“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."
You've been afraid of the dark before. Your door's open, and you're afraid of looking through the doorframe and find someone, or something, lurking in the hallway. You tuck your feet into your bedsheets so they're not exposed, you bury your face so you don't see those things which look like monsters in the darkness, and you don't turn to look at the window because that's where anything could stalk you, watch you sleep.
Horror is one of the oldest forms of storytelling that humanity shares. The oldest recorded horror story elements come from Homer, one of the more ancient Greek writers. You'll rarely find a culture without some sort of folktale that they either made or borrowed from someone else. Nowadays there are some things you'll find everywhere. The ghostly hitchhiker that kills you if you leave it stranded, and disappears after a couple of blocks if you pick it up, the specter that stayed on Earth because of unfinished business, a deal with a devil, a monster that kidnaps disobedient children. And these aren't limited to stories; the Lumière Brothers were the first to show a dancing skeleton in 1885. The next year, Georges Meliès took it upon himself to record the first https://youtu.be/mw8bzC33CGYactual horror film, a little over three minutes long, that manages to portray bats, witches, trolls, and many other elements.
These stories can be cautionary, sometimes carrying some sort of moral, like Edgar Allan Poe included in his best stories, or they can be made up just so kids keep their noses out of your stuff. There's something fascinating about the genre, though, as most people will be drawn into it by some deep-seated curiosity of the taboo and morbid that will pull anybody in, be it old, young, man, woman, brave or cowardly. The funny thing is that something different will scare each person, but that something different tends to be a manifestation of the unknown.
The fascinating thing about horror is that it tells us something about human nature, and what we're truly afraid of.
The origin of horror stories
The more notorious ideas in horror come from ancestral fears that humans have had to deal with. Different subgenres come from different things that we've had to deal with during more primitive phases of nomads and being hunted. This is why there are few horror movies in which the monster is a modern weapon like a gun or a rife, which can certainly be used, but in itself doesn't scare us much.
Take werewolves and vampires as an example. They're the manifestation of a fear of disease, as their bite is practically an STD, but then look at how they've been transformed into a sexual creature, and there you have the Victorian idea of purity and corruption.
Speaking of Victorian ideas of purity, another fascinating tale is that of the witch. A woman who signed a deal with the devil, she dances naked in the woods and performs rituals by blood sacrifice and satanic symbolism with her sisters. Mistreat her, and she'll curse you. Convene with her, and you shall be barred off from Heaven.
Perhaps you're afraid of ghosts. Where did they come from? Some say that in the last Ice Age, whenever a nomad died, his breath would leave his corpse, and that mist is what we thought were spirits. Maybe somebody heard his house settling in the evening, a door creaking, and finding nobody else, assumed that some disembodied soul moved things around while he was asleep, just to spite him, and invented the poltergeist.
There's a scientific theory that would explain why we see things out of the corner of our eyes at certain places. Vladimir Gavreau noticed one of his assistants bleeding out of his ears, and looking for the reason, tried holding vibrating metal pipes next to his (unaware) assistants' ears. Vibrating metal pipes with the right length and girth could cause some pretty nasty effects from mild discomfort to actual pain, and sounds between 7 to 19 Hz would induce dread and fear. They even tried blasting these vibrations at a crowd in a concert, and one out of five of the people in it felt fear they couldn't explain.
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| Pictured: The source of horror |
Anything that can cause these vibrations in nature tends to be big and powerful, which explains the fear. Make the frequency strong enough, and people will see things out of the corners of their eyes, sometimes even for minutes, as the vibrations are strong enough that eyeballs will be affected, even if you can't consciously feel it. If you go to a haunted house and are able to measure the vibrations, chances are that it'll be close to 19 Hz.
Ghosts can come to be simply from psychological factors, though. Take darkness, shadows, isolation, and a fear of it, and your mind turns vulnerable. Give them motivations, and you can even have empathetic characters, or make them forces of nature like the Japanese do and they become this unstoppable entity which will either haunt you or hunt you for the rest of your life. They certainly have earned their place in horror.
Another common fear is that of clowns, and this one exists since before Stephen King, so it's not something new either. This also goes into the fear of masks. I remember as a child watching Courage the Cowardly Dog, and the episode which most unsettled me was that of The Mask. There were uglier monsters on that show, but the fact that I couldn't see what was behind it meant that I couldn't even finish the episode because there was so much dread built in me that I felt sick.
That's a great part of it. You can't see what's behind the mask, or in the clown's case, the makeup. As a social animal, we depend on facial cues to know what a person's intentions are, otherwise, we're left blank, and a mask gives us this sensation of the uncanny valley: Something which seems close to human, but isn't quite so, which also taps into our aversion to abominations, which could be a reiteration of the fear of disease but more in the vein of "healthy people don't look like that". Leatherface and Jason Vorhees are both an excellent example of combining the fear of masks and of abominations.
Zombies are a more recent phenomenon. Although there have been tales of necromancers and mummies, their first true iteration was in Haiti where some people were believed to be dead and reincarnated as a mindless minion (instead of stoned out of their minds) by a voodoo witch. Frankenstein's monster is also a classic example of this, although he was an intelligent zombie. Scenarios involving the undead tend to involve apocalyptic scenarios, and that's where the psychological factor comes in: We're a society which sees frequent economic and humanitarian crises, and zombies are a metaphor for the economic and social breakdown of mankind. The fear of disease is still there, but the ramifications are different.
Cosmic horror was created by H.P. Lovecraft, and this one taps directly into our fear of the unknown. The basic concept is that humanity in itself is insignificant in the universe, and we're surrounded by elder gods and eldritch abominations which could accidentally wipe us out, let alone purposefully, and any character who runs into these tends to go insane.
The current trend in novels and movies is horror turning psychological. Many of us don't fear the monster under our bed or the one in the closet, and we know enough about medicine and survival to stave off the other fears. Rather, as we run out of things to fear, our minds betray us, so we have to be careful of ourselves. Suicide rates go up and mental disorders are more widespread, because of a combination of better awareness and the high-speed and pressure lifestyle that's encouraged nowadays which takes a heavy toll on the mind. Culture can be a reflection of the times, and this is a strong manifestation.
So what is it about reading and watching horror? Is it the thrill? The catharsis? That one's been a theory since Aristotle himself. Is it the fact that whatever happens on screen can't get to us? We do want to be frightened, otherwise, we'd see these movies once and be done with it, and the fictional factor is important, for you'll find few people willing to watch actual gore. There's also an empathy factor. People are curious to know that what the people around them feel the same as they do, and that's almost always the case when the stories tap into our deepest fears as a species.
We'll be delving deeper into this topic with other posts, as it's certainly fun. Horror has brought us some of the best stories and some of the best thrills; it's a genre I'm deeply fond of. Stay tuned for more, maybe watch a nice scary movie, and try not to look over your shoulders while you're at it. They don't like being seen.
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