Horror, Architecture and the Sublime

Source: Horror in Architecture
Joshua Comaroff and Ong Ker-Shing


An exploration of horror in the visual.  Often the horror aspect is achieved through the supplementary audio of soundtrack, or audio alone as in the old time radio suspense hour editions. Is it imperfection or the perfection of image that is seen as horrific?  The sublime and abject lie in the fantastical horror,  it is able to present the world as it might be by bringing to light evidence of things previously unseen.  The double, the perfect twin or clone identifies with the horrific, the mirror being the frequented fictional catalyst in many a horror fable.  The room left untouched and exactly as it was after it's inhabitants have departed becomes a double in that the possessions belong to another time, the domesticity a parody of itself, the objects becoming ghosts themselves, incontinent and hollow.

Repetition  follows the double closely, in the sense that there can only be one authentic original.  A street of perfectly duplicated houses comes to mind, Stepford Wives style.  As we move through such a place, time becomes redundant,  the street becomes a labyrinth with no landmarks, no beginning, no end.  Groundhog Day.  Place cannot exist convincingly without it's reference in time, without time, it becomes a void, somewhere lost in the laminal, like a dreamscape or nightmare, an abyss.