There is a large qualitative difference between fear and horror. Fear is a surface emotion, or so it feels to me. Horror is many dimensional, complex, rich. It is unpleasant, but still interesting–I suppose like a car accident.
And I feel horror very much represents the involvement of the gut, of very primal, very primitive nerve impulses. What you do you feel, when you are “frozen” with fear? What is that dream, where you try to run but you can’t? I think horror is an activation of the unmyelinated vagus nerve system, which is suppressive, which works to slow things down, with the logical end state being complete immobility, complete paralysis.
And I will speculate again that the popularity of horror films must have something to do with a felt sense that something is missing, that some part of the process of living is going unexpressed. We do not encounter primal terror in our ordinary lives, most of the time.
Think to farmers: they regularly slaughter animals. Hunters kill because they enjoy it. And in my experience, most of those people are very relaxed.
Being able to process horror and being able to process trauma are in my view the same thing. It seems likely one could view some spiritual practices–especially Tantric practices–in this light. I have in mind things like meditating in cremation grounds and smearing human ashes on yourself, and keeping human bones around as relics.
My task, I think, is to maintain contact with this energy while ;progressively diluting it by combining it with ordinary energies, with daily life, by staying with it and functioning, not allowing it to slow me down. I think I can do this. It’s not easy, but few things worth anything are.