"Powers of Horror"- an essay by Julia Kristeva

This essay addresses abjection which is about how viewers feel when watching horror. Abjection is the feeling where you feel fascinated about the horror but at the same time feeling disgusted by it. Kristeva was one of the first people to write about abjection.

"It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects".

This quote describes in detail the feeling you get watching gruesome events. She talks about how it worries you, a sickening feeling but fascinates desire at the same time. Horror is taking something out of the ordinary world and turning it to frighten others, which isn't what humans were made to do originally.

"Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck. The shame of compromise, of being in the middle of treachery. The fascinated start that leads me to toward and separates me from them".

This quote describes how the disgusted feeling is like in your mind and body which is not pleasant, but at the same time the horror leads you towards it. Love/hate relationship.

"Food loathing is perhaps the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection. When the eyes see or the lips touch that skin on the surface of milk- harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring- I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire. Along with sight-clouding dizziness, nausea makes me balk at that milk cream".

This quote is a very graphic and visual description of how you feel watching horror linked with food, and the reason why it makes people feel so disgusted is because horrors show these scenes in such detail and audiences can thoroughly imagine the feeling of these things being inside us. These feelings are described in this quote, eg. gagging.