Emotional responses to horror

Semley, at Baffler: "Here we knock into elevated horror's biggest insult to the genre. These films cast implicit aspersions on the horror's baser appeal. And not just the jump scares, gore, and promise of co-eds going full frontal. In their heavy psychologizing, and insistence upon their sophistication, they take for that granted terror, anxiety, and disgust are insufficient emotional responses. But a truly effective scare or gnarly gross-out is more difficult to put across the screen convincingly than some Psych 101 bunk about grief. Elevated horror's recourse to "the real" diminishes the genre's power, which has always fed on fear of the fantastic, the unknown, the unreal, and given it form in all the omnifarious creatures, creeps, ghouls, and brutes that go bump in the night. Horror's ability to terrify is its art."