62. THE HORROR - Is It Rational To Enjoy Scaring Ourselves?
It’s been a scary week, not least because as I write this it is Halloween and ever since I was a kid I have endeavoured to observe this spooky time of year by over-indulging on horror films and scary stories. Each Halloween I read at least one short story by Lovecraft, Poe, James and King and ensure I end the night with at least one scary movie. As it is often half term in the week before - as it has been this year - the annual observances tend to bleed out into the preceding week. This year I watched several scary movies in the lead up to the day itself, and read Michelle Paver’s chilling “Dark Matter” to pass the time.
But it hasn’t just been the manufactured horror of Halloween that’s made this a week to be scared. It began with the shock of discovering my boss - a relatively young man of 57 - had died suddenly and completely unexpectedly of a heart attack the first day of the autumn break. Any time death darkens our lives we are reminded of how fragile existence is. He died on the Saturday. The day before we had been joking about the US election and discussing student politics at our school training day. The idea that this man who seemed so alive twenty four hours before was now gone felt like the wheels had come off reality. Or rather that the wheels had been off all the days before - pretending the world was fine and lives might go on forever when, in fact, the reality was far more tenuous: we could all go at any second.
The thought has been on many of our minds this year more than most. Since March we have been told there is a deadly virus spreading throughout the population. A virus with a terrible unpredictability about it. You might find it to be simply a bad cough and a few days in bed. On the other hand - it might just kill you, or your loved ones. In fact, you can have it and not even have any symptoms, then give it to someone you love who might lose their life to it simply because you got too close to them at the wrong time.
Personally, with a father who died at 59, much like my boss, suddenly, without any warning, in my father’s case at a conference for his work, but both after months of stress trying to carry out the person-affecting policies of inept governments in their separate domains of the public sector (dad, libraries; my boss, of course, schools), and a mother dead at 61 after a terminal cancer whose name we had never heard of and which had no cure just a few years after my dad, the fragility of life - and the real life horror of how easily it can be lost - has been something I have been battling with for a decade now. With my dad dying two weeks before I began training to be a teacher, the spectre of death has been in the background of my career in education.
And so, as I curl up with another scary story and find myself predictably sleepless later on, trembling at familiar creaks made new, and far more sinister, by the unsettling images now in my head, I wonder: with horror so real and ever-possible why do we indulge in the self-harm of scaring ourselves intentionally, at Halloween or any other time?
The first obvious response is that when we choose to scare ourselves we claw back control from the completely out of control reality of genuine fear. We may not know exactly when in the horror film the scare will come, or which bit of the book will linger in our mind’s eye once the lights go out, but we do know when we switch the film on or pick the book up that we are letting ourselves in for a scare, so we are in control of that experience. When the phone rang and a stranger’s voice told me my father was dead, when my mother called from the hospital, or when I opened up an email from the Deputy Head of my school and read its tragic news, I was not expecting the shock and was not ready to receive it. When the jumpscare in the slasher film has me throw my popcorn into the air, my body was primed to be terrified and the shock is a thrill instead of a gut-punch.
I may not know when I will die, or when a loved one will die, but I know that between the covers of this Stephen King book, in a controlled and structured way, some terrible things are going to happen. And I can always close the book and do something else if it gets too much.
As well as the aspect of control, horror as a genre gives us a means to speak about the unspeakable. During the four year period where my father, my mother, my grandmother and my cat died, I was all-too aware that people in our society do not like to talk about death or illness. My wife and I used to joke that we were “The Grimms” whenever we went to a social event throughout that time. The innocent question of “how have you been?” either requiring us to lie or give details about the latest terrible thing to have happened and watch as our friend soon sought conversation elsewhere where the mood was lighter. We don’t like to dwell on grim realities as humans (see how desperate everyone is during this pandemic to get us all “back to normal” or try to pretend everything isn’t as awful as it actually is). But horror allows us to dwell on it in a safe, abstract and removed way. Watching from a distance, through metaphor and fiction, and sharing common fears in a way that is entertaining rather than depressing.
Consider some of the commons tropes of the genre, and what they are really about:
The stalking slasher: the unknown and unrelenting assailant acts as a stand in for whatever terror won’t leave us in peace, be it the very literal fear of a home invasion or murderer ending our lives, or whatever keeps us up at night unable to rest because it is “out there still”. These films are a double-edged sword of allegory as, in most, our hero somehow survives where other victims have fallen, defeating the monster by the movie’s end and reminding us that even the unrelenting dread of being stalked can come to and end and you can be victorious. However, due to the desire to make money and the allure of the franchise, the monster tends to keep coming back, sequel after sequel, itself a reminder that worries don’t just magically disappear. That sometimes, even with a lot of work done, the problem/anxiety/threat will come back for one more scream.
The monster movie: here we see a confrontation with the limits of our knowledge and sanity. A creature we cannot believe exists attacking us, representing both conventional xenophobic myths of the “other” and the more theological idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our (rational) philosophies. The monster’s existence forces us face to face with the recognition that there is more to our understanding of the world than we knew there to be, whether this be supernatural legend or Lovecraftian “ancient ones”. This is not to be confused with:
The transformation movie: sometimes the monster is the main character, a werewolf’s bite or interaction with a cursed artefact or alien ooze making them become something terrible. Here we grapple with the idea that we can change, maybe even do horrible things we didn’t know we were capable of. That there may be sides to our personality we do not want to acknowledge and hope may never materialise, but are there, lurking beneath the surface, potentially ready to erupt at any moment when given the right catalyst. And then there is that special category of transformation movie:
The body horror: here the transformation is not into a monster, but into something inhuman. The fly in the teleportation machine, the growing brood sacks hanging from our belly, the teeth where teeth shouldn’t be. Our worst medical fears are brought to life with the obvious metaphor being cancer: something growing that is killing us, eating us from within. Often such horrors are the result of meddling with something - ancient evils, alien technology, or scientific experiments - that we shouldn’t, communicating another common fear: that we may bring such physical destruction onto ourselves. Death by accident, death by being exposed to something we shouldn’t be at work, death by misadventure. Death tinged with regret: why did I do that thing? The heart failure from years of bad eating, the cancer your cigarette packets told you would be the result of your smoking. Why didn’t I listen to the warnings?
The curse: a similar manifestation of our fear of doing something wrong is found in tales of cursed buildings, cursed objects or simply curses placed on individuals. The classic haunted house tale is as much dealing with our fear of investing the largest amount of money most of us will ever have access to into something that becomes so obviously a mistake as it is about the spirits of the dead. The wishes made on the monkey’s paw that bring us only misery remind us that we need to be careful what we wish for, and the puzzle box which opens up a gateway to hell is a stark warning that we should think twice before we buy even that which our heart desires.
The ghost story: and then there is how we deal with death. Hauntings. Ghosts. The restless dead. These stories are always about grief - the sense of sorrow and melancholy intruding into the previously normal world. Glimpses in the shadows of someone we miss. Fear of the history of places and the dead who once walked where we now live. A confrontation with our own mortality and worry that there is no happy heaven at the end, only entrapment in the routines of an unsatisfactory life. Note most ghost stories have a sense of psychological distortion about them too. Not merely questioning one’s own sanity at what we have seen, but often a physical malevolence manifesting as a disruption of time and place within the narrative. Death has an impact on a person living with it. Death throws everything off kilter. And in the background always the same threat: does the evil ghost win by making us join them in death? Do we wish for death ourselves to join a loved one forever? The ghost story is about all the manifold aspects of grief and grieving, as well as the thin thread of our sanity which feels so tenuous when mourning.
The horror of madness: because sanity is something we value and yet we know some of us have gone insane before and not even recognised they had lost grip with reality, these horror stories explore the possibility that one might have lost their mind and not even know it. We play with the idea of how easy it might be to have no idea that we are quite, quite mad.
Demons and possession: likewise, we also know seemingly good people sometimes snap and do such terrible things. The idea that their doing so is a rational choice is far harder to come to terms with than the idea some evil entity entered them and made them do it, and yet that also leaves the door open for our own possession or temptation towards evil one day. Obviously the more religious might even believe in the genuine possibility of such things, but from a secular mythology the metaphor of demons and possession is a reminder that we must always be vigilant towards things which might make us cause harm to others, be they venal desires or uncontrollable mental illnesses.
Zombies: a distinct kind of monster and my own personal worst fear. The manifestation of unthinking human ignorance. A lumbering, or sprinting, creature with no real backstory, no real purpose other than to kill you, and with which you cannot reason. On the one hand, they represent the threat of contagion and virus - a bite and you’re dead; and may end up biting and infecting your loved ones - but for me it is the idea (like a virus) that you cannot talk your way out of it with a zombie, you cannot negotiate, nor can you ever understand what motivates them because they themselves don’t even know. They are just pure, driven, infection and death. But they are also the unthinking fellow humans we share our real lives with, whose instinctive, unthinking actions or acceptance of questionable norms lead us ever closer to catastrophe without them knowing, or caring, about the damage they do.
The uncanny: in this kind of movie or story things just seem “off” and we deal with the possibility that everyone else knows something we don’t about the world. That there is some massive conspiracy we are unaware of and we are finally getting a glimpse behind the curtain. According to studies, most people in any job experience what is known as “imposter syndrome” - the idea that they shouldn’t have got the job they have and will be found out soon to be incompetent or a fraud by the others at their workplace far more competent and qualified than they are. And of course, as children we are literally all having to learn how the world works and being initiated, consciously and unconsciously, into the norms of our society. These films play with the idea that there really is an answer out there that others have but we do not.
There are many more but each type of horror has at its heart safe and controlled experimentation with deep-seated human fears, allowing us to confront these core terrors - death, illness, transformation, being hurt or hurting others, losing our minds, failure, etc. - in a manageable way and enabling us to speak about these horrible things through imagery and imagination which makes it socially acceptable to do so.
As I wrote this there was a news alert on my phone. Sean Connery has died. I hope his family were prepared. Life is fragile and horror allows us to confront that fragility and make peace with it, making it perfectly rational to enjoy scaring ourselves. It is more irrational, in fact, not to, and to simply wait for the real shocks of actual existence to leap from the shadows where they inevitably lurk. The enduring place of the scary story in human culture (the pinnacle of which is, of course, the stories of religion, with their depictions, and threat, of hell or vengeful gods) shows the important role that playing with our worst fears has in maintaining our wellbeing. They are not for every day (which is why some religious ideas can be so harmful, as they embed the mind with these manufactured terrors to the point that they take on a sense of reality) but when used effectively, and sparingly, say for a week or so towards the end of October, they can enable us to explore the darkness of what it means to be alive without dragging us completely into the abyss, better preparing us for the next time we get that phone-call, that email, that knock on the door which will once again throw our sense of reality into turmoil.
Author: DaN McKee
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