“For the love of God, Montresor!”
What was the first horror story? Man’s desire to tell tales throughout the course of history, combined with an innate fear of the unknown, has left us with countless terrifying stories passed down through generations, but where can we begin to pin down a definition of horror as a distinct genre? Because this is a paid article, I’m not going to delve too deeply into the Aristotelian basis for any of what I plan to present before you; instead, I’ll be pitching my ideas exactly like I would in basic conversation. This could have manifested in a Socratic dialogue at one point, but I thought I’d spare all of you from trying to parse down some high-concept ridiculousness into the basic arguments and give them straight away. Another thing to note is that regardless of the number of matter-of-fact statements I make in this piece, it’s still all merely based on opinion. If anyone disagrees about how I define the genre, or agrees but thinks I have drawn the lines in the wrong places, that’s totally okay! I welcome disagreement.
The earliest popular candidate for “the first horror story” in the modern mind is Pliny the Younger’s tale of Athenodorus Cananites and his haunted house. The full letter1 concerns Pliny broaching the subject of the existence and nature of ghosts with the consul Lucius Licinius Sura during a period of downtime for the latter. First he recounts a short tale of Curtius Rufus’ premonition of a woman who predicted his prosperity and sudden end, next is Athenodorus’, and one final he attributes to his freedman Marcus. The middle of these is by far the longest and most intriguing: the stoic philosopher Athenodorus purchased a house in Athens that nobody else would dare to inhabit due to the sound of rattling chains in the night that accompanied an apparition of an old man. Instead of fearing the ghost like prior residents, Athenodorus investigated the phenomenon by following its footsteps, finally marking a place in the ground where it stopped. He advised the magistrates to dig there the day after, and they discovered an improperly buried skeleton. With the body having been properly interred, the house was no longer haunted. Why is this not a horror story? Put simply, it’s not a story. Pliny presents this as a historical account; we cannot discuss what category of fiction something belongs in if it’s a work of nonfiction. Atlantis “truthers” would be wise to heed this. Any works of mythology also fall into this problem whether we believe them or not. Other stories presented as fact like the book of revelation or the adventures of Perseus or Theseus would also fail under this criterion.
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