Fearing the Dark: An Essay on What Scares Us

There is a duality to what scares us. Sometimes you may want to be scared, other times you're just curious on what is going to happen next. For me, when I purchase or rent a horror film or book, I am in it not for the goose bumps-I want something big, a sequence of terrifying events, not just a guy walking around with an axe.

What scares each person is his own feeling on darkness; people have nightlights for a reason. Children don't watch "Silence of the Lambs" or "Halloween" at age four. So what truly scares us? What makes us look under the bed or wonder why the sound in the basement is so odd?

There is something to be said for the boogeyman, the basis for the modern mythic horror. In Stephen King's "Dance Macabre," the horror novelist and legend goes into all that makes horror what it is, from Frankenstein's monster to the escaped convict with a hook for a hand, scratching at your car door. Another boogeyman explored by many in the horror field is Michael Myers. There is a fearful line in the original "Halloween" film, where Jamie Lee Curtis looks at Donald Pleasance's character, and says, "It was the boogeyman." "Yes," Pleasance says back, "as a matter of fact it was."

There are countless films to bring up in a discussion-and countless books-but let's look at the ones that play upon our base fears. "Halloween" shows how darkness can capture a slow; and how darkness has patience. "Friday the 13^th" plays upon the old slasher film with a good setting: we are at Crystal Lake, its summer, there are "hot" teenagers looking for fun, and a killer. "Hellraiser" proposes an entirely original horror that only "Halloween" can compete with, where hell is formed within a small cube, made by a French toymaker of immense talent, a cube meant to open a portal to the darkness.

What these films have, in screenwriting terms, is a certain beat, a cadence to the terror. You could throw all that out with something like "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," a disturbing look that tells of the duality of man.

Talking about horror one has to bring up a few legends. Stephen King is a horror legend. "The Shining" is a prime example of a writer going into his own subconscious for terror. Stephen King battled alcohol addiction, much like the father in "The Shining." But, if you read the book, you know few of us go the route of the father. Some people do. That's clearly what scares me: losing control of who you are and becoming something altogether different.

The base nature of mankind is to take power by whatever means. Horror shines a light on the things that scare us, and the things within each of us. Fearing the dark is often fearing what you will do-if you could, if you went mad. Whether it's the boogeyman character like in "Halloween," Clive Barker's hellworld in "Hellraiser," or Stephen King's descent into madness in "The Shining," there is something to be said for the dark. And there is something to be said for that which could be/might be within us all. That's what truly scares us. Isn't it?