Imagination vs. Art in Horror Film, Comics, and Literature, Pt. 2.5: A few clarifications

• Pt. 1: Introduction
• Pt. 2: From Memory to Imagination

So I'm challenging the claim, commonly heard among horror fans and critics, that it's more effective in horror to suggest a monster or violence, and let the audience use its imagination to fill in what isn't shown, than it is to show a monster or violence in all explicitness.

Before picking up exactly where I left off in Part 2, I think I need to clarify a distinction I tried to stipulate in a recent related post--that between "scary" and "horrifying." I'm afraid I didn't do a great job of explaining it in the first place, and only made a further hash of it in my responses to some comments. The difference I want to isolate with this distinction is not that between horror that's suggested and horror that's explicitly shown (that seems to be how commenter Jack Veasey took it, and I not only failed to clarify, but perpetuated/exacerbated the misconstrual in my response).

Like I said, when people say things like, "what you don't see is scarier than what you do," or words to that effect, what they generally have in mind are monsters and/or violence. Now, although monsters do often commit violence in horror, it seems to me that the image of a monster aims at provoking one kind of response (whether that image is explicitly shown or just suggested), and a scene of violence aims at provoking a quite different kind of response (whether that scene is explicitly shown or just suggested). In short, I think we're not dealing with a single claim here, but two related yet distinguishable claims--one about monsters and another about violence. Some considerations will apply to both claims, but some will apply specifically to one case or the other. One claim might be correct and the other not, or they both might be correct or not for different reasons. Just to tip my hand on this point--while I disagree with both claims, I can actually see some basis in experience for the claim about monsters, but the claim about violence strikes me as a groundless piety and a critical prejudice.

Anyway, getting back to the terms of this distinction, by "scary," I mean the effect aimed at by the (suggested or explicit) image of a monster. By "horrifying," I mean the effect aimed at by a (suggested or explicit) scene of violence. So we might ask, then, 1) whether Wein and Wrightson's first hint of a monster in Swamp Thing #4:

. . . is scarier than their Big Reveal:

. . . and 2) whether Scott McCloud's primary illustration of how "gutters" work in Understanding Comics:

. . . is more horrifying than this Dick Ayers "eye-popping" splash-page from the April 1970 Tales from the Tomb (courtesy of Empire of the Claw):

To be clear, the view I'm challenging would claim that the image a reader would spin in her imagination around the suggestion of a monster in the first Swamp Thing panel would be scarier than the explicit image of the monster in the second, and that the scene of violence a reader would imagine to fill in the gutter in McCloud's example would be more horrifying than Ayers's gruesomely explicit depiction of an axe actually striking the head off a living man.

In that prior post, CRwM also raised in comments some questions about how we judge something to be more "suggestive" or more "explicit"; he points out that the terms are seldom well-defined when they're trotted out for discussions of this sort, and moreover are relative and have a tendency to shift over time or between contexts. In the axe illustrations above, I chose examples well to the extremes, but cartoonists (just to stick with examples from comics) have a much wider range of options than a suggestive/explicit binary.

Here, to kick things off, is an actual instance very much like McCloud's example (courtesy of Horrors of It All):

Again, this is awfully far to the "suggestive" end of the spectrum. But now here are some examples where we see the swing and a suggestion of the impact, but the actual gruesome contact of axe to flesh happens off-panel or close enough to fudge:

(Tales from the Crypt #46, Joe Orlando)

(another from Horrors of It All)

(Terror Gigante N. 122)

Now here are a couple from similar angles to the previous two, only they show impact in-panel:

(from Skywald's Scream #1, by Alan Hewetson and Maelo Cintron)

(Kriminal #2, Max Bunker & Magnus)

Here's a really interesting case:

(Tales of the Zombie #9, Doug Moench and Alfredo Alcala)

Though we get the full impact in-panel, it's obscured by that bloody starburst "impact effect"! So what do we say here, about where this falls on the scale of suggestive to explicit?

Here's one I like:

(Frankenstein #4)

Is this in-panel decapitation "less explicit" (and more or less horrifying?) than the Ayers one above because it's just a tad less gruesome (i.e. no eyeball flying loose)?

And just for the hell of it, because it makes me laugh, here's the Frankenstein Monster slapping a clown's head right off:

(Frankenstein #9)

One more wrinkle I'll mention--frequently in horror, we get a progression from hints and suggestions to a more explicit presentation. So in between the Swamp Thing panels above, we get this gorgeously spooky intermediate panel:

Toward the climax of Richard Sala's Mad Night, one delirious sequence runs all the way up the scale from suggestive to explicit. It begins with the first death entirely off-panel:

On the next page, we see the grisly results of that THWACK! and THUNK!:

We next get an in-panel axe in the back, but the impact of the killing stroke is mostly kept off-panel, as in some of the examples above:

It winds up with an axe in someone's face, right in-panel:

This kind of escalation really makes no sense if the increasing explicitness only ratchets the intensity of the horror down.

To toss out one final complicating example, one of the most truly horrifying sequences I've seen in any comic is the following page, from Josh Simmons's bootleg Batman:
This is quite a sophisticated blending of suggestion and explicitness. The brutal physicality of Batman's operation of his new "bat device" couldn't be more explicit, although what exactly it accomplishes isn't clear at first. The black panel is an effective pause, that I must admit gives the imagination a little room to breathe, so to speak. Through a progression of panels, it becomes increasingly clear what Batman has done. I daresay whatever we imagined--whatever we filled in that black panel with--the reality Simmons hits us with is worse, and Batman's reaction to what he's done drives it home with a sledgehammer.

That's all I got today, Groovy Agers. Let's keep this discussion going!