Post
by MacPhantom » Sun Oct 18, 2009 11:59 pm
For me, the concept of horror is about attaining some measure of power or control over the fear of death. I don't know that I necessarily fear being dead (which I view as the cessation of existence, both physical and conscious), but I do fear dying. Will it be slow, painful, far earlier than expected? Will my brain, clinging to the last few seconds of existence, drag out the actual death so that I experience it as an eternity? The great unknown of death is something that is necessarily scary, and the idea of horror, in the context of films or Halloween decorations, is about feeling the fear of death while being removed from actual death. A horror movie may be scary because I identify with the characters, but when the movie is over, I'm still alive, and it almost feels like an F. U. to death. I put up ghouls and corpses and skeletons in my yard; things which, if they were real, would be horrible. But the fact that they aren't real helps relegate the concept of actual death to a part of my mind which can view my real death, which I know is eventual, as something unreal. I can, in a sense, fool my mind, at least temporarily, into thinking that my own death may be just as fake as the monsters in my yard or on a movie screen.
