M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” is not a particularly scary movie. It’s more tense than truly frightening. But there are definitely jump scare moments, and those apparently worked like a charm on some of my friends when we watched the movie in their dorm a couple weeks ago. Some of us were really intent on silently appreciating every moment of the building tension. In my opinion, that’s the whole proposition of a Shyamalan film. A couple of my friends, though, were trying very hard to mitigate the movie’s ability to scare them. Every time a scene would get quiet, the characters frozen by fear, my friends would start joking and laughing so that when the moment came they wouldn’t jump out of their skin.
That got me wondering: why do we seek out scary entertainment? If you think about it, it’s pretty odd that horror as a genre exists at all. We mostly try to get away from the things that terrify us — so deliberately seeking out terror is deeply strange.
For most of human history, horror wasn’t something we experienced vicariously (let alone digitally). We were too busy dealing with very real terrors on a daily basis. You don’t need “The Conjuring” when you can just go out and get run over by a wooly mammoth.
Certainly, there are still horrific realities today, particularly in poorer countries. But in our day-to-day lives here in the U.S., and at Union, we can mostly choose when to give ourselves insomnia and bad dreams.
The genre is dominant regardless. Everywhere you look, there’s some form of media that is meant to entertain through terror. True crime sits atop the documentary and podcast scene. Shyamalan and David Lynch and John Carpenter and countless other filmmakers have built careers on the odd, eerie and macabre.
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Over winter break, I spent some time working for my older brother. We each mostly worked alone, which gave us both a lot of time to listen to music and, mainly, podcasts. I got hooked on one called “Lore.” The basic idea is that the narrator presents a story that interweaves history and legend, usually about something creepy. (For instance, there’s an episode about werewolves and the legend’s origin, and one about the Salem witch trials.) The whole thing is backed by light, eerie music that sneaks up on you in key moments to accentuate the scares.
The podcast is wildly popular, like a lot of horror content. And while the question of why still remains, I think the answer — or at least, an answer — is right there in the name: “Lore.”
We love a good story. But even more than that, we love the lore of a story. It’s why people consume the thousand-page backstory of Tolkien’s fantasy world. And why we pay Ancestry.com big bucks to learn about what our great-great-great-grandfather did. It’s why dads watch obscure World War II documentaries like they’re studying for an exam the rest of us don’t know about. And yes, it’s why we tell ghost stories around the campfire.
We love lore.
There’s something special about a danger we know isn’t real; a monster we know can’t actually get us. Kids might get scared by the bedtime story, but at the end mom can just close the book. We might make jokes so the jump scares don’t actually make us jump, but at the end we can just turn off the TV.
By scaring ourselves a little in this detached, distant way, we can experience an emotion that our comfortability usually protects us from. We don’t have wooly mammoths anymore, but we can still have aliens and ghosts and whatever the clown from “It” is supposed to be. (I get that it’s a clown. I’m talking more existentially.)
Maybe we need to be scared a little to remind us how nice safety actually feels. So we turn to lore.