Semiotics of Horror in the Artistic Works of Metal Album Covers in Perú: Semiótica del horror en las obras artísticas de portadas de álbumes de metal en el Perú

The fantastic is the battlefield of conflicts between the real and the impossible. However, the borders between nonfiction and fiction present different interactions through their historical development. Since the emergence of fantastic literature, horror has adopted the cries of its time and its history to present discontinuous entities against the continuity of the everyday. From the literary creation of the Castle of Otranto to the most current grindhouse cinematic experience (28 Days Later, Hostel, etc.), horror has acquired various aesthetics throughout history that never cease to express an ontology of the ominous (Hutchings 2009). Paraphrasing Marx (1972), we can say that the most fantastic expressions arise only in the midst of the richest concrete development, where a reality appears as a common and collectively shared element. In the words of Walter Benjamin (2008): "There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." (42) That is, despite their coexistence, the fantasy of horror and reality, the ugly and the beautiful, have opposite meanings and claims.