man, this book is such a disappointment.

carroll totally evades the paradox of tragedy and over-intellectualizes horror (while chastising critics like wood for doing the same thing.) the co-existentialist model will always fail to address the core problem because it necessarily separates the emotive response to horror from the very pleasure of consuming horror fiction. so, yeah. i have no idea how carroll thought he could get away with arguing that being scared or disgusted is something totally unrelated to our attraction of the genre—a mere “cost” to being fascinated. moreover, while his thought theory is a fine start to answering the paradox of fiction from a cognitive-evaluative position, it totally lacks the sort of empirical detail that carroll claims to be committed to. like, the thought alone is not what scares us, it’s the thought in concert with the craft of cinema… but, even further, is there not a darwinian, pre-cognitive facet to horror cinema?

the book is a failure. however, i think it’s an important read.