First published in Rue Morgue #43 March 2005
If the substance of horror is fear, then the essence of it must be death. Death – the final Rubicon, the undiscovered country, the sum of all fears… the essence of all fears. Long ago, a Greek slave who was also a philosopher made a casual remark that seems to fly in the face of all of the horrors ever perpetrated in every movie and in every book. “Death is nothing,” he said casually.
Of course, he was right. Unfortunately, this is not a truth that comes easy to us, given that our culture – and global culture in some form all the way from Plato to New Ageism – has laboured under the conception that human beings have a soul and that this soul somehow survives after death. Wherever it goes after that is always a point of contention, but the basic premise is seldom disputed. But really, if you think about it, it’s unlikely that the soul lives on. It’s unlikely, in fact, that the soul even exists.
When I try to remember the earliest memory of my life, an image comes to mind of being strapped to a car seat – this little lingering memory of being a baby – but further back there is nothing. And yet things happened, lots of grand, important, historical things. But for me there was only blackness and silence until the day when, all of a sudden, I was being strapped to a baby seat.
And it dawned on me at some point that if decades and centuries and millennia ticked by happily without me, why couldn’t it happen again? One day there is everything; thoughts, desires and every memory of everything singing in your ears with the rush of your own blood. And then, at the turn of a second, it’s gone. The world continues and great things still happen, but we’re back in that empty blackness, that silent nothing with nothing in it, not even a single solitary thought.
Or look at it this way: have you ever been so dog-tired, so utterly knackered that you passed out into a deep dreamless sleep? Sure you have; and when you woke up, you were vaguely aware that for the past six or eight or ten hours you were utterly oblivious to everything, including your own existence. You were dead to the world as they say, though it’s closer to the truth to say that you were practicing to be dead. And if anyone would have stopped by to look at you, they would have said that you were great at it.
So death is nothing and if death is nothing, then there’s nothing to fear, right? Well, not exactly. The human instinct, so we are told, is always for self-preservation, and though self-preservation is often taken to indicate the protection of the physical body, more importantly it means the preservation of the thing that runs the body: the mind.
The mind is powerful and delicate, it has the power to abstract and construct, imagine and recreate, and through a union of these attributes it can convincingly face its own destruction, just by thinking about it. At times the reaction can be so strong, that it affects the body. But would that reaction be as strong if, deep down inside we knew that we were going to survive? That somewhere in our genetic code was a failsafe switch called the “soul” which was going to allow us to bail out at the last possible second and live on in an afterlife of eternity?
I don’t think so. The reason we experience horror, I think, is because horror is what happens when the mind is confronted with its destruction and obliteration, its return to that silent blackness from which it inexplicably came, and to which it will inexplicably be thrust back into. A truth that doesn’t hurt so much as it perfectly horrifies our sense of self-preservation.
Whether you’re drawn to the beautiful grimness of shudder pulp art, or the verité grotesque of Jim Van Bebber’s The Manson Family or the frightful flesh portraits of Bob Tyrrell, ultimately you’re engaging your mind in a contemplation of what it has – or more accurately lacks – at its very core. Think about it: if the soul existed, your body wouldn’t ever experience true fear, less so over a scary horror movie. But it does, because somewhere deep inside, it recognizes that there is no soul and that when your death happens, it happens completely. But take heart, because it’s probably only the people who can enjoy fear in this life who will likely appreciate the good night’s sleep of eternity.