摘要: While there is some dissent about the parameters of horror, there is agreement among fans and theorists alike that the function of the genre is to (aim to) arouse the affect of horror, an emotion which the theorist Noël Carroll had described as a combination of fear and disgust. 1 Frequently, this affect is achieved through inexplicable terrors, such as supernatural monsters. 2 But while these nightmares may be expressed in the manifestation of the monstrous, they are purposefully encoded to express and arouse the anxieties and concerns of the age. 3 These include broader concerns such as the battle between good and evil, fears of losing one’s soul or succumbing to evil, and the impossibility of justice and what justice would look like. A common trope in the genre is the failure of authority in response to horrors. Protagonists are frequently confronted with this failure in the form of an inability by characters or institutions in authority to adequately respond, prevent, protect, or believe, or worse, authorities that create, exacerbate, or enable wrongs. This failure in response to supernatural threats expresses and encodes broader anxieties about the failure to respond to real ones. In horror, then, lies exquisite terrain for analyses of complicity—and its monstrous capacities. Although in Stephen King’s IT, Pennywise the evil, supernatural monster is the most obvious and fabulous villain, a great deal of the horror of IT lies in the representation of the complicity of the townspeople of Derry. IT illuminates the ways in which evil flourishes because the bystanders around the perpetrator fail to intervene and therefore are part of a conspiracy of silence. IT offers a …