Horror cinema has a long history of affecting spectators in profound and often unsettling ways. Its impact is often catalysed in the way it produces a reluctant bodily response for a viewer. While an intellectual consideration of its content may shock and unnerve, there is also often a coincident corporeal action on the spectator; this sometimes emerges in involuntary somatic responses, such as the startle or the freeze, or the capacity to nauseate the viewer. But is this response truly coincident? Or is there something fundamental in the coalescence of our bodily experience of sound and image that requires that we reassess arguments regarding horror spectatorship that understand this somatic response as a simple parallel to semantic appraisal?

A range of scholarly approaches, many drawn from film scholarship more broadly, have been employed to attempt to fully comprehend and interrogate the intensity of the spectatorial experience of horror cinema. These frameworks have necessarily evolved over time: as the nature of the approach of horror films has changed, so too has the nature of the analysis required to understand it. A cornerstone text in the discourse of horror, Noël Carroll’s The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart, attempts to articulate the underlying premises of horror through a philosophical investigation into horror's paradoxical appeal. This seminal treatise on horror's genesis, function and capacities underpins many early theoretical approaches to the genre. In the work, Carroll first separates ‘art-horror’ from horror, specifying the latter as the outcome of real-world effects. His ‘art-horror’ requires that an audience evaluate the central monster for two particular components: its potential threat and its impurity. Carroll contends that if either element is missing, the evaluation will be incomplete; a monster without impurity generates only fear, whereas a monster without threat produces only disgust.

Building upon Mary Douglas's classic study, Purity and Danger, Carroll infers that the impurity present in horror emerges from what Douglas defined as ‘the transgression or violation of schemes of cultural categorisation’.