What Are You Afraid Of…

Warning: if you love horror, take this as advice from someone who learned the hard way. The fun of horror is to be scared, and the more you understand it, the less you might feel that fear. Knowledge can make the shadows smaller, but it can also take away the thrill of not knowing what hides in them.

To understand fear, you have to start with the original one: death. Everyone, in some way, fears it. Your conscious mind might be able to live without that fear, and I think many have learned to do so, but deep in the subconscious it will always be there. Even the smallest living things fight to survive and reproduce to keep their lineage going. All life on this planet is constantly working to stay alive, and we are not the exception.

Death is the seed of the tree, but its roots go deeper.

The Unknown

It may sound obvious since death is the greatest unknown, but this root comes from somewhere else. Long ago, being fine with what you did not know could get you killed. Something unknown might be dangerous, and we could not leave our lives to chance. So we evolved to fear what we could not understand.

The Different

This one is close to the unknown but not the same. We are naturally wired to find patterns. Many things look alike, yet one can feed you while another can poison you. We also learned to notice differences in people. As a territorial species, spotting those who were not part of our group could be a matter of survival. Even inside communities, people who looked different were often rejected, as differences could be signs of disease or traits tied to early death.

Pain

Pain is the body’s alarm system. It tells you something is wrong and needs attention now. It keeps us alive, but it also means one thing: when you are in pain, you are closer to dying. The body is telling you, “Stop this or we will die.” We avoid pain because avoiding it helps us live longer.

Conscious Fears

The last root is unique to us. It comes from our ability to think, reason, and imagine. Unlike the other roots, which are natural instincts, this one grows out of our awareness. Sometimes the answers we discover can be far worse than the questions we began with.

From these roots, all fear grows. Most scary stories mix two or more of them. In my next posts, I will break down each root in detail and tell a story for each one.