Can disgust be a key component of horror?
The feeling of disgust is often used in horrors, exspecially visual medias (where is arguably easier to shock the audience with great effect). Often horror stories revolve around one scary element (a villain; a monster; a disease) that carries along a lot of repulsive traits.
The alien in Alien is slimey and it drools a lot; the ambience in Silent hill movies and games presents often narrow corridors, covered in filth; in Stephen King's Insomnia the protagonist has to explore the crampled, dirty nest of the main antagonist, and so on.
Disgusting elements often leverage our natural instinct; e.g. I remembered reading that seeing internal organs up close evokes repulsion since evolution has thaught us that it's not good if those things get out of your body.
This said, is disgust - rather than fear - enough to be used in an horror story?
Probably some genres of horror have a higher component of repulsive elements (I'm thinking of body horror), but my question holds.
2 answers
As a component of "horror" it has a role to play - and it can be quite effective. On it's own? No.
Seeing internal organs up close can as you say invoke a disgust/repulsion response. But context will determine whether we are likely to have a horrified response as well.
A dish in an operating theater containing say an appendix that has been removed in an appendectomy could reasonably trigger some disgust. But it's not horrifying in of itself - the organ has been removed but we know that it's likely to be as a result of a relatively routine medical procedure.
Finding the same organ in a chipped bowl on the floor of a dingy bathroom spattered with blood however is likely to be both disgusting and horrifying - because we know that not only objectively is performing surgery in that sort of environment inherently more dangerous to the subject but it's also something that heavily implies it was done under some pretty worrying circumstances.
Essentially disgust can be viewed as a spice - you add it to your horror scene to alter/enhance the flavor, but you can't just put a load of it on a plate and call it dinner.
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TL;DR:
* Fear (or equivalent shock) followed by disgust -> horror
* disgust alone -> disgust
A significant effort in analyzing the concepts of horror, terror and sublime times back to the XIX century. From what I recall, they are connected to a sense of fright and fear, with horror being the disgust felt after a deep a profound scare.
That being said, the mere sight of a slimy pond of garbage, while disgusting, may not be enough to cast a sense of horror in the onlooker. On the other hand, if an arm stretched out of the pond of garbage mentioned above, barely missing to grab a character in your story, and if the character was utterly frightened by the experience, then the sense of revulsion would be what we call horror.
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