It’s that feeling of having a teacher breathing down your neck while doing a test or when you hear your mum’s car get home after a long day alone, and you forgot to defrost the chicken for tea.
Fear. One of my favourite horror writers, H.P Lovecraft, put it best, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
What is it, and why do I love to scare the shit out of myself? I love horror. It’s my favourite genre. I don’t know what it is, but something about sitting in a dark room watching a scary movie is comforting. That sounds a bit backward, but plenty of people will watch scary movies or shocking documentaries to comfort them. In this essay, I want to figure out what is fear. And how can we use it to write better scary scenes?
The dictionary defines fear as “An unpleasant feeling triggered by the perception of danger, real or imagined” So, in this way, anything that makes us scared or creeped out must mean we deem the stimulus to endanger our well-being. However, this doesn’t make sense when you think about a creepy raggedy Anne doll in your nan’s doll collection (or some clever use of an unassuming object eliciting fear). Indeed, this response isn’t one of feeling threatened.
Francis T McAndrew, an American psychologist, conducted an excellent study titled “On the nature of creepiness,” investigating the cues that give someone “the creeps.” He describes creepiness as a “response to the ambiguity of a threat.” McAndrew discusses what he calls a “creepiness detector” as basically this thing inside humans that decides whether something is a potential threat, which, when identified as a potential threat (whether it’s a man following you around the city or a weird sound in the middle of the woods), our ‘creepiness detector’ identifies these things as a potential threat and thus we consider it creepy.
So now we understand that we get creeped out or scared when something is considered a possible threat to our well-being. I want to apply this to some of my favorite movies.
First of all, the only movie I have watched so far that gave me a mini panic attack is a Netflix movie called Incantation. I know I have not watched nearly the tip of the iceberg of scary movies; I’m merely a horror infant, do keep that in mind. This is a Taiwanese supernatural, found-footage horror movie in which a woman must save herself and her daughter from the religious curse she unleashed six years prior. The whole time is tense and quite scary, but why is this the case? Let’s apply what we have learned. Something becomes eery when we consider it a threat. This film directly talks to the viewer giving chants and hand signs for the audience to do, which we later find are not as meaningless as the main character would have us believe; where finally, at the end of the film, the audience is treated as a part of the film in which, the woman, apologizes for what she’s about to do! And then does something which is supposed to have detrimental effects on the viewer; I had a mini panic attack here as I genuinely felt I was in danger, which was excellent work from the director.
But I only sometimes want that feeling from media. It’s uncomfortable to be that scared; I want to be enthralled in the story and make an “Eeeeeeeeeegh” sound when something creepy happens. For example, in The Blair Witch Project, an American supernatural horror film, where three students decide to go into the backwoods to investigate the mystery behind the Blair Witch incidents; when unfortunately, they lose their map and sense of direction, and things take a turn for the worse. Throughout the whole film, plenty of things are creepy in just the right way. For instance, the group comes across stick figures hung on trees, and you feel a real sense of creepiness; using McAndrew’s idea of the “creepiness detector,” the group finds the stick figures after waking from their sleep; the symbols convey that there is some intentionality and malevolence which otherwise are just sticks and twine, which thus pervades a genuine creepiness.
I am writing my first short story, “Totem,” a supernatural horror, and I’m finding it hard to identify how to create that sense of unease. After learning about fear in the research of this essay, I have thought of 3 ways that you and I can write scary scenes for our stories.
- To make something creepy, an otherwise innocuous object or event must happen in an odd situation. We want to add hints of a larger picture and let the reader’s imagination fill in the blanks.
- Ultimately, the fear generated around an out-of-place object is the fear of the unknown, which is the root of most scary events. The more obscure the link between the object and the environment, the more ambiguous the threat and the more frightening the scene.
- Finally, use your fears. Everyone is scared of something, and at the base of all these things is the unknown, so if you write from a place of fear, you will instill some fear in your audience.
That’s it. I hope you have gotten something out of this; I would love to hear what you think; let me know below. Thank you for your time, and I hope to see you again.
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