The Sublime In Edmund Burke's Night Of The Living Dead

You dash through a misty, decrepit graveyard. A shambling figure, adorned in a tattered, dirty suit, is stalking you. Despite your haste and his seeming patience, you trip on a headstone, and he catches up with you. This would mean your end, but you are grinning. That is because you are not really in a graveyard being assaulted by the undead. Rather, you are in a movie theater, and it is a character on the screen who is about to be devoured. The film is so enthralling, you almost feel as though you are the unfortunate soul on the screen. The above describes the experience countless individuals have enjoyed by viewing George A. Romero’s horror classic Night of the Living Dead, which happens to be an experience that is better understood after a consideration of Edmund Burke’s writing on the sublime.

To begin, he illustrates the notion of the sublime and writes, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible . . . is a source of the sublime” (459). To further delineate the sublime, he states that it is antithetical to the beautiful similar to how black is antithetical to white; just as with black and white, the sublime and the beautiful may be intermingled, but each is most potent when it is pure. Moreover, Burke clarifies that the sublime tends to be large and unpolished whereas the beautiful tends to be small and refined. Additionally, he contends that one may derive pleasure from the sublime through aesthetic distance, which is accomplished through artistic representation; for instance, one can approximate firsthand experience with the sublime by viewing a realistic painting of a ship in a violent storm instead of actually sailing a vessel into a