Horror pervades human experience. It affects us both as individuals and
as members of social communities, it is recurrent in pop culture and
arguably present in all fields of human knowledge and realms of
storytelling, from Cronus eating his own children, to Freddy Krueger’s
sadistic murders in
A Nightmare on Elm Street to media coverage
of war. As a fundamentally paradoxical concept, horror simultaneously
repels and fascinates us: we naturally dread it, yet we are drawn to it. We are taught to avoid that which is horrifying, but the appeal of horror, whether in the form of fiction or sensational news, is irresistible.
