Thoughts On Fear

I find it ridiculous that there is a genre of writing called horror. That's because I find it ridiculous that a person can be scared by reading a book or watching a movie. Fear is the response when faced with danger and a piece of writing can't hurt you.

Movies are the worst because they use the same tricks in absolutely every movie. I guarantee you that every time the camera zooms in on a character's face, it will get quiet, then a loud sound will happen and the monster will be breathing down that character's neck. Two or three times, they will try to trick you by making you think it's going to happen, but either nobody shows up or it is one of the friends. At least one of the characters will be the biggest asshole in the world. If it's a woman, she's a bitch and a slut. If it's a dude, he's an intolerant bully. That character will be the first one to die.

If I ever get dragged to a horror movie, I just play a game with myself. It's called Called It. Throughout the movie, I constantly predict what's going to happen next. And if I'm right, I say "called it." If I'm with other people who think the movie is stupid and sucks, we can have a good time with it. If not, I just say it in my head. It's the only way to make the experience tolerable.

Despite all of this, I wish I could be scared. I know I used to be. I remember being a small child watching The X-Files and it freaked me the hell out. Granted, this was the first few seasons when it was all about being scary and not so much about massive conspiracies that didn't make sense or go anywhere. It was about random strange events going on. And one of the scariest things is that they kept being real. What made them scary to me is that they were realistic. That was a show about things that went bump in the night and it gave answers of what they were that weren't impossible.

Now, as an adult, if I were to watch it, I'm sure I would be far too jaded and cynical and rational to be scared by it, but that principle of possibility is there. I recently read World War Z by Max Brooks and that book freaked me out. Even though it was fiction, it was not impossible. What we called zombies was caused by a virus and transmitted as such. Weird, mysterious stuff happens all the time and diseases can do all kinds of horrible stuff. Granted, we haven't found anything that killed the body and reanimated it, but it's not impossible. It's far more realistic than the brain-eating zombies that were raised from the dead with magic.

As I read that book, some of the stories really had me worried. It made me wonder, what would I do in a zombie outbreak? Would I be able to survive? Would I be able to save my friends and family? Could I kill somebody I knew if they got infected, or myself if it happened to me? These are very real questions that it made me really ponder. Also, in the story, the infection started in China. By the time America got hit, would it be too late for me?

These are scary thoughts because they are real. They could reasonably happen in real life. That is the only way that horror can ever work. And let's face it, the news media have that genre covered.