Ken wrote:
>    In my own interpretation of horror however I have an entirely
> different point of view. I expect to see monsters, disfigured humans,
> atrocities against nature, blood, guts, dripping goo, moss hanging
> from forbidding trees and slime covered rock walls, dungeons, tools
> for torture, nooses, guillotines, headless horsemen, Frankenstien
> monsters, mummies, vampires, vehicles smashing together with body
> parts flying everywhere, worms crawling out of eye sockets and bugs
> from gapping bloody gashes in human flesh, dripping oozing boils on
> pretty young faces, death and destruction in every single pixel of
> the image, and you know just plain scary, frightening, horror related
> imagery.

On the surface, I find very few of those 'horror' -- and note there's a
difference between 'horror', 'disgust', and 'fear', though 'disgust' and
'fear' can certainly be elements of 'horror'. I suspect you equate 'horror'
with fear, whereas I think there's a subtle difference. I'm afraid of
heights, but a picture of the street from, say, the Sears Tower would not
qualify as 'horror' for me.

Blood? Doesn't scare me. Guts? That either; I watched open-heart surgery
once on PBS because I thought it was fascinating. In the right
circumstances, I might be disgusted by either, and with the right
/additional/ elements I might consider it horrifying, but not in itself.

Monsters? Okay, there I'd mostly agree with you. But I don't need blatant
monster imagery to give me that sense of horror. A vampire, viewed
attacking a victim, is a blatant horror image. The barest glimpse of a
cloaked, pale figure on the periphery of a perfectly average night-time
street down which walks Miss and Mr Joe Average would be subtle horror of
the "what lurks in the shadows?" type -- and that's just as much an
expression of horror as the first.

In other words...

>   I don't think there is a need of making the viewer try to find the
> horror in the image in this round. It should be blatant and obvious.

I disagree. Sometimes, the subtle and almost-normal is far more horrifying
than the blatant and obvious. I certainly am not going to be disappointed
by images that are blatant and obvious, provided they are well done, but
the /contrast/ of 'absolutely normal' with 'nasty horrible thing' to me has
more impact. Not just "there are terrible things here" but "there are
terrible things in a scene which should otherwise be pleasant and serene".  

A good correlation to how I'll be inclined to view images in this round
will be how I feel about role-playing. A game in which the horror is
expressed as a band of zombies in a cemetery is not all that gripping to
me: I can see the enemy, and fight them. A game in which the horror is some
shadowy enemy striking at times and places I can't predict, in an otherwise
perfectly normal town, is going to fascinate me: minute by minute, I don't
know what's going to happen, and I can't tell what it would take to stop
the enemy.

Just a matter of perspective, I guess.

I predict, Ken, that you will not like my entry. :)

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