What is fear? 

When I was a child I used to sprint up the stairs after turning off all the lights downstairs. It was a routine: the kitchen, switch off, run to the telly area; the telly area, switch off, run to living room; the living room, switch off, sprint for dear life up those stairs. 

I believed a ghost would follow me if I stayed in the dark – in retrospect it resembled something like the pokemon Gengar – and irrational as it was, this fear held onto me strong for many years. I imagined its wide grin, spiky head and pointed fingers, round body as tall as me, simply staring with those big old eyes – always, always staring. 

I never could imagine what it would do if it caught me – I was too chicken for that. All I could muster up was that if this thing, this little devil, this ghost caught me – well that would be a very bad thing, wouldn’t it? And it was just enough to send me off sprinting, tripping on the stairs and jumping into bed as quickly as could. 

All of this drove my mother nuts, who was mostly annoyed with my shenanigans when I tussled up her bed (“you’ll break the springs the rate you’re pouncing on them!”). Now it’s all a memory, and a rather funny one too; still, to this day I habitually turn off the lights in the same manner before, and every once in awhile I’ll find myself walking up the stairs faster than usual once the lights are all out. 

So what is fear exactly?  

A good portion of our life is uncontrolled. Weather, disease, economics, death – we can map these out, react to them, possibly predict their course but ultimately we can never foresee the future. And that’s just it: what we cannot control, what is beyond us can be awe-inspiring and utterly terrifying. 

This lack of control is a slight to our own ego, our pride in existence; in a sense it makes us feel subservient to a greater force that is arguably unpredictable, a greater power per se. And that’s just it: here we are, proud humans, being tampered with with things outside of our control that essentially render us helpless. 

Of course, such things are to be expected. We can only stay in control to a certain extent – what we eat, what we wear, what we like, how we talk – but beyond that our natural instincts instruct us to expect and anticipate the unforeseeable and the unforeseen. It’s survival instinct at its finest, and it’s also how and why our fears can get the best of us – in real life and in fiction. 

Classic horror narratives and century old folklore play off these aspects of fear. From the Slit-mouth demon to the Hound of Baskerville to Sadako, these stories and their respective narrators played off our innate and subconscious characteristics, puppeteering the smallest of elements into grossly gripping disturbances to psychological peace. We know something is going to happen – just what it is is the real question, and perhaps the most maddening part. 

When we are put at suspense and dangled in wait, the built anxiety becomes stronger and stronger until suddenly it’s there – hand, a face, a cackle, a blur, a element. The element itself may not be wholly terrifying, but the wait, the anticipation is what triggers an instinctual fear. The longer it is, the more our imaginations take hold and by the time it reaches we can only pray its presence is only half as bad as we hope it to be. 

What makes the element itself additionally terrifying is subjectively personal. For Bruce Wayne, it was bats; for Hamlet, it was his father’s ghost. The manifestations that trigger fear and subsequent horror have varying meanings and implications of our own subconscious and psychology, perhaps more than we can explain ourselves. I was fearful of the Gengar-like ghost because subconsciously, I was cautious of fickle classmates who in one moment were my best friend and in another moment mischievous and plotting; the ghost was my insecurity materialized, a devilish grinner who simply antagonized my imagination with its mischievous aura. I know this now, only may years later with extreme contemplation, and even then I’m not sure if I’ve hit it quite right. 

In film, the framing, pacing and sound (or lack of) of a uncontrollable element is essential to create any effective suspense and subsequent horror. From Dutch angles to extreme close-ups, the filmmaker is in total control of what we are able to see and hear, lending them masters of our expectations and the elements that trigger our instincts of fear. In the dark of the theatre we are helpless, subjected and subservient to what is unfolding on screen. We know not of the element and its effects until it occurs, and until then we are left to calculate algorithms of possibilities to prepare for such shock, ironically resulting in more stress and anxiety before element X even appears. Arguably, the less element X is seen the more suspenseful and terrifying the narrative becomes – for we are nearly always left in the dark, vulnerable and sensitive still to the sensation of such an wild card entity. And when it actually strikes down by God is it horrifying. 

Fear is instinct, anticipation, expectation – all together. It is essential for survival and stems from the inevitably of elements beyond our control that perhaps incept in our own insecurities as well. In a sense, fear lends itself solely to sensation in which we react to it immediately, commonly in the form of horror or flight. The psychological aspect, the subconscious angle is perhaps the most disconcerting characteristic of it all, and perhaps something we may never fully understand despite decades of Freudian teachings. 

So what is fear? Perhaps we are destined to never know beyond its sensation of anticipation and elementalism. It may simply be instinctual, ingrained in our own existence. And by God, it surely is a fascinating and bewitching element to manipulate and study in narratives and storytelling – something that I hope to investigate with future articles.