Fear Transcoding: A Comparative Study of True Crime Narratives and Fictional Horror Films
In the risk society and digital media, fear has become a flourishing cultural consumption. Comparing true crime narratives with horror films, this study integrates narratology, cultural studies, and terror management theory across five dimensions: fear sources, narrative logic, construction of security, audience contracts, and media-sensory experience. Horror translates premodern and posthuman anxieties into supernatural others by symbolic encoding, achieving ritualized purification; true crime confronts modernity’s systemic crises by documentary encoding, eliciting risk alertness through open endings. The two are complementary, transcoding fear from “supernatural mystery” to “social pathology.”
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