I respect your opinion, you are clearly a scholar of the genre. Please indulge me if I seem to stray off topic in responding.
Critics have tried to characterise the experience of horror as being divisible into different categories; revulsion is an emotional state that is instinctively evoked by a class of visual images (usually having to do with death and decay).
Terror must be evoked more subtlely; the frightening thing is not shown, but is suggested; the reader fills in the details themself.
I think all fear responses are on a continuum, not seperate things. Unease is at the low intensity end, shuddering horror at the other. Because the written word takes time to process the fear is always at some remove; you know you are not under any threat. When you watch a horror movie, rationally you know the threat isn't real, but because you are seeing an image there is not the same barrier there.
Language devices like onomatopoeia etc may be nice tricks with words but they can't deepen a fear experience. You could read a beautifully crafted story about being run down by a car. The writer could spend a long time describing the sensory reality, creating a mood of impending doom etc. None of would be as scary as stepping into the road and narrowly avoiding being hit by a car.
Interesting and thoughtful post... but I do have some argument with some of your thoughts here. First:
all human emotion is part of a continuum, which is why we almost never experience a single pure emotion, but it is nearly always mixed and mingled with many others. As for repulsion -- though having an element of fear in its makeup (especially when dealing with images of or contact with death, the dead, decay, etc., as on some level we know -- though we reject on a basic emotional level -- this is how we too will someday be), it is much more allied to repugnance and disgust, much less with fear and terror. This, too, is why there is a strong distinction between horror and terror: one deals much more with the physical end of the scale, while the other deals with the emotional/spiritual (I'm using the term in its psychological, rather than religious, sense, here). To paraphrase Varma: One is catching the whiff of death, the other is stumbling upon a corpse.
(Parenthetically, I've had the experience of "stumbling" upon, or discovering, a corpse, and I'd say this is true. While I had nightmares about it for some time afterward, this was because of the repulsion, disgust, and sheer nastiness of it -- mixed with pity and grief, as I'd known this person, not well, but known him for some months; it was horrific, but not terrific, it didn't "scare" me more than momentarily, nor did it give me the feeling of a violation of what I understood as reality, which is what truly lies at the base of genuine fear. That which is unknown, or which strikes a blow at our understanding of how the universe works on an emotional as well as intellectual level, is invariably more terrifying than anything which represents -- even symbolically -- a mere physical threat, or expansion or enhancement of such a threat, because while the latter threatens our physical existence -- something we all face at different times in our lives -- the former, on some level, threatens the integrity of our own identity by displacing our understanding of reality.)
As for the comment on onomatopoeia and such being "nice tricks" -- they are far more than that. Onomatopoeia perhaps especially, is much more powerful by its very nature, the very sound of the word having much to do with our conception of what it labels, therefore tying in much more intensely not only to our depiction of that thing, but its various layers of meaning for us. Therefore it is much, much more intense in its effect than any prosaic description could ever be, and often much more so than any visual image can be
on a sustained level. Something similar is at work with all the other techniques, because they do not have any single reading, but shift and flow (within certain limits), allowing for a more powerful and sustainable effect.
And, again parenthetically, your analogy of the story of being run down by a car... from someone who had such an experience (at a very young age: 5), no tale is going to capture that sensory experience completely; but I'd say that a skilled verbal description is going to be one hell of a lot more powerful than any visual image of such as far as recalling those feelings and experiences, and hitting at an emotional level of fear; while the visual images would evoke repulsion, disgust, and pity or horror.
(You know, for someone who feels he lives a rather secluded, quiet life, when I get into discussions like this and end up calling on my own experience, I've had some damn
bizarre things happen in my life!!!)
