HORROR

What do spiders, clowns and high places have in common? They're goddamn terrifying.

In all the best ways.

Not to everyone, mind you, but it's a bit of a theme.

Bot fly larvae burrowing up under your skin, wriggling, throbbing pale white grubs the size of half-dollars. You can see them moving under your skins, twisting and turning like monstrous pimples, filled with so much more than pus. True story.

Creeping legs crawling over you while you fade toward sleep, falling through that twilight of consciousness. The prickling across your skin as sharp feet pierce and tease over bare skin. Knowing it’s happening, feeling it, but being unable to stir toward consciousness to brush them away as they decide whether to start burrowing, or biting, or exploring a way to some unexpected orifice where to crawl inside. Think on it hard enough and your skin will tingle.

The top fears are fairly consistently rated as:

          Public display

          Dark

          Failure

          Dying

          Heights

          Flying

          Spiders

          Spatial fears (tightly enclosed or wide open).

No particular order. I could list on and on.

They give you chills and shivers and you think about all the horrible concepts of that something that is waiting for you, grinning that manic, alien grin. It's fun. And only occasionally crippling paranoia. Not always rational fears, but the knowledge they are irrational is what changes it from harrowing to a thrill.

That's the fun bit of fear. A scenario that is both unlikely and awful is fun to read.

The fun of horror comes when one of those irrational masks is settled atop a very rational fear, or at least a very rational truth.

• In Cujo (Stephen King), the rabid dog was a fun face to the conclusion that monsters are very real, and “it can’t happen to me or mine” is a lie.

• In The Ruins(Scott Smith it was malevolent Brussels sprouts. And the helplessness of inescapable confusion and despair and death.

• In Dracula(Bram Stoker) it was Thoreau’s attempt to establish the raw essence of American culture. Or wait… wrong book. But underneath Stoker’s vampire was the desperation of confronting something that is not understood, and that even the steadfast are susceptible to seductions. Stoker was working through some fears of female-equality too.

No one wants to read pure real horror. It's not fun. It's awful. It's the phone call that your child just died in a car accident, the end. Or that you have some completely unremarkable but utterly fatal disease, or that you can’t pay your bills and you're going to get evicted, or you get in an accident and lose your license or your wife leaves you because she realizes that she shares that same dismal opinion of you that you've hidden in your own heart but believe in far more devoutly than any priest of any religion. That awful lurch, the drop just at the top of your throat that makes it hurt to swallow. The dizziness, the vague feeling of detachment that throbs in waves punctuated by the simple underlying horrible truth that worlds are easily shattered and you can't go back and stop IT before IT happened, because time is too late and your one life is horribly disfigured beyond repair.

It's too much to look at it head on.

Stephen King did not want to market Pet Semetary. Understandably. At the risk of spoiling, he wrote into it the death of his own son in a very realistic and plausible way. He said it wasn't fun, and that he felt it was just horrible. I personally think it's a pretty good book. But then again, it involves necromancy rites and Indian burial grounds and all that fun stuff dressed over the skeletal core of "if my son died, I'd risk damning myself and dooming anyone I know to try to bring him back. And sons do die."

It’s a heavily recurring theme in King’s work, at least as common as the perils of being a writer in Maine.

Not all things have to be so direct, of course.

Zombies, vampires, ghouls and ghosts.

• I Am Legend(Richard Matheson) is about vampires. Not in the Twilight estrogen-drenched sparkle-fest sort of way, nor even in a Stoker-ian sense of the supernatural, but in a way that attempts to conform to established scientific principles. Underneath it all, the concept that savagery is a manner of perspective and that loneliness/individuality is an easy background to make someone seem a monster.

• John Dies at the End(Jason Pargin, alias David Wong) is humorous horror about... that's a tough one to summarize, but the underlying constant is the constant, unremarked cruelty of the world contrasted against some pretty fantastically remarkable circumstances.

I could list on and on.

Chuck Palahniuk(Fight Club, Haunted, Lullaby) is probably one of the best horror writers in my mind, but he is not at all the most fun to read. His brand of horror bypasses much of the outer fun-fear, or he purposely puts one so outlandish that the reader is heavily conscious of it being implausible. He then barrages the horrible internal truths at the reader until you feel like you're going to be sick (and in some cases, people have been known to literally pass up and/or vomit during his readings.). Palahniuk has no patience for foreplay. He may get the real work done, but he does not pretty it up to help it go down more easily.

It’s all a balance.

Serial killers, home invasions, satanic rites.

It's the same thing as roller coasters, or sky diving, but for your mind. You experience the instinctive reaction to lethal speed and uncontrollable space, impending doom as you hurtle through impossible conditions. You roll the dice and delight in the sensation that it all could go wrong, that it might go wrong, that something similar has probably gone terribly wrong for someone else. The face story is the plane and parachute, the roller coaster. The falling is real.

It’s far less fun to skydive without a parachute. Thrilling, sure, but not exactly a bumper crop of hilarity.

Personally I'm afraid of all sorts of things. I’m not an anxious person, but there’s more to fear than screaming and hiding. I do not like heights, or clowns. I do not like camel spiders or large things moving just below the surface of water. I don’t like crowds or people touching me. I do not like full body suits that hide the wearer entirely. Sorry, furries.

I do not like raw meat, the knowledge of it rotting, slippery and wet as I touch it, slimy with a film of digesting bacteria. And of course, I do not like the feeling of foreign things moving inside me, infesting and wriggling. I do not like certain irregular patterns. Think that sounds silly? Look up trypophobia. See if you keep laughing. And sometimes ventriloquist dummies. Because ventriloquist dummies.

But all of those are just fun faces to the real fears.

The unreliability of my own mind. The dark, monstrous thoughts. Failing even at things I should be able to easily do because the shortcoming lies not in the skills, but in me. Being unable to express things. That I’ll grow old and weak and withered and I’ll have no fire, no drive, no purpose. That my opinion about myself that comes crashing in on those dark and bitter nights was right all along. That other people will be able to read my mind and know the horrible truths I've long since discovered about myself.

I could list on and on.

Universal fears that are all the more horrible because when you peek under the bed to say “Ah! No homicidal clown there today!” you see them peeking back at you with a mocking, toothy smile and you realize that the most dreadful monster you can barely imagine has nothing on the real fears that confront you in your life. 

Which, of course, is why I like to read horror. Because the world is a scary place.

So, 

Of what are you afraid?

P.S. If you are a horror movie fan, I’d heavily HEAVILY recommend watching the movie “Babadook” as it’s one of the better horror movies I’ve seen with a very interesting underlying truth.