Thinking through fear: Nistor's philosophy of the horror film

Why does anyone choose to watch a film that will frighten him?

The question looks banal, but there is a contradiction inside it. Avoiding pain is the most basic tendency of anything alive. And fear is not an agreeable emotion — it quickens the heart, tightens the muscles, sets off the urge to run.

Yet millions of people pay for a ticket in order to be frightened.

Iulia Nistor's new book starts from that paradox. Published in May 2026 by the German house transcript Verlag, it treats horror cinema not as a study in genre but as a field of philosophical thought.

A genre on the edge of aesthetics#

For a long time horror cinema counted in the academy as a second-class subject. Aesthetic theory worked to preserve the distinction between "high art" and the popular genre.

That has changed over the past thirty years. Noël Carroll's The Philosophy of Horror, published in 1990, showed that horror could be taken seriously in philosophical terms. The "paradox of horror" that Carroll posed — how can a fictional monster genuinely frighten anyone? — has shaped every argument since.

Nistor's contribution is not to continue that tradition but to widen its scope. Rather than tying herself to a single theoretical frame, she approaches fear from a number of philosophical traditions.

Four concepts#

Catharsis#

The oldest explanation comes from Aristotle. In the Poetics he says that tragedy arouses pity and fear in the spectator and brings about a purgation of those emotions.

The horror film can be read as the modern form of that model: fear undergone at a safe distance discharges real anxieties.

But the explanation has its limit. The cathartic model explains why the experience of fear is pleasurable; it does not explain what fear itself is.

The sublime#

The sublime of Kant's Critique of Judgement offers deeper ground.

For Kant, the sublime is the encounter with a magnitude that overwhelms us: the ocean in storm, the precipice, the endless sky. The encounter first produces a shock — the imagination cannot take it in. Then comes a strange pleasure: one recognises that one's own reason is able to think that crushing magnitude.

The structure of the horror film is much the same. The spectator meets a threat he cannot comprehend; but he is safe in his seat. The shock and the safety are there at once.

The abject#

Julia Kristeva's notion of the abject accounts for the horror film's most disturbing moments.

For Kristeva the abject is neither subject nor object: it is what violates the boundary. The corpse, vomit, blood — these disgust us because they blur the line between the "I" and the "not-I".

Horror cinema makes that violation of the boundary visible. The body decomposing, the dead coming back to life, the human turning into an animal — all are instances of the same logic.

Existential anxiety#

The fourth leg of Nistor's framework rests on the distinction drawn by Heidegger and Kierkegaard: fear (Furcht) and anxiety (Angst) are not the same thing.

Fear has an object — the man with the knife, the monster, the noise in the dark. Anxiety has no object; it is the disquiet felt in the face of nothingness.

Here lies what marks out the best horror films. The film that shows you the monster frightens you; the film that makes you consider that the monster may not exist gives you anxiety. The second lasts a great deal longer.

A mirror held to society#

One of the book's important claims is that the horror genre keeps a record of the anxieties of its period.

The giant insects of the 1950s were nuclear fear. The exorcism films of the 1970s were the crisis of belief in a secularising society. The contagion narratives of the 2000s were globalisation's unease about infection.

Today we watch screens, cameras and artificial intelligence seeping into the horror film: fear of surveillance, fear of data, fear of one's own image moving independently of oneself.

Our recent piece on MatrAIx was the documentary counterpart of exactly that unease — the simulability of human behaviour.

Why read it#

This book belongs to the most fruitful kind of work bringing philosophy together with popular culture: it does not use films as illustrations of philosophy, it argues that films think for themselves.

The philosophy of cinema has been gaining ground in Turkey in recent years. In bringing together a theoretical framework for the horror genre not otherwise well represented in Turkish, Nistor's book is a candidate for translation as well.

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Publication details: Iulia Nistor · transcript Verlag, Bielefeld · 13 May 2026 · in English

Note: no Turkish translation has yet been announced.