Category: “What We Fear”

I often try to puzzle out my attraction to “trash culture” given that I have advanced degrees in “snob culture.” A strange correlation came to me today. Many defenders of snob culture assert something like a moral superiority to certain kinds of media. For instance, it’s “better” to read than to watch TV or more recently, it’s “better” to surf the internet than to watch TV… like a Paper-Rocks-Scissors game where everything seems to beat on TV. And then even within certain media there’s the familiar claim that, say, literary fiction is “better” than romance fiction or whatever. And further there are grades of literary fiction too where the classics are better than the contemporary. During the big canon wars of the 1990’s, various explanations were trotted out to defend this intuition. One idea said that the best kind of literature is the kind that could be re-read profitably, that each time through the work the reader gains some nugget of lasting value from the experience. I think I’ve had that idea at the back of my head for quite awhile.
But today, I realized that that sort of argument sounds pretty similar to an argument for monogamy, literary monogamy. Stay true to the classics. Don’t be lured into the iniquity of all that faddish, contemporary fun stuff. Virtue over pleasure. And if you happen to read the million or so books that are on any of those “lifelong reading lists,” then start over again because you STILL can learn more from them. Again, there will NEVER be time in this life for casual texts.
And what’s funny of course is that the consumption of media is really nothing like sexuality… Roland Barthes and the Pleasure of the Text notwithstanding. And even if reading was like sex, at least it’s not like sex between two humans. When I close the covers on the latest novel, I don’t ask “Was it good for you too?” Books are objects and humans, regardless of our endless attempts to treat ourselves otherwise, aren’t.
I don’t know if it really belongs here but I am also trying out this thought, namely that there are only two kinds of writing: successful writing and unsuccessful writing. All this “genre” talk is a way of selling writing, an honorable, noble pursuit because it helps grab a paycheck for a writer, but one that really doesn’t say much about the writing itself. It’s a way of managing expectations for the consumer… and I suppose also why ColdPlay sounds so much like old U2. There are of course several ways of evaluating “success” not the least of which is to answer the question “Why Write?” and the other “Why Read?”

I can cope with fear. I’ve got rational categories and ironic perspectives all set up to deal with even the most disturbing nightmare or distopic vision. To be honest, I *enjoy* a good bit of white-knuckled terror because it wakes me out of the complacent greyness of my everyday life. But recently I’ve encountered something worse than nightmares.

The funny thing about fear is that it isn’t that funny when you’re experiencing it. Perhaps that’s why a little comedy is so useful in scary movies as a counterpoint for rising tension. While collecting the nightmares found on this site, I’ve encountered a common reaction that people laugh while trying to tell me a dream that obviously was quite disturbing to them. Overlooking whatever Freud had to say about laughter, fear and the unconscious, what these people often say they’re laughing at is the inability to make the story sound as scary as it was to them in the dream. In some cases, even THEY aren’t convinced that one should be afraid of the dreams as they’re retelling them.

It’s just not easy to make others really understand the same things that scared you. Maybe that’s why we get some delight — IF we get some delight — from well-told scary stories.

I have also collected a small number of discarded fears, things that people said they were afraid of once but that they are no longer fear. These stories were always surrounded by laughter, that embarrassed laughter that means on one level “I can’t believe I used to be afraid of something so LAME as this.” On another level perhaps this reaction means “I was so naive then to find THAT scary. NOW I’m older and more mature and now I know what’s REALLY scary.” It’s a fun list that I’ll certainly add to over time. In nearly all cases, they’re images from movies that they probably shouldn’t have been watching at that age, but then again, who am I to say?

(Female, 40’s) Birds especially large groups of them, after seeing Hitchcock’s “The Birds” as an elementary school child. Walking home from school was sometimes a problem, especially in the late fall as birds massed in the trees getting ready to migrate south.

(Male, 40’s) The Wicked Witch of the West from “The Wizard of Oz.” Especially the scene where she appears suddenly on top of a roof and hurls a fireball at the Scarecrow.

(Male, 30’s) The Ghostly Librarian from “Ghostbusters.” He says what was so scary to him was that she appeared to be friendly at first but then turned terrifying.

(Male, 30’s) The Robot named Maximillian from Disney’s “The Black Hole” (Look it up on IMDB! It was a relatively early attempt to use digital imagery, I think) The whole design of the robot is a little scary plus he was depicted as being nearly invincible.

(Female, 30’s) A ghost that mysteriously appears in the back seat of a car as someone is driving at night. “I’m sure it came from a movie–probably LOTS of them– but I just can think of which one.”

Needless to say, send in your childhood fears! To grimgnome (a) dailynightmare.com

We’re afraid of zombies. Or at least peculiarly fascinated with them at the moment. Add up the zombie-related nightmares that appear on this site, the zombie-related movies and games of recent years, the zombie-flash-mobs that have occurred in Toronto, San Fransisco… heck just about everywhere in North America. Those cold-hearted crypt creepers are hot.

Zombies are the perfect enemy. They don’t have any of those irritating human qualities that real enemies possess. Sure they look human enough but when it comes down to things, they’re dead and they won’t stop until we’re dead too. Don’t waste compassion on them; once they’ve changed they can’t change back. You can’t brainwash a zombie into not craving brains. Nobody seems to question the absolute right of self-protection so we can kill them without a twinge of moral regret. Zombies are the perfect metaphor for “the bad guys” during wartime.

But I don’t think that’s why they’re scary.

We’re afraid of zombies, because we’re afraid the zombies are us. Forgive this rehearsal of obvious information, and these qualities are the same for slow-moving, original style, Pittsburgh zombies (Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead“) or speed-freak, extra crispy zombies (“28 Days Later“):

• zombies are mobs, un-individuated groups;
• zombies consume voraciously, mindlessly;
• zombie-ism has no internal mechanism to limit itself. The “zombie-lifestyle” is excessive and exhaustive. It will not stop until there is nothing left alive;
• zombies have pure desire. It is not complicated by dogma or propaganda. There is no zombie religion; no zombie government.

Looking through the mirror of metaphor at the everyday world, zombies could be seen as a critique of rampant consumerism. We respond to the stimulus to buy, buy, buy quite brainlessly, without much consideration for our own fate or that of anyone else. This lack of limiting concern is NOT a “liberal thing,” either. Zombies can be depicted as a critique of capitalism in general but the brainless consumption portrayed by zombies also runs afoul of the old-time conservative values of thrift and frugality. Fiscal conservatives cringe at the prospect of a generation of folks who max out their credit cards while saving nothing for retirement. Who will cover all that defaulted debt when those self-indulgent hordes grow too old to work at McDonalds? The liberal spin on zombie consumption emphasizes the human degradation of near-cannibalism as mobs of once-humans feast on current humans, leading up to total environmental collapse.

While none of the zombie traits are laudable, perhaps that collection of qualities particularly grates against American values, especially individualism and “puritan” self-restraint. Zombies are post-human masses who seek to wipe out individuality. Americans cherish the notion that somehow maverick individuality is what made us what we are. Zombies threaten that identity, a fate worse than death. Zombies also are non-critically self-indulgent. Whether left-ish or right-ish, Americans tend to distrust indulgence, ironically enough while acting quite self-indulgent and privileged. However, we have elaborate justifications of our indulgences.

Zombies might be so scary because they’re what we see in the mirror.