Two of the incidents upon which he lingers at what would have to be called disproportionate length, if he were less forthright about not pretending to seek balance, involve horror stories of meanness and incompetence.
You never turn your head away from a Caravaggio piece no matter how brutal it is because there's such a balance of horror, of unsightly bodies and violent scenes, with such great beauty.
Working with material based on actual events and with characters who really existed and had to balance the horror of living under the shadow of the Nazis with conducting their own lives has given the director a new lease on life.
Sikov, the author of books on Billy Wilder and American film comedy, takes care to balance the horror stories with testimony from those who loved Sellers and loved working with him, and a book that could have been sensational is fair and thorough.
One of the strongest aspects of "American Horror Story" is its delicate balance of horror and humanity, its ability to showcase the ugliest, most depraved depths of characters whom we learn to love and accept for their flaws.
More probably, acclaim would be balanced by horror.
No, the real reason you want Mayer on your team for that last big roundup is that he has perfect pitch for such events -- an eye for the weird majesty of destruction, a vocabulary well stocked with superlatives, a tone exactly balanced between horror and grandeur.
Shearman and Pearson felt that the episode suffered from its attempt to balance comedy and horror, "not having enough comedy to explore the premise properly, and not enough suspense to provide much drama".
But I'm not writing here to balance all this horror with words of hope or counterweight these terrible things with the avoirdupois of the progress we have made.
It hung off the badger like a separate animal". With even as little actual action as there is here, the idea of what has already happened, and what will soon happen again, alights its pain almost even more sickeningly than if shown directly, leaving the reader hung in the balance between moral horror and putrefaction.
