Used POE for the answer choice D since I didn't know what that means.
Macabre - something horrifying
figurative - out of scope
articulate - out of scope
contrived - fake

didn't like all the choices. So D.

Yes, you can do process of elimination, but contrapuntal has the key prefix, CONTRA, in it. Contra often means against, like opposites.

Please change tag, since this is a MGRE question.

My explanation on solving this question -
The sentence 'Evoking both horror and joy' means that it puts the audience in an ambivalent position (Mixed feelings), the blank is before the word 'technique' meaning that we have to select the adjective for the technique -
Options 1 -
macabre - I knew means gruesome. (N/A)
figurative - Metaphoric (Does not make sense)
articulate - Means fluent and comprehensible (Which is the opposite)
contrapuntal - Do not know what that means
contrived - Remorseful

Since none of the words I know can be plugged in here, right answer is contrapuntal.

Iterating briefly through each option, this was my mental process:
a. Macabre -- gruesome or morbid. Not quite; the piece has an element of horror but also of joy.
b. figurative -- not literal or used as a hypothetical in an analogy. Nope.
c. articulate -- well-spoken. Nah.
d. contrapuntal -- no exact idea what this meant but "contra-" is a clue that it may combine two opposites.
e. contrived -- come up with, usually out of nothing or without reason.

Hence, D.

Look for clues that give a sense of the structure and tone of the sentence. "Horror" and "Joy" are nearly opposite in meaning, so the word that goes in the blank should capture that tension. "Contrapuntal" is the only word that accomplishes that task.

Be careful of the shiny object--"horror" and "macabre" are similar in meaning, but we're not looking for a synonym for "horror".

Answer: D