Abstract
Crisis theory comes from diverse politics. All warn of political illegitimacy, dystopian society, or civilizational collapse. So encompassing are these troubles that we typically fail to sense our jeopardy straightforwardly. Crisis theory connects historical dynamics with everyday realities to reveal what monstrous developments await us ordinary people. Popular horror joins crisis theory in facing realities gone radically wrong. The stakes are ultimate: often the soul, even the world. The challenge is to face and defeat evils. Horror seeks to recognize our evils soon and skillfully enough to thwart them. Stephen King and Peter Straub are especially good at this. They sideline theoretical abstractions of crisis theory with provocative details and potent symbols for our everyday lives. Thus they do crisis theory by other, better means. They face ours as times of terrible troubles, yet with figures more engaging and practical than many theories of civilizational crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
Conservatives include Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind (New York: Random House, 1973); Robert Nisbet, Twilight of Authority (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Existentialists include Glenn Tinder, The Crisis of Political Imagination (New York: Scribner, 1964); Robert Jay Lifton, History and Human Survival (New York: Random House, 1970); Norman O. Brown, Closing Time (New York: Random House, 1973). Greens include Bill McKibben, The End of Nature (New York: Random House, 1989); Jared Diamond, Collapse (New York: Viking, 2005); Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, The Collapse of Western Civilization (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Liberals include Al Gore, Earth in the Balance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992); Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003); Jane Jacobs, Dark Age Ahead (New York: Random House, 2004). Democrats include Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect (New York: Norton, 1974); Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). Postmoderns include Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Random House, 1970); David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
- 2.
See Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1947); Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).
- 3.
See Michael Calvin McGee and John S. Nelson, “Narrative Reason in Public Argument,” Journal of Communication, 35, no. 4 (Autumn 1985): 139–55.
- 4.
See John S. Nelson, Politics in Popular Movies (Boulder: Paradigm, 2015), 56–68.
- 5.
See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, ed. and trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941); Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1944); Nelson, Politics in Popular Movies, 105–72.
- 6.
See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
- 7.
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, 38.
- 8.
Stephen King in Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, eds., Bare Bones (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988), 139.
- 9.
See Barbara J. Hill and John S. Nelson, “Facing the Holocaust,” in Robert Hobbs and Fredrick Woodard, eds., Human Rights/Human Wrongs (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 189–209.
- 10.
Barney Cohen, “The Shockmeisters,” Esquire (November 1984): 231.
- 11.
See Carl G. Jung, The Portable Jung, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Viking, 1971).
- 12.
See Stephen King, Danse Macabre (New York: Berkley, 1981), 51–81.
- 13.
Mark Rose, Alien Encounters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 24–49.
- 14.
King and Straub, The Talisman, p. 529.
- 15.
King, “Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut,” p. 196.
- 16.
Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 13.
- 17.
Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen, p. 13.
- 18.
See King, ’Salem’s Lot, especially pp. 340–42.
- 19.
Even short-term cycles of interest in horror appear to support the connection to facing evil. See King, Danse Macabre, p. 28: “Horror movies and horror novels have always been popular but every ten or twenty years they seem to enjoy a cycle of increased popularity and visibility. These periods almost always seem to coincide with periods of fairly serious economic or political strain, and the books and films seem to reflect those free-floating anxieties … which accompany such serious but not mortal dislocations. They have done less well in periods when the American people have been faced with outright examples of horror in their own lives.” As crisis theorists typically contend, the difficulty of facing troubles is greatest when they lurk in the background. Then our need is most urgent for writing that con-fronts and faces troubles. When troubles reach the foreground, they can more readily assume some humanly accessible face, and in any case, they can more readily consume completely the attention previously available for reading indirectly about them in books of horror.
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Nelson, J.S. (2020). Horror, Crisis, and Control: Tales of Facing Evils. In: Picariello, D.K. (eds) The Politics of Horror. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42015-4_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42015-4_2
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