Why Fear Equals Fun For Some

                

                 My love of all things terrifying started very early on and has yet to subside.  The first nightmare I can remember came after reading my Disney book, The Haunted House. I couldn’t have been very old at all, maybe kindergarten, when I dreamed of three ghosts coming into my room to get me and even though I woke up in my parent’s room the next morning, I never gave up my scary book. By the time I was in fourth grade I was reading every Stephen King novel I could get my hands on. I desperately wanted to watch horror movies but my mother hated being scared, so the only chances I had to fulfill my need for horror in 2D was when I was at a friends or with my cousins. I remember clearly the first time I finally got to see Friday the 13^th; I devoured it, and while my cousins ran out of the room when a commercial came on, I sat there and savored every moment. Thank goodness for large, loud, catholic families with a love of card games because it kept my mother distracted long enough for me to immerse myself in fear.  

                So why would a rational person want to be afraid? It seems to go against our very nature.  In Freud’s pleasure-pain principle he states that people seek pleasure and avoid pain in order to satisfy their biological and psychological needs.  So how do you explain people who seek out fear? One of two theories is generally used to explain why. One is that we are not actually experiencing fear, but excitement. The other theory is that in order to enjoy the exhilarating sense of relief at the end we are willing to undergo some terror. I am not sure I fall into either category or even just one. I cannot explain all the reasons I love to explore the dark side but I did come across something that came pretty close. A psychologist at Temple University had this to say on the subject, "there's a long history of people being intensely curious about the 'dark side,' and trying to make sense of it," says Frank Farley, PhD. "Through movies, we're able to see horror in front of our eyes, and some people are extremely fascinated by it. They're interested in the unusual and the bizarre because they don't understand it and it's so different from our everyday lives." I have often used that exact line, “don't understand it and it's so different from our everyday lives” to explain to my friends and family exactly why I am interested in monsters, both fictional and the all too real ones.

                One of the masters of horror, Stephen King, even wrote an essay on the subject. In King’s essay he asserts that we are all a little off and that for some it is contained by feeding the inner beast a healthy dose of macabre while others with less control and a higher level of insanity are out acting on dark impulses and chopping people up, i.e. Jack the Ripper.  He points out that children are taught how to be civilized through positive and negative reinforcement but it is only through our desire to be rewarded and not punished that we toe the line of a civilized society. It is an interesting read as usual but I don’t agree with the king of horror. I have no dark desire to kill and I do not do good only in order to avoid punishment. I think King’s essay is entertaining and 100% Stephen King, that being said, who I am to question the authority of the man who brought me so many hours of happy horrific reading!