The Face of the Beast: Bestial Descriptions and Psychological Response in Horror Literature

Abstract

Current scholarship surrounding the predator mythos in culture and literature suggests a distinctive binary of wild–domestic. Scholars often argue that the uniquely terrifying aspect of the predator is in its unconscious capacity to invade our standards of civilization, disrupt order, and pass our final frontier of fear: that of being eaten alive. Other scholars, too, tend to read the terror of these predators with an almost colonial analysis, centering around the concept of the predators’ ulterior motive to flip the cultural hierarchy of human above animals. However, what these scholars often neglect are the physiological and evolutionary drives that ultimately construct a genetic response to these predators’ general anatomical outlines and features. As we undertake the crucial work of understanding humans’ perceptions of their place in their environment, it is important to recognize that, aside from discussions of culturally constructed paradigms of dominance, we too are animals, with primal responses to our environmental conditions. These instinctive responses must be acknowledged as playing a part in our view of the “wild.” The scholarship on predator–human interactions necessitates a close study of such relations. In horror texts—literature, films, video games, and other media—the depiction of fearful “beasts” relies on anatomically deconstructing the image of the predator to highlight key predatory features that generate instinctive responses in the audience. On display, in the horror genre, is the anatomy of our fear of predators.