Carroll's Response to Gaut

As you may recall from our readings on horror, one of Gaut's critiques of Carroll was that Carroll's definition discounts the existence of horror movies where the "monster" is actually human. He cited "The Silence of the Lambs" as an example of what is clearly a horror movie without a monster. He also brought up the hypothetical example of a person who comes from a horror movie, saying that it wasn't scary.

In his article "Enjoying Horror Fictions: A Response to Gaut," printed in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Carroll responds to both of these claims. (For those interested in reading the full article, it can be found by searching through Freel Library's listing of journals. I accessed the text via "Academic OneFile.")

In brief, his arguments are follows: Hannibal Lector is a monster, because he, and other psychotic killers depicted in slasher films, "constitute science fictions of the mind." They do not suffer real psychoses, but fictionally enhanced versions of psychoses, taking them from the realm of science to science fiction, and thus monsters, defending his monster hypothesis.

As for Gaut's example of Norman, the man who claims the film wasn't frightening, Carroll has this to say: "On the basis of my own -- admittedly unscientific -- sample of such pronouncements, I think that, when they are assessed contextually, these assertions (generally uttered by men, especially adolescent men) most often mean 'I'm too tough to be moved by something like that'."

He goes on to cite the commercial success of the movie (and preceding novel) Jurassic Park, and the success of the horror novels of Stephen King, to suggest that it is not an atypical person who consumes horror fiction, or a typical person in an atypical situation, but that they are, again, fascinated by monsters.

To end with a question: Do you feel that Carroll's response to Gaut adequately addresses the objections he raised? Why?