Imagination vs. Art in Horror Film, Comics, and Literature, Pt. 1: Introduction

On the commentary track of Anchor Bay's Scars of Dracula dvd, horror icon Christopher Lee goes off on a rant at the 11 minute mark in which he invokes two other horror icons to drive home a point:

It's an old Hitchcock saying . . . that it's what you don't see which is much more frightening than what you do see. I've said this for years. For years and years and years. I've said to people, "Why do you need to show this? Why do you need to show that? Why don't you suggest it? Why don't you make the audience even more involved? Because they are thinking about what's going to happen." And I remember Boris Karlofff saying this to me: "Leave it to the audience. They'll always think of something far worse than what we're doing up on the screen."

Lee, Hitchcock, and Karloff aren't the only ones to hold that view. Horror blogger CRWM observes that "this bit of conventional wisdom [i.e. the "widely held and oft repeated axiom that what one imagines is far more horrific than whatever one sees"] has long since passed from insight to received orthodoxy to ill-understood critical superstition."

Before proceeding to consider this view, let's tighten it up with a bit more precision. What exactly does this view claim should be left to the audience's imagination rather than shown? Two things, primarily: monsters (mainly of the supernatural variety) and horrific violence. Where these elements are present in a work of horror--whether explicitly or implicitly--they tend to be the elements that deliver the desired emotional response, or fail to. This view doesn't dispute that they should play that role; it claims that they play that role better if they're implied and left to an audience's imagination rather than explicitly depicted.

Now, what we generally mean by "imagination" includes a wide spectrum of various more-or-less related capacities and activities, but for the purposes of this discussion, we can narrow it down to one: our ability to compose and experience mental imagery in such a way as to respond emotionally to it. That nicely isolates exactly what we mean when we talk about creators leaving a werewolf or a gruesome dismemberment to an audience's imagination--the idea is that the creators present only a few select details and withhold the rest, so that the audience is guided and indeed forced to fill in what's missing by generating its own mental imagery of the monster or violence.

This view makes an extraordinary claim, if you think about it: the claim that, when it comes to those elements most responsible for delivering the emotional experience of horror, art fails. Proponents of this view would insist there's artistry in the way a creator directs an audience's imagination through suggestion, by the selection of evocative details, etc. Be that as it may, what this view implies is that no author can describe, no comics artist can draw, and no filmmaker can commit to film--not with any amount of talent, craft, or technical means at their disposal--an explicit image that delivers a more intense or satisfying experience of horror than the imagery an audience could supply with its own imagination.

To be clear, the claim is not that a mental image generated by any particular audience member would be objectively scarier than anything a creator could explicitly render; nobody is claiming that, if only we could get the mental image out of some audience member's imagination and into the artwork, that would make it scarier to the whole audience. The claim is rather that an audience member's mental image will be subjectively scarier because his imagination will draw on his own fears to personalize the image to make it maximally scary to him. Or, the claim might be (as Christopher Lee suggests above) that forcing an audience member to use her imagination draws her into the experience, or leads her to invest herself in it personally, in a way that is more conducive to having a powerful emotional response.

I've long disagreed strongly with this view. But so many people--with genuine, extensive insight and expertise about horror--characterize their personal responses to horror in terms of it, and with such conviction, that there can really be no question of "refuting" it. I decided to get to the bottom of the question once and for all. Not surprisingly, there are grains of truth on both sides of the debate--surprisingly, though, they aren't where most people (myself included) tend to assume they must be.