Hans wrote:
"I don織t know if that織s a complete misunderstanding of Cavell. Did he give any examples to illustrate his definition?"
Here’s the rest of Cavell’s discrimination (though I still find part of it puzzling):
"[...] And isn't it the case that not the human horrifies me, but the inhuman, the monstrous? Very well. But only what is human can be inhuman. - Can only the human be monstrous? If something is monstrous, and we do not believe that there are monsters, then only the human is a candidate for the monstrous.
If only humans feel horror (if the capacity to feel horror is a development of the specifically human biological inheritance), then maybe it is a response specifically to being human being. To what, specially, about being human? Horror is the title I am giving to the perception of the precariousness of human identity, to the perception that it may be lost or invaded, that we may be, or may become something other than we are, or take ourselves for; that our origins as human beings need accounting for, and are unaccountable." (My italic.)
(It reminds me of what you mentioned in 19 August post about the philosophical aspect of horror film.)
Mulhall then finds this conception of horror insightful to explain why typical monsters in horror genre are beings like Frankenstein, zombies, living deads, vampires: they are "mutations or distortions of the human". And I’d add that part of the horror of zombies, vampires etc. is that they have the power to make human beings “one of them” (Freaks: we accept you, one of us! Hercules: They are going to make you one of them, you peacock!), a threat to the identity of human characters.
Hans wrote:
"I only have a vague memory of a part of the brain, the Amygdala, that reacts to certain visual patterns (like serpents) very quickly, while the stimulus is not processed by the more sophisticated parts of the mind."
Yea I know little about neurology, I just learn from Dr. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain that Amygdala triggers emotions. It seems that our bodies react constantly to external stimulus, and as you mentioned, certain stimulus is not processed by the more sophisticated parts of the mind. I am not sure whether such somatic state are “affects” discussed in psychology, philosophy of emotion, in certain account of horror (e.g. Matt Hill’s “affects of horror”), or even in Deleuze’s works.
Lorraine
I織m not sure if there has been any neurological research that would be helpful for the emotional response to the visual stimuli of horror films.
If I織m not at all wrong, the same part is involved during flashbacks of traumatized persons (although they not only include hallucinations but also sounds).
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