Horror vs. Terror

“Fear, Itself,” while using gothic elements—blood drops, disembodied parts (eyes, at least)—originating from The Castle of Otranto, is not particularly the same vein of Gothic as its horror-based predecessor. Though Oz even says in the episode, “Let the horrors begin,” the episode uses much more terror than horror.

In Otranto, life is normal and then boom, a helmet falls from the sky and kills someone. For the most part there is no suspense of the supernatural elements—no expectation that some scary supernatural thing will happen—no terror. We even know how it will end from the prophecy given us in the first chapter. (Most of the suspense came from the interpersonal relationships—will Isabella marry Manfred, how will Isabella and Matilda settle their mutual feelings for Theodore, etc. ) The supernatural stuff just happened, in the moment—and that’s where the horror came from.

Dracula too, had little suspense—we could tell most of what was about to happen, even if some of the time we were waiting for it to occur. But “Fear, Itself” is very much about the suspense and waiting for something horrifying to appear: from early on, when Giles tells Buffy that there is no expectation of something supernatural going on, we the audience who know that the Buffy formula has her facing something supernatural have expectation that something will happen—and we wonder “What’s going to happen?”

Usually, in Buffy, as in Otranto and Dracula, Giles says: this is what’s happening—there’s the horror. So this episode is different. From the outset, too, we are told about the party in such a way that we feel suspense for it: we are not just shown the party, we have to wait for several scenes before we even see the house it’s going to be at several more scenes later. And even at the very end, when Giles says “Bloody Hell, the inscription,” we the audience assume something bad is afoot (is the demon not really gone?). But it turns out rather to be something that, if it had been read early, instead of adding terror, would have dissipated it—it harmlessly read “Actual size.”

Is Whedon showing us how far the Gothic can go? That it isn’t reliant on more horror than terror? Or is he showing the interchangeability and close relationship between the Gothic, scary stories, and other supernatural tales? Being on Halloween, in which people are dressed up in scary costumes—not an element of the gothic, which these costumes do not always intend to bring to mind—the episode relates our culture to the gothic. It could be viewed as showing the close differences between certain aspects of horror culture and the gothic, or how the gothic reflects culture and has changed to keep up with it. Perhaps these two viewpoints are really expressing the same thing….

(Also, just as the man in the costume wasn’t a scary demon, the real demon is tiny and not too scary, and the inscription at the end is humorous, not scary… these aren’t aspects of horror, but rather the terror that they might be.)