Ah, Halloween. That wonderful time of year when friends gather round the TV, drink pumpkin spiced lattes and scare the ever-lovin' bejeezus out of each other with horror movies. There aren’t many holidays that I love more than Halloween. Maybe Christmas -- but I mean, come on, everlasting salvation and free presents? That’s hard to beat!
But let’s get one thing clear: I am not a brave man. I’m not too proud to admit that. I will run away from creepy little girls in dark hallways. I will not swim in murky water. If you lock me in a dark room, I will cry. What I’m saying is, fear is definitely not my element.
“But wait,” says my computer, “If you hate fear so much, why did you add all those horror films to your Netflix queue?”
“Yeah,” replies my PS3, “and why do you use me to play all those scary DVDs every other night?”
“And what about all the money you spend on horror movie tickets?” adds my wallet, like the cheap little brat that he is.
I … don’t really have an answer for you, various inanimate objects. I’m not exactly sure what it is about scary movies that is so appealing to me. I’m also not supposed to be talking to you anymore. (Remember how the doctor said that if I didn’t stop, he’d have to call the men in the white coats to come and take me away?)
But I can say one thing with certainty -- I’m not the only one who loves scary movies. See, horror is a big industry in this country. Lots of people are willing to spend their hard-earned cash on something that will pop out and shout "boo!" at them. Last year’s "The Conjuring" raked in $137 million on the domestic market alone. The shaky-cam pioneering "The Blair Witch Project" (1999) pulled in even more, concluding its American run with a whopping $141 million in sales.
There is a clear demand for scares. How else can you explain the existence of 12 "Friday the Thirteenth" films? But why do we want scary movies? What draws people to the terrifying stories of "The Ring" (2002) or "Hellraiser" (1987) or "Alien" (1979)?
I think it’s our curiosity. Humans are naturally curious creatures, almost to a fault. We like new things, and we’re almost compulsive in our drive to explore the world around us. It’s that drive that convinces us to twist a Rubik's Cube, or read the next chapter of a novel or work out a complex mathematical equation. It’s what pushes us to experiment on cancer cells, or play musical notes in a certain order or watch an entire season of a TV show in one night.
And horror is the perfect toy for that curiosity. Think about the things that truly scare us. Sure, jump-scares can get your heart racing, but the truly terrifying stories, the ones that will leave you trembling for days to come, all share a common thread: They’re alien to us.
Dead bodies walking around. Killing people for no reason. Beings from other worlds. Spirits. To the typical mind, these concepts are completely foreign. They don’t make any sense. How could a little girl crawl out of a TV and murder me? How could an autistic child who drowned years ago leap out of a lake and grab me? How can getting hurt in my dreams hurt me in real life?
We don’t understand these things, and that terrifies us. It forces us to acknowledge how narrow our comfort zone truly is. We don’t want to look. We don’t want to see a world we don’t understand.
But a part of us is curious, so we can’t look away.
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