10月31日是我们沉溺于所有恐怖事物的日子。孩子们在街上游荡，寻求美食，没有被斜眼的眼神、恶魔般的南瓜灯、塑料骷髅和其他万圣节用具吓倒。之后，当“不给糖就捣蛋”的人不再来了，孩子们都躲在床上，大人们可能会坐下来看一部恐怖电影来庆祝。

Horror movies aren’t the same as scary movies. The plots of scary movies are riddled with physical danger.Silence of the Lambsis unquestionably a scary movie, but it’s not a horror movie. Fear morphs into horror only when it’s supplemented by an element that I callmetaphysical threat. Metaphysically threatening things leave us with a deep, nightmarish sense of disorientation, driving home the unsettling idea that we can’t rely on the ordinary framework of assumptions that give us a sense of security.

The British horror writer Arthur Machen captured the essence of metaphysical threat perfectly in his novel灵魂之屋。“What would your feelings be,” a character asks, “… if your cat or your dog began to talk to you, and to dispute with you in human accents?” He continues, “You would be overwhelmed with horror. I am sure of it. And if the roses in your garden sang a weird song, you would go mad. And suppose the stones in the road began to swell and grow before your eyes, and if the pebble that you noticed at night had shot out stony blossoms in the morning?”

The philosopher Noël Carroll points out in his bookThe Philosophy of Horrorthatwhen metaphysical threat (or, as he calls it, “cognitive threat”) is combined with physical threat, something monstrous emerges. Monsters have got to be physically menacing—a monster that can’t or won’t hurt anyone isn’t a monster at all. But simply being dangerous in that way doesn’t distinguish monsters from other threatening entities, like grizzly bears and serial killers. Horrific monsters have got to be metaphysically threatening too.

What gives monsters their metaphysically ominous aura is that they are fusions of incompatible kinds of things, and therefore do violence to our conceptions of the natural order. Like Machen’s singing roses—which are an unsettling combination of the human (singing) and the botanical—monsters transgress the boundaries of what philosophers call natural kinds. For example, some of them (zombies) are alive and deadat the same time. Others, for example werewolves, are human/animal fusions. Chucky, fromChild’s Play, is an animate doll. All of these entities, and others from horror fiction, are both dangerous (in fact, deadly) and also unnatural.

We enjoy horror flicks because we know the horror isn’t real. The monsters are all make-believe monsters. But the idea that there are real monsters was and is regarded by many people with deadly seriousness, and not just by those who are shrouded in superstition. These aren’t monsters like Freddie Kruger, Count Dracula, and their ilk, but they’re monsters nonetheless.

I’m talking here about dehumanized people—members of oppressed and marginalized groups who are regarded by their tormentors as subhuman creatures. And when dehumanized people are seen as physically threatening, the stage is set for morphing them into monsters. In Nazi discourse, Jews were described not only asUntermenschen(subhumans), they were also portrayed as irredeemably destructive. Consequently, anti-Semitic propaganda from the Third Reich often reads like a horror narrative. For example, a widely circulated 1942 booklet published by Hitler’s SS entitledThe Subhumanstates:

这个次等人类憎恨所有人类创造的东西。这个次等人类一直憎恨人类，并一直暗中寻求使人类堕落....次人在混乱和黑暗中茁壮成长，他害怕光明。这些次等人类生物住在粪坑和沼泽里，比起阳光，他们更喜欢人间地狱....次等人类部落会不惜一切代价颠覆光和知识的世界，给所有人类的进步和成就带来天启。他们唯一的目标是把任何一个国家或种族变成一片沙漠荒原，让他们闪耀着创造力、善良和美。

Similarly, during the Jim Crow era many racist Whites imagined Black men to be predatory beasts that were hell-bent on rape and murder, and routinely described them as fiends and monsters. In Thomas Dixon’s novelThe Clansman(on which the notoriouslyracist 1915 filmThe Birth of a Nationwas adapted) Gus, a former slave who rapes a white woman, is described as a monstrous creature. He has “gleaming apelike” eyes and his “thin spindle-shanks supported an oblong, protruding stomach, resembling an elderly monkey’s, which seemed so heavy it swayed his back to carry it. The animal vivacity of his small eyes and the flexibility of his eyebrows, which he worked up and down rapidly with every change of countenance, expressed his eager desires.” When he approached his victim, his “thick lips were drawn upward in an ugly leer and his sinister bead eyes gleamed like a gorilla’s. A single fierce leap and the black claws clutched the air slowly as if sinking into the soft white throat.” More recently, the characterization of Latinx migrants not only as rapists and murderers, but also as blood-thirsty animals, is headed in the same disturbing direction.

We all know where these images lead. They lead to the living hell of Auschwitz, to the unimaginably cruel and gruesome spectacle of lynching, and now to the detention centers that deface the American landscape.

这不是电影恐怖片，也不是万圣节的游戏恐怖片。This isrealhorror.