I got through Aristotle’s Poetics and actually enjoyed it. I’m surprised because the first time I tried it, I hated it. Hatred’s too strong, but I was confused and put off by it. In most editions, the text is fragmented and speckled with footnotes that all generally agree that we know very little about what the Philosopher was talking about. Lots of his examples of good or bad plays have been eaten by the unfeeling centuries. The Poetics, as a work, only exists as fifty percent of the original project. While it deals with tragedy and epic, the second half was about comedy. But that second half was also consumed by time. Frustratingly fragmented and fully obfuscating.

But there is an edition that fixes all that. Philip Freeman has translated Aristotle’s work into something readable. He uses bullet points, chapter headings, and section numbers to incarnate writing that was otherwise fairly formless. Wonderfully, Freeman leaves the Greek text on the left hand of the book and so, even with my rusty Greek, I was able to catch every fourth or fifth line and see how close he was translating. There’s a fair amount of paraphrasing, but I think it’s all in the good service of intelligibility. So, if you’ve been putting off the Poetics, this edition is here to help.

I need to write out just a few of my gleanings because I think Aristotle has helped me understand why I love horror as a genre. I don’t know many people who enjoy horror movies. And when people find out, I’m usually called upon to give a defense. “Who wants to be scared? You seem so normal. Why do you like that stuff?”

Usually, I ask them to define what sort of “stuff” they have in mind. Torture porn like the Saw movies? That’s not horror. That’s just gross. Slashers? I consider them as subgenre of thrillers. And you have to actually care about the characters for it to be horror (more on that in a minute) and in slashers, the victims are indistinguishable pin cushions or slabs of meat.

While comedy imitates (or portrays) people worse than we are, tragedy imitates a better sort of person than us (not morally better). Broadly speaking, that nice happy family that is innocent and undeserving of catastrophe – they’re an ideal. You don’t want them to blithely move into a haunted house or eaten by werewolves or stalked by psychos. You empathize with the characters, and you don’t want bad things to happen to good people. So why do I enjoy a genre in which bad things happen to good people?

Well, Aristotle says that we all take great pleasure in imitation. Poetics is, for Aristotle, the art of storytelling. It looks different in different media (music, dance, painting, poetry, etc.), but all the arts use their own distinct crafts to create imitation. Imitation is a representation (a re-presentation) of what you see in nature. Plato used imitation to describe artists and poets who imitate what they see and what they see is a shadow of their ideal forms. So, the sculpture creates a statue (an imitation twice removed) which is an imitation of a man (an imitation of the idea of “man”). For Aristotle, tragedy is an imitation of action – a good man falling from a high point in life to a life point.

That’s the shape of tragedy. That’s also the shape of horror. Tragedy represents a course of action that takes place in an exemplary person’s life and that course of action is always downward in the end. And here’s what Aristotle says is a crucial effect of tragedy: it evokes pity and fear. Pity as in “Oh no, those poor people!” Fear as in “This could pretty easily happen to me.” Why would anyone want to bring out these emotions?

Catharsis. For the person watching or reading a horror story, fear has a place to go. It can be channeled and directed. It can be purged from the system. My empathy muscles are exercised. I care for this innocent or worthy person, and it hurts me when they are punished or when they suffer. Aristotle says the best tragic character isn’t a goody two-shoes or a villain, but someone who’s in between. Their downfall or doom is triggered and sealed not because of their wickedness. It’s usually just because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. A good person makes a wrong turn and, bam, you have a tragedy.

Horror does that. It’s cathartic for me. I can’t get that from comedy or action or documentaries. And so, I go back for the delightful shiver and get spooked again and again. It’s horrible and wonderful. Horror is tragedy and that is the remedy.