The Horror of the Enlightenment
This is from my Kolchak post.
“Horror, began appropriately enough during the Reign of Terror. Religion was officially outlawed in France. The Catholic Church had been forced out of the country and if you were going to worship anything at all, it had to be the Goddess of Reason. Graveyards were filled with dead people who were, according to the First Republic, gone forever. They were in an eternal sleep from which there would be no waking.
Into this government mandated spiritual vacuum stepped Étienne-Gaspard Robert, the creator of the very first horror show: The Phantasmagoria.
Robert, unlike his various conmen spiritualist predecessors, had to keep an eye out for militantly atheist authorities, so he was very clear about the fact that what his audience was watching was fiction. Ghosts and ghouls weren’t real. It was all purely for entertainment.
And by all accounts, audiences found the Phantasmagoria utterly terrifying. Admittedly, Robert was careful to serve them punch laced with laudanum before the show started but that only goes so far. The fear was quite real.”
Something that occurred to me later is that horror didn’t exist as a genre before the Enlightenment.
The reason is simple enough, before the Enlightenment, people believed in the supernatural. It wasn’t a matter of ignorance, it was a matter of everyday life. If you believed in the Bible, you believed in the supernatural. It was filled with the stuff.
It was only after the Enlightenment that Christians were required to uphold two irreconcilable and opposing viewpoints. That God existed but that the supernatural did not, despite the fact that God Himself is fundamentally a supernatural being. Declaring this thing or that to be a superstition that the scientifically minded should sneer at in disdain, created a spiritual vacuum.
And almost immediately a need for the “delightful shiver” emerged.
Horror was a bone-deep reaction to the Enlightenment.
