Verisimilitude
That’s a really big word I’ve grown fond of recently. If you distill its meaning, it stands for truth. Truth in reality. When you go deeper, it’s really a facade of truth. A reality created in a fictional universe that contains people, places, and things must have a sense of verisimilitude to appear believable, though the universe is actually a figment.
What’s interesting is that in order to achieve this oxymoron of fictional truth, you must use real human truths as a reference. There are the obvious truths: gravity, day and night, the general physical restrictions of the universe. But there’s also transcendence: God, the soul, love, hate. These are truths that are intangible, improvable, but also that have transcended time and space. Now, when you implement verisimilitude, you can alter one of these groups of truths, but not the other, and still achieve believability. For instance, you can get rid of gravity, but you must maintain emotion. This is one of the reasons Kubrick’s 2001 is so startling. Because the humans on the ship are becoming like HAL, gaining a robotic sensibility. They aren’t human like us, they’re numb. But HAL seems to be quite human. So it becomes terrifying to watch them react to HAL’s antics through the film, because we have no anchor. That’s where horror comes into play. You must use verisimilitude to establish a foundation that later can be completely obliterated. When you take away the foundation is when fear begins to grow. But the truth must come first.
