This article explores the aesthetic distance between horror films and their viewers by reconsidering the philosophical problem, the ‘paradox of fiction/horror’. Referring to Kendall Walton’s theory, I argue that horror film viewing is a game of make-believe for survival in an unpredictable world, which is a motif of meta-cinematic slasher films. By examining Wes Craven’s Scream series, I show how the franchise, rather than maintaining the postmodern condition, accentuates active immersion in fiction for surviving a hyper-mediated society that operates like fiction, an allegory of our current image-society.
Junxian Cai (2026) studied this question.