[j. d. worthington]

I think that's part of the problem; we've come (once again) to confuse terms. Horror and terror and repulsion have all become intermingled, to the detriment of the entire field, frankly. Going on older definitions -- the ones that actually did define the differences (Burke, Radcliffe, Poe, Birkhead, Varma, Raillo, etc.) -- I'd say that "terror" is that where the intention is to expand the reader's emotional state... what Burke and Radcliffe would call "the sublime". Fear (or terror) is a part of that, because it is part of the emotional complex emerging from a realization of something so tremendous... something that overpowers by sheer awe and majesty, which may be terrible (in fact, it usually is, along with being awe-inspiring in the sense of giving one a feeling of almost unlimited possibilities... like the contemplation of the vast unknown of the universe, or of the potential of a spiritual realm about which we really know nothing -- nor can know).

"Horror", in its truest sense, relies on a somewhat cruder effect, but not necessarily on gore and bloodletting. Varma described it well when he compared terror and horror by saying it was like the difference between sensing something awful in the dark and stumbling across a corpse. Horror is more concrete, and usually more physical; though it can be an unseen thing where one senses something awful and menacing that has a feeling of something ugly, disfigured in some way (physically or spiritually)... say, the phantom in "How Love Came to Professor Guildea", which is unseen and is, in fact, the spirit of Love... but mindless love... love bereft of reason, sense, intelligence. That inspires both terror and horror... and even repulsion.

And that's where we start getting into "repulsion" or "the gross-out", which relies on the physical plane alone. I'm sorry, but that which relies on such mundane things is simply easier to do, and doesn't leave a lasting impression. It's closer to pornography than to art, as it goes for a baser, coarser approach... usually the bases and coarsest possible. I'd suggest reading Frank Belknap Long's "The Space Eaters" for a good discussion of this. As a story, it has terrible flaws, but his discussion of the differences here, and of why they work in different ways and why one is much more powerful to the imagination than the other, is really quite good.

This is why I tend to use "terror tale" rather than "horror"... because horror has, for most of the last century, been debased into something relying on the lowest common-denominator: our fear of physical injury or death. Whereas earlier writers such as Bierce could use such, they usually used it as a means to address the much more terrifying idea of psychic damage or displacement... something which rips away the illusions we hold so dear and makes us realize that our view of reality is a pitifully inadequate hodgepodge, which we use to shield us from the truth of life and our position in the universe. Now, it has come closer and closer to the sort of meretricious "pornography of violence" so criticized in many of the pulps and earlier comic books... and rightly so, to a large degree. Where I do use the term "horror", it is because of the recognition that that is the umbrella term used these days, to cover all sorts of things, from what can also be called "dark fantasy" to "splatterpunk" to the ethereal nightmares of Ligotti, to such things as "Silence -- A Fable", by Poe.

Frankly, though, I'd say "dark fantasy" began as a marketing ploy, and has gradually taken on a life of its own, as people began to write stories that they thought were in that vein... a vein that, originally, didn't really exist as a separate thing; it wasn't even as distinct as the Gothic was when it began... and that became rather a confused grouping of tales itself, from the "explained Gothic" to the "supernatural Gothic" to the "New Gothic" to "American Gothic" to....

But "dark fantasy" remains, I'd say, a term that has never had its parameters defined; therefore I'd say it still remains a subset of horror, which itself is a subset of fantasy (when it involves any supernatural or preternatural phenomena). We've yet to have a Burke or Radcliffe to give some sort of genuine theoretical structure to this little offshoot, while the entire concept of "the weird tale" has itself become so jumbled and confused that, at this point, labels used for marketing is really all these things can be.....