On Terror and Horror - Assignment #1

To examine the differences between terror and horror, I'll be looking at two works by Stephen King; A short story entitled Graveyard Shift and an excerpt from his novel The Shining.

The differences between the two are already pretty well defined, terror being the feeling of dread and anxiety that precedes the horror, which is accompanied by feelings of disgust and revulsion.

In King's The Shining, the boy Danny Torrance heads out by himself to the playground of the Overlook Hotel. In the process of playing make-believe, he climbs down into the concrete rings - a tunnel like structure buried in the snow that kids can crawl through. While he's down there, the hole that he had climbed in through becomes plugged with snow.

Now by this point in the novel, Danny is already aware that the spirits of the Overlook are actively trying to harm him and as he is bathed in complete darkness, a creeping sense of terror washes over him.  He becomes certain that something is in there with him, slowly coming for him. Hearing the crackle of dead leaves from inside the rings, he snaps and frantically begins to claw at the snow in an attempt to dig himself out. But the snow seems to want to keep him trapped in there as well. As it falls down around his head, he hears the crackling getting closer and closer and just as he thinks the thing is about to reach out and grab his ankle...he breaks through the snow and tumbles out into daylight. He turns and stares at the opening for minutes, waiting, but nothing emerges.

Here we see King create a superb sense of terror and foreboding. Danny is trapped in what is essentially a  frozen coffin, claustrophobic and pitch black which is terrifying enough as it is. The addition of the unseen, creeping "thing" makes it even more so. In the darkness, Danny is forced to rely only on his sense of hearing   and as he begins to believe that there is something in there with him he is filled with a sense of panic and dread. This is terror. The almost paralytic sense of fear that comes before the reveal of the horror. The fact that the horror is never revealed in this case makes the situation even more terrifying. It is left solely to the reader's (and Danny's) imagination as to what that thing could have been.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have King's short story Graveyard Shift. In it, a pulp mill crew is tasked with cleaning out the basement and sub-basement of the mill. As they get deeper into the basement, they begin to encounter bigger and bigger rats. Eventually, the protagonist gets down to the lowest level and discovers thousands upon thousands of rats that have begun to mutate. At the end of the basement they discover a rat the "size of a Holstein calf", eyeless, gray and pulsating. The story ends as the rats attack, clawing and biting at the exposed fleshy bits of the workers down there.

This is a fantastic example of horror. There is not a great deal of terror built up along the journey to the sub basement. The rough, blue-collar workers make jokes and complain to each other about the job as they get closer and closer to the sub-basement. They are not expecting anything out of the ordinary down there, so there is no sense of anxiousness, dread or anticipation built up despite the larger than usual rats. It is only once they get to the sub-basement and see the truly enormous rats that they realize what they have stumbled into. And by that point, the horror has already been revealed, and in quite the fashion. King seemingly delights in providing the reader with lurid descriptions of the  repulsive and horrible beasts that dwell within, as well as the gruesome fate that awaits the workers.

By looking at these two examples, we can see how terror is built up by purposefully keeping the "monster" behind the curtain and keeping those involved guessing in the dark, while horror is pulling the curtain back on the monster and showing everybody it's true, disgusting form.