Things that go bump in the night

By Sabrina F Ahmad

My grandmother is afraid of sleeping alone, because she's scared of ghosts. At ninety, with many of her former acquaintances and loved ones no longer in the land of the living, ghosts are pretty much part of her reality. While I can still be amused by this, my sister nods in wide-eyed agreement. Once upon a time, a particularly loud thunderclap during one of those wild kalboishakhi storms would have her running for cover. Now it's just the occult that gives her the willies. That, and the prospect of being broke. As for myself, I would rather face a ghost than some of the monsters that come in human form. Goes to show that people are different, even in their fears.

Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that starts with a stressful stimulus and ends with an adrenaline rush that triggers the fight-or-flight response. The stimulus is different for different folks. The human brain is a profoundly complex organ. More than 100 billion nerve cells comprise an intricate network of communications that is the starting point of everything we sense, think and do. Some of these communications lead to conscious thought and action, while others produce autonomic responses. The fear response is almost entirely autonomic: We don't consciously trigger it or even know what's going on until it has run its course.

As we grow older, our experiences shape our fears. This has provided much fodder for artists, musicians, filmmakers, and writers, fundamentally because there are so many things that defy the psyche, and push past the limits of human comprehension into the incomprehensible, the bizarre, the shocking. It is the faint borderline between the 'natural' and the abnormal, the possible and the impossible, which attracts us yet at the same time disturbs us. It is a wide category into which enter both fear of the unknown, the grey areas of human existence and the fear of a hypothetical future linked to scientific conquest: the beast and automation, therefore, are subjects which the genres of horror, science fiction and fantasy continually employ and re-elaborate upon. In Cinema it is exactly this background ambiguity (ingrained in the very same cinematographic language) between on one hand the taboo of an impossible or disturbing vision, and on the other hand the consequent voyeuristic pleasure which enlivens the imagination and fear. It is the horror genre and its science fiction or fantasy variants, which involve the spectator in their narrative and allow for identification more than any other genres.

Wired to fear?
Back in the eighties, behavioural scientist Professor Susan Mineka delved into the dynamics of fear with a project that worked with monkeys and videotapes. Wild monkeys are deathly afraid of snakes - to the point where they'll starve to death rather than reach across even a fake snake to get food. Since learning this fear by experience is a literally short-lived solution, this fear was thought to be hereditary. Monkeys born in captivity exhibited no such fear, however, which seemed to hole the hereditary idea - until Mineka got together some primates for the ultimate horror movie.

By showing some monkeys footage of a wild monkey utterly terrified of snakes, she triggered the same hysterical responses in those who had never seen the object of fear, would never see it and were never going to be at any risk from it. Interestingly, attempts to trigger a fear of flowers by showing fake footage of a monkey scared of plants failed. It seemed that the "snakes suck" wiring was always there, but until it was externally triggered it never manifested.

Enter the malevolent birds, the giant snakes and spiders, that creepy clown that's hell-bent on blowing you up. We're designed to prefer survival, and thus are afraid of anything that threatens our security and sanctity is to be feared, giving rise to the monster stories from Beowulf and beyond, to the aliens and cyborgs lurking in some near future.
That's just gross

While the earliest stories deal with preserving the sanctity of our bodies, which are sanitized and codified by discourse, some films try to uncover a primordial disgust and horror towards the body. You have the old tales of changelings, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and even stories from Hitchcock, dealing with disease and the horror is principally derived from the graphic destruction or degeneration of the body. Film-makers like David Cronenberg would take this concept to develop the genre of body horror in films, dealing with those parts of our body like blood or wastes which inspire shame and disgust, making the viewer squirm by making you realize how close you are to these fears. Resident Evil, anyone?

The Bogeyman is you
Victorian horror classics relied on an understanding of human nature and psychology to instill fear. Bram Stoker's Dracula wasn't terrifying because of the vampire's bite and the effects it had. Dracula instilled fear by the threat of the bite, the possibility of being turned into the monster he has become. He inspired terror not because of what he was, but by presenting himself as what the heroes could become if they allowed themselves to engage in the same base desires that he did. The bite merely acts as the catalyst, the metaphorical key to the lock that people in Victorian society placed upon their darker urges. In fact, classic horror literature relied heavily on the use of fear and anxiety about the darker sides of humanity to scare their audiences.

The Unknown
Remember those creepy stories from back in your childhood, which dealt with a bunch of kids going into a haunted house? For many of us, it's not knowing what's out there can be the most frightening experience. People being sent into situations they have no script for, can create the most delicious of paranoia. Horror masters Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft relied heavily on this fear of the unknown and what lay beyond that threshold. The subtle Poe relied heavily on the consequences of falling victim to things outside one's control, which he expertly combined with the very real threat of death. In contrast, Lovecraft made use of the consequences of humanity seeking knowledge that he should not delve into. "Love-craftian" horror, a small but powerful sub-genre, attempts to show the futility of human endeavour and uses the concept of excessive knowledge as a device for terror. Whereas Poe scared by reminding people that they knew too little, Love craft achieved the same effect by showing people the consequences of meddling with things man was not meant to know. Pandora's probably nodding in agreement.

Behind those human masks
As people become more desensitized towards violence, it takes more work to inspire fear through the written word. With human monsters like Jack the Ripper, and later HH Holmes and Ted Bundy, wreaking terrors on their fellow man, Dracula and his friends certainly don't seem so terrifying.

For literature, modern horror novels lean towards personal horror, as with Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, focusing almost entirely on the monster within the man. Thomas Harris makes a fascinating read because he delves into the stories of the birth of the monster. Why does Hannibal eat people? Why did Dolarahyde murder families? You find yourself sympathising with them, even as you cringe at their unspeakable acts.

Films saw the rise of the slasher genre, with flicks like Saw and Hostel using as much blood, gore, and blatant violence as possible. History shows that the horror genre had its greatest periods of revival precisely in moments of great collective fear or anxiety, that is, when society needed most to exorcize these fears. The horror genre, with its theme of death and concomitant voyeuristic release of tension proved effective in this regard. This is even more valid for science fiction which had its most productive period in the forties and fifties, absorbing a climate of collective uncertainty and paranoia which was a result of the Cold War, the threatening nature of Russian politics and nuclear research.

Social and situational dramas also find place in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. Father and son trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world in Cormac McCarthy's The Road is as disturbing an idea as is that of a sane person being stuck inside a sanatorium, or that of some unsuspecting Joe trapped inside a recurring nightmare, both themes visited by that chief of chills, Stephen King.

Oriental spooks
Asian authors and filmmakers have a different approach to fear in their art. They often draw from a potpourri of elements from the various styles and genres. However, unlike Hollywood, Asian literature and film are significantly more subtle and psychological. For example, in the film "Battle Royale," the real horror comes not in the killing and the violence, but in the fact that, just hours prior, the characters killing one another called each other friends. Personal horror and gore are also used in a more aesthetic manner, limiting just what the audience knows about an antagonist's torment and how much blood is presented on-screen. Finally, Asian horror typically makes good use of the supernatural and the unknown, effectively using the lack of knowledge and minimal amounts of it to great effect, as best exemplified by the graphic novel "Tomie" and movies like The Ring.

Fear itself
Sometimes, it is fear itself that is scary. Consider the atmosphere of a ghost storytelling session. The ghost itself isn't half as frightening as the atmosphere, the isolation, the feeling of being watched, the hair-raising terror that sends goosebumps through the fascinated listeners. Harry Potter's Boggart took the form of a Dementors simply because he was afraid of being scared. Contemporary horror gurus like Neil Gaiman and Stephen King use this theme to full effect. Pennywise lives! Flashgames these days are beginning to tap into this idea with moderate success, with games like Redrum or Mary Celeste using the nightmare themes to chill and thrill.

When all's said and done, be it Nosferatu or Psycho or The Exorcist or Saw, what shocks and scares the human mind is a constantly evolving thing. The familiarity of a century of film and popular culture has changed general perceptions of what scares. One might find homunculi like Frankenstein clichéd rather than terrifying, but will cringe and scream at pieces like Dead Space, where death by dismemberment is staple faire, or at the supernormal, such as Dark Waters or the Ring. Someone else might not flinch at the spectacle of a decapitation, but run screaming from the sight of a bird at the window. So when the lights go out, what does your bogeyman look like?

References:
http://health.howstuffworks.com, http://www.articlesbase.com, www.play4film.com