What is Horror?

What is horror? This question is hard to answer by itself because they are so many layers to what makes horror “horror”. Viewing horror, or any other form of literature, in a black and white view is often a grave mistake that undermines the complexity of the story. So, let us try to complete the task of defining horror in a concrete way, despite it being a spectrum. Horror is a story that is about something unnatural meant to make the reader fearful. Now they are two important things to keep in mind with this definition! First, the word unnatural is purposely vague because different cultures and subcultures have different definitions of what is scary and not scary. For example, in Spain catholic use a ghostly hood in rituals which is often seem as normal: now go to America in a ghostly hood and we see a monster. Second, the story is “meant” to give a reader a sense of freight. Though not all people have the same view of what is scary or not, we can all agree if a story is written to be dark and scary then the purpose of this story is obviously to be horrific. For example, in H.P. Lovecraft’s “Dagon” it was scary to people back then, but now I am not particularly scared of fish people; however I would not say the story of “Dagon” is not horror, in fact, it is one of the foundational work of horror that inspired many other works of horror that I find scary.  

Now that we got the definition of horror out of the way I would like to briefly talk about one subject that is important to the context of my analysis of Stephen King’s “Harvey Dream” and that is the subject of literary criticism. In class, we often discuss the idea of literary criticism through different viewpoints of a given story. For example, Feminism and Racial criticism. With these forms of criticism, we can view the intended viewpoint of the author and his characters. We can see the sexism of Milton and the racism of Lovecraft through these forms of literary criticism. In this analysis, I am going to use the viewpoint of the average American and how their (And in turn mine) sees horror. 

What is “Harvey’s Dream” about? In short, it is about a man with dementia going over his dream with his wife, Janet, within the dream he perfectly describes the horrific scene in which his daughter was killed and the phone call he had in the dream. The twist is that it turns out his dream was true. Then ending was cute too, saying that “dreams don’t come true if you say it out loud.” 

The short story “Harvey’s Dream” meets the definition of horror in the followings ways. First, it is something unnatural happening when Harvey describes his weird dream that comes true. It use the elements of theme and mood to build the devices of suspense and foreshadowing to a climax ending with the reality of the Harvey’s dream coming true. Second, the story is meant to be taking has horror by the elements of characters and mood with the devices of foreshadowing and suspense giving the reader a sense of dread throughout the story of his dream.  

This story is the most horrific because it treats horror troupes in the following ways: it has two major tropes, Unreliable narrator and unhappy ending. The unreliable narrator troupe is given to the character Harvey for his dream he told Janet. He is unreliable because of his lose grasp on reality. In the story, it shows he is unreliable through certain literary elements that described him as crazy, for example, the scene of him being half naked in the kitchen. Additionally, the devices use showed him being in consistent and unsure of himself, show in when he is telling the story. Second, the unhappy ending is a big part of the Stephen King’s short stories. The ending of “Harvey’s Dream” is no different. It ends with the truth of their daughter being dead or at least it heavily hinted at it. It uses the suspense of the dream Harvey is telling to build up tension within the reader which comes to a climax when the dream becomes a reality.  The story uses the literary elements of the character and mood to create tension. Additionally, it uses imagery, suspense, and foreshadowing to give the ending a truly horrific end. 

In conclusion, to my definition of horror Harvey’s dream meets it with flying colors. Though it is not as scary of some of Stephen King’s other works it does perfectly illustrate my point.