Terror and horror in the past

The concept of terror and horror is born from the idea of fear. In the opinion of Freud is frightening an encounter with something that is felt as threatening by our balance and so understood as dangerous for our life. This something is often the unknown, in different forms (both mental and physical). Freud defins this fear “upsetting”: it is that something new that causes wariness and fear, because is other from us and from what we know.
Later the generally fear has been divided in two kinds: terror and horror. Terror is more mental and is a fear that stimulates the person and makes him react; horror, instead, is more physiological and is a fear that annihilates and paralyses the person, making him unable to react.

The english writer Ann Radcliffe was the first one to define this distinction: in her opinion terror was carachterised by “obscurity” or indeterminacy, and it’s this one that leads to the sublime. She says that it “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”. Instead horror “freezes and nearly annihilates them”. She also thought that neither Shakespeare nor Burke looked to positive horror as a source of the sublime, even if they believed that terror was it, giving to horror a meaning more negative.
The indian man of letters Devendra Varma wrote that “the difference between Terror and Horror is the difference between awful apprehension and sickening realization: between the smell of death and stumbling against a corpse”.