and nations has made men sit at the feet of the taleteller who can summon adrenalin with shadow dangers?

Aristotle's answer was that pity and terror purged the emotions and left the heart light. Freud thought stories of "the uncanny" released repressed anxiety—real toads come out to play in imaginary gardens. A modern German theologian, Rudolf Otto, was convinced that the goose flesh people feel at horror movies was the symptom of primitive religious experience. But a close look at the history of the fear trip—as Pop-Sociologist Les Daniels demonstrates in this witty catalogue of Who's Who in Horror—suggests more immediate historical reasons.

Forbidden Fruits. Horror stories were told in prehistory—there are monsters in the cave paintings. In ancient Egypt, the god Osiris was chopped to pieces on the orders of his mother. Terror haunts Beowulf and the Book of Job. But horror as civilized commercial entertainment arose in the rationalist 18th century, and its compensatory function was recognized. In one of his Caprichos, Painter Francisco Goya said it all: "The sleep of reason breeds monsters."

The horrors Daniels describes divide fairly neatly into two species—Things Seen and Things Unseen—and each has inspired its own tradition. The tradition of Things Unseen dates from Horace Walpole, a wealthy English dilettante who built his own medieval castle and in 1764 published the first gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto. Madness and murder stalk Otranto's parapets, but violence is held to an artful minimum: Walpole's readers wanted to nibble at forbidden fruits—but not to find worms.

Edgar Allan Poe was the first great master of the new art of the uncanny. In The Telltale Heart, The Masque of the Red Death and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, he made the horror story a respectable literary form. But only a handful of literary terrorists (Hawthorne, James, Chekhov, Gogol) wrote tales as eerily disturbing as Poe's. Only one (Franz Kafka) found the ladder to a deeper gallery of madness.

Meanwhile, back at the castle, werewolves and vampires had taken over. In 1897, a London theatrical manager named Bram Stoker published a book called Dracula. It became the most popular story of the supernatural ever written. Uninformed about vampires, Stoker baldly invented his own lore of the undead—how a vampire changes at will into a wolf or a bat, cringes in terror at the sight of a Christian cross, and lives forever unless a wooden stake is driven through its heart.