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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...
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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/43911 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
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.