Things That Go Bump in the Night: The Truth About Our Fears
Your heart begins racing at 300 beats per minute, breathing uneven as each gasp for air gets caught in your throat, and your hands get clammy as you break out into little beads of sweat. This is the feeling you may get when you watch films like Carrie, Child’s Play, Scream, The Ring, or The Conjuring.
At one point, films and word-of-mouth urban legends were the only way to get your fix for the frightening and creepy. But as time progressed, this wasn’t so much the case. Then came shows like American Horror Story and Black Mirror to frighten us in the form of a weekly series. When online media platforms like Youtube and CreepyPasta came out, they became outlets for channels such as Buzzfeed Unsolved: Supernatural/True Crime and lost-tape stories such as “Squidward’s Suicide” and “Max and Ruby 0004.” Then came social media, and the game, quite literally, changed. ARGs, or Alternate Reality Games, incorporated our everyday lives with scary stories. We’re able to become pawns in the game without even realizing that there’s a game going on. ARG’s are created with actors that upload content in real-time. Due to this, audiences think that they are witnessing something that is real. ARG storylines can consist of the paranormal as presented in Security1275’s TikTok videos, murders as discussed on TeletubbiesFact’s Twitter page, or even kidnappings as shown on AshVlogs’s viral Youtube channel. Sometimes, when audiences get too involved in the ARGs, the creators can even insert them directly into the game. But that’s all it is: a game.
In an anonymous poll done of 32 people conducted using Google Forms, over half responded that they actually enjoy being scared. So, what is it about the creepy, twisted media that really gets us going? Why is it that some of us find the scary and unusual actually quite thrilling or sometimes even comforting? Are we hard-wired masochists? Is it the need to feel heightened emotions? Maybe the reason is staring us in the face, and we’ve yet to notice it. Maybe if it were a snake, it would already have bitten us, or if it were a ghost, it would already have possessed us.
Now, the obvious answer to the question is adrenaline, right? We’ll watch scary films, listen to chilling tales, and take part in frightful games all for this surge of energy. According to Marina, also known as The New York Medium, “People need to get their adrenaline pumping sometimes. It’s the same reason people get on roller coasters. Yes, it’s scary, and yet here we are doing it. So it’s the same thing with horror films. Yes, we’re gonna be scared but it’s that adrenaline that needs to pump every now and then, for whatever reason.”
However, the feeling that adrenaline provides doesn’t last very long. So, is it all just about this one hormonal jolt? Or is there more to it? According to New York State Certified EMT, Nicole Blazeski, control seems to be another part of it. “A lot of the time the fear that people have can cause them to feel out of control because they feel like their fear is what’s in control of them,” Blazeski says.
This idea of control being a significant motivator for what seems like a torturous act of scaring oneself is actually not that far off from the results of the previously mentioned poll. You see, the respondents were all given an option to choose between genres that frighten them the most: slasher films, paranormal films, and psychological thrillers. The difference between the three being that slasher films tackle the “animal instinct in humans,” paranormal films confront the unknown, and psychological thrillers address personality disorders as well as our minds’ ability to internalize things in order to cope, according to Nebraska-based therapist, Jaci Pekarek. Therefore, having these three genres seemed to cover a variety of fears that people may have. Yet, when asked to provide an answer to the question, “What scares you the most,” the responses didn’t seem to line up.
The participants of the poll ranged from under the age of 15 to over the age of 45, and out of all 32 responses, 56.3% deemed paranormal films to be the most frightening. This may lead one to believe that perhaps these participants have a fear of subsequent death, of spirits or ghosts, of possessions, or perhaps even just a fear of the unknown. However, these weren’t the answers that were given. Instead, responses show that many of those who chose paranormal films to be most frightening listed fears such as being kidnapped, dolls, heights, and being unsuccessful in life. Therefore, those who filled in paranormal films still chose to watch the genre because it’s not representative of their biggest fear. They don’t choose to face their biggest fears. This proves the point that while some may be afraid of certain general topics, they are able to control their own fright. It’s the ability to choose what gets to scare you and what doesn’t that motivates one’s attraction to media deemed terrifying.
Blazeski furthers her take on control by saying, “There’s a sense of control that can come with it mainly because it’s your choice. [The choice] to watch the movie, what movie to watch, when to watch it, day time or night time. I feel like when you tell yourself you’re gonna watch a scary movie, you’re somewhat prepared for it. Whereas in real life even when they know what they’re scared of, sometimes they’re not prepared to face it because they might not be in control of its timing or how it comes on.”
It seems that just choosing to be frightened is not enough control. It’s also the control over how and when it happens. Are you more likely to want to be frightened in the morning or at night? Does it depend on how scary something may be to you? You see, it’s all based on preference and the specific type of control that you’re looking for.
Pekarek earned her Bachelor’s in Psychology and her Master’s in Clinical Psychology. She suggests that there is another motivator for our fascination with frights. That is, the need to understand. She uses the topic of trauma when discussing the motivator of understanding, saying that sometimes, those who experience trauma can reenact trauma through watching horror films or films with “a perpetrator or a victim.” Many understand that much of our deep-rooted fears do stem from traumas that we have experienced in life. Though, usually, it impacts our behaviors and mindsets in a way that is unknown to us. For example, if a clown were to scream and frighten a baby multiple times, the baby may grow up to be fearful of clowns and not have any clue as to why. That trauma is unknown to them until they dig deeper.
“On some conscious level—that can be kind of a reenactment of the thing that’s kind of like what they’re feeling inside… The fascination would be the unknown,” Pekarek says.
It’s almost as if those who choose to watch specific films or read certain stories are doing so with the goal of making the unknown known, and it seems that Blazeski and Marina agree. “Some may look at it as somewhat comforting because maybe they’re shown some way to deal with [their fear] in the scary movie,” Blazeski says. This idea of rationalizing the unknown is not a new one as it was brought to the public’s attention by Sigmund Freud in the early 1900s.
According to an article from The Guardian written by Darian Leader, Freud was the one who made the major discovery of our need to rationalize. “Freud believed that [rationalizations] were a basic feature of the human ego,” Leader says. Basically what this means is that people don’t like to acknowledge that there is something that they don’t know. Therefore, they turn to these fearful tactics in order to ease the cognitive dissonance and to rationalize the unknown instead of bruising the human ego.
When discussing her profession, Marina explains her mediumistic ability to “tune into the vibrations of the souls that we consider passed over” by going through what her day-to-day seems to consist of. She says that her clients are mostly looking for answers, which goes hand-in-hand with Freud’s point. “We’re all looking for answers. Like why am I here? What’s the purpose? What am I doing on this planet? You know, so if I die and nothing else, then what’s the point of all this? But it’s no longer the feeling of fright that I say, rather the need to understand,” Marina says. The need to understand seems to be tethered to our hard-wiring and essence.
Therefore, adrenaline being at the forefront of fright fascination seems to be burying the lede on this conversation. In reality, there’s more to it than just the jolt of energy, heart ferociously beating, and beads of sweat dripping. We’re attracted to fear and the things that go bump in the night because we’re attracted to control and to knowledge.
You know that old saying, “Ignorance is bliss”? Well, throw it out the window. Because in this age where we can quite literally control our fears and use them to learn about their origins, ignorance is no longer bliss. Thanks to the twisted minds behind our favorite scary stories, TV shows, films, and ARGs, we are able to fulfill that need for control and knowledge at the touch of a button while satisfying that sweet, sweet craving for an adrenaline rush.