The charm of horror only tempts the strong
― Jean Lorrain
I heard a short horror story when I was about 12. When I say short, it could hardly be shorter. It was told to me at a sleepover, by a friend not known to be good at telling tales. He couldn’t remember where he’d read it, but to his eternal credit, that quiet pre-teen boy resisted the allure of claiming unearned glory by saying that he’d composed it himself. After a couple of lukewarm stories that barely registered on the fear-O-meter, and I’d told a long, rambling story about a serial killer that used shard of ice to dispatch his victims (so the murder weapon would melt, thus allowing him to evade capture), this is what we heard:
The last man on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door...
- from (it turns out) “Knock" by Frederic Brown, 1948
After a stunned silence, another friend asked the inevitable question:
“What if the world ended right now? And it was just us?”
We spoke for hours on this subject, conjuring all sorts of reasons as to why the world was now empty save us 4, all sorts of scenarios of various degrees of plausibility, the heebie-jeebie level we inflicted on ourselves far exceeding the trite tales of blood-starved vampires, floating ghosts in abandoned mansions, and my convoluted yarn about the ice-wielding serial killer. We were all scared, no doubt. And that was exhilarating.
This experience is age-old, especially for young boys and girls. It’s not just in the form of campfire tales that lift the neck hairs; we like to challenge ourselves and each other; who dares get closest to the edge of the cliff? Who is wild enough to knock creepy old Mr Edwards’ door before we all run away, laughing? Or, most macabre of all:
Who is brave enough to poke that body on the train track with a stick?
Fear is one of our most useful evolutionary adaptations, a quick impulse that warns against impending danger. Coupled with our linguistic ability, and our game-defining ability with tool use, it has allowed mankind to become the most incredible avoiders of harm.
Indeed, we have, as compared to our ancestors, achieved in creating a world that is (comparatively) without harm. The Canadian cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has been banging this drum for a while: he lists many metrics, all moving in the ‘right’ direction, that form a compelling argument that we’ve never had it better as a species;
1. The percentage of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has plummeted since 1950.
2. The percentage of the world’s population who can read has skyrocketed in that same period.
3. Homicides and deaths in war have been decreasing for centuries.
4. Motor vehicle deaths are dropping
5. Life expectancy has been rising
6. Clean energy is getting cheaper and cheaper
7. More and more countries are adopting democratic forms of government
8. Racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes are becoming increasingly rare
9. School bullying has decreased
10. People are working fewer hours, and nevertheless earning more
As much as I do not agree with Pinker’s eventual conclusions in this area (Black Swans do enjoy a good event, after all. Especially when powered by atomic wings…), there is much to be said for his data-driven approach.
So, if we are to consider the material circumstances as shown in the data as correct, why in the sweet hell would we love horror so much? Why do tales of the macabre, mayhem, and maleficence be so attractive? Shouldn’t this bucolic, near-Eden be enough to banish such things to the pages of history?
One answer, I believe, is to be found in a weird analogue. Meal replacement technologies have long since been heralded as the future of fuelling the human machine. We’ve all heard of space-age children describing the far future of the 1980s as being a time when every meal will be in pill form (alongside flying cars to get to work at your office on the moon… or under the sea). Today., meal replacement drinks have developed a lucrative market, with some products showing long-term efficacy. There is a problem: the social aspect of eating, a very long-lived aspect of human culture (indeed, it may well be an aspect that predates homo sapiens in our evolutionary history), is not something we can very easily dispense with. Alongside a basic need for variety of flavour and texture, the ability to break bread may be more than a mere idiom - it may be essential. So too our love for artificially-generated fear. Testing one’s mettle in anticipation of real threats may be as essential to the human condition as communal eating. If you stop sleeping, you will die. If you stop eating actual food, you may die sooner. If you stop exposing yourself to fear, perhaps the horrors our world can still produce will pounce.
And eat you alive.
A fitting example of an engrained cultural fear ritual comes to us from Japan. Hyakumonogatari Kaidankai (A gathering of 100 supernatural tales) was a parlour game that traces its origins back to the tests of courage employed by samurai, with the first written record of a similar game being played coming from the 17th century. The simplest version of the game has one hundred small lamps being lit in a room. Participants would then take turns to tell kaidan (traditional Japanese ghost stories, horrific anecdotes, and folklore), extinguishing a lamp on completion of each tale. When the last tale was told, the last lamp would be snuffed out, casting the party into darkness. There are more elaborate versions of the game, incorporating elements of legend tripping (eg. playing the game in an abandoned building), or other rituals such as the use of mirrors and multiple rooms (similar to the Western game of Bloody Mary). Given the sheer number of tales required, the game would often be shortened - sounds like an excuse to me, scaredy cats! In the story Otogi Monogatari, a samurai playing the game is about to extinguish the last lamp when he notices a long, grasping arm with a gnarled, clawed hand reach down at him from the ceiling. Whilst his fellow rōnin run away or cower in fear, our hero swings his sword at the arm, revealing the monster to simply be the long cast shadow of a lone spider in the last lamp’s light.
The hero shows us that readiness to face fears will always result in a good outcome. Here, it is that there is no threat at all. If, however, the grasping arm were attached to some swamp monster hiding in the rafters, it would be swiftly de-limbed: all thanks to those informative hairs on the back of our hero’s neck being artificially raised by the telling of spooky tales.
Also, doesn’t this sound like the most spine-chillingly fun game ever devised? (The correct answer is yes).
It may still seem counterintuitive to some of you that people enjoy being scared. There’s always a line of people staring up at a roller coaster, shaking their heads, waxing lyrical about how strange those screaming people are as they’re hurtled around a steel track, flipped and flopped at breakneck speeds for no practical reason at all.
There’s a similar phenomenon with humour: gallows humour, and other forms of shock humour, always have detractors; one must never laugh at a funeral, and woe betide those that do. One cannot make a joke about a tragedy. Never laugh at misfortune. There are always those whose pearls remain perpetually clutched.
(I’d be fascinated to see if there’s any work to show if these different attitudes - distaste for thrill-seeking and distaste at ‘edgy’ comedy - are to be found in the same people. My inkling is yes they are).
The attempt at summoning of spirits, the move to inhabiting the dank, twisted, chilling landscapes of the tales by telling them, giving yourself and your friends the spooks with dangerous challenges: it’s easy to hand-wave this away as merely adolescent/childish hijinks. But there is clearly an underlying evolutionary value. “Safe” thrills will inoculate you against the actual horrors of the world. On a regularly warring set of islands with difficult terrain such as Japan, it’s no surprise that having a spooky old time would crop up as part of the cultural setlist. Indeed, it has done so pretty much everywhere else too.
Let’s put it like this:
As with a skilled boxer, I’d argue, training one’s body to dole out damage is vital, but so too is one’s ability to take damage. In doing so, you are not simply hardening your jaw or torso against the inevitable blows, but also learning how to prevent such blows from landing in the first place.
If not, you’ll have no idea what to do when only you remain, and then there’s a knock at your door.