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god i can never stop thinking about certain sculptures used in modern art and how they can be used to elicit the beautiful and terrible feeling of true and genuine horror in ways that a lot of horror movies can never do

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

that’s horror, to me.

@admiraloblivious

This is amazing

This post makes me think of Klaus Pinter’s work:

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Anyway this is such a great post thanks for putting the whole idea into words so well. ❤

This is how I feel about wind turbines (I tried to walk up to one once and felt the most inexplicable terror I’ve ever felt in my life), or most things that are ridiculously large, for that matter. Ships fascinate me but make me feel very uneasy. Certain buildings, especially if they look old-timey in any way kind of freak me out. 

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit.

Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

WHAT AMAZING ADDITIONS TO THIS POST, thank you! I didn’t know of Kalus Pinter’s work and now I REALLY want to see it for myself, goodness.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror – the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

Overall, THIS HORROR IS WIDELY UNDERUSED IN FICTION and I’m so glad to see so many examples of it posted here!!

I feel this way about kangaroos. If you really look at a kangaroo for a minute it’s deeply unsettling, they’re bipedal and they have insane abs and they move wrong, it’s too human and I get that creeping horror that this thing exists. If I look at kangaroos too long I feel like I’m going insane

Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures did this to me, a bit. It was less the shape than the form–the lumpiness, the uneven shine–but mostly it was the scale. Most of these examples of horror don’t feel quite so wrong when they’re at a scale we can look “down” on. But when they overshadow us, or at least when they overshadow our general certainty of control, even for just a moment, the disorientation can slip suddenly into horror.

consider the Gelitin collective’s enormous pink rabbit left to rot in the Italian alps for the next 10 years

Eoin Mc Hugh – The Ground Itself is Kind,  Black Butter, 2014

Kiki Smith’s lilith sculpture is more humanoid but i feel like it belongs on this post because walking into the stairwell in the met and seeing this fucking thing was one of the most unnerving experiences in my life

If “the horror of wrongness” makes your soul sing as it does mine, read literally anything by Robert Aickman. My favorite is “The Hospice”.

in terms of literature, my favorite example of the horror of wrongness is ‘declare’ by tim powers. if you want to be slightly creeped out by concentric circles for the rest of your life, read it. it’s… mostly a spy novel.

My dad is a musician at the Naples Philharmonic orchestra hall, and let me tell you, there is nothing more terrifying than being no older than 4, wandering out to the courtyard at your dad’s workplace, and feeling this horrific aura of cosmic judgement from the masked Phillip Jackson sculptures just looming there. Their height and limbs are just tall, twisted and elongated enough to not be human, and you can totally feel it in person.

I’m about to ramble a bit so you’ll have to forgive me, but this phenomenon is caused by the process in your brain that seeks to “auto-fill” the information being presented to you. See, human brains are actually very lazy, and because of the amount of stimulus we experience every minute of every day, to save energy the brain auto-fills assumed factors. This is why it’s still fairly easy to read a sentence where the middle letters of each word are jumbled; your brain uses the clues it has available–the first and last letters of the words and the context–to construct the final sentence. That’s how skimming a page of literature works, it’s how facial recognition works, etc.

So in these cases of horror of wrongness, what’s happening is that your brain is being presented with an object or idea that it initially believes it understands, not unlike pre-rendered assets in a video game. Because the brain thinks it understands, it has already concluded what the object is… The wooden horse sculpture, for example. Your brain instantly recognizes that it’s a horse, but the horror comes in as the brain attempts to auto-fill the known material related to horses.

That’s a horse.

Wait, there’s no fur, there a weird driftwood planks…

There’s no ears, or eyes….!

And so on. Now your brain is reacting extremely uncomfortably, because what it thought it knew no longer exists, and familiarity has been shattered, temporarily, trust in reality has been shattered and that induces panic while your brain attempts to reassess the offending concept.

So for large buildings, your brain thinks of the building a certain way, as just a building which is a thought that is auto-filled based on your most common surroundings. However, when you get close to the massive building, your brain can no longer supplement you with experiences because it’s not used to the concept of buildings in that context.

So the horror of wrongness is really the assumption of reality that is being challenged and the horror of the implications that we do not really understand much at all.

reblogging for all the fantastic additions- shit this is so interesting.