Self-Scare: Why We Love Horror
An exploration of fear.
The Architecture of Fear
Anyone following Gestalt Media this last year knows that we are deep in the production of an excessively ambitious project. So, let’s take a minute to do a high-level overview of what Self Scare is really about. Millions of years of human evolution and psychology are a lot to break down in a single post, so forgive me, we’ll be using broad strokes and some extremely generalized concepts, but the bones are good. The following covers the groundwork of why we started this project and what it means to us all.
What is fear?
At the base of every instinct known to humanity, there is a single motivation: survive. It is the primary drive that determines our actions, our emotions, our ethics, and our principles. It directs us in ways so pervasive that often we don’t even realize our behavior is not as much our own as a pre-programmed response designed to ensure our survival. We are quite literally on autopilot.
But there is a contradiction in survival. Our individual minds are trained to keep us alive, and by extension, our immediate families. However, Evolution, the force that oversees our biological development on a macro scale, doesn’t give a fuck about us. Not on an individual level. It will gladly chuck us into the meat grinder if it somehow increases the odds that humanity will last a few more generations. Even worse, we will volunteer for the privilege and celebrate our own demise. It is here, at the crossroads of personal instinct and species-level preservation, that we see the birth of a genre whose entire purpose is to manage the friction between those two basic truths.
Let’s take a look.
500,000 B.C.E.
It is a cold, harsh winter. Bright red and orange flames lick the night sky; dry wood crackles as sparks rise and disappear into the black of night. A group of early humans gathers, sharing warmth and food. They are a tribe, insulated and fiercely protective of their territory. The savory scent of burning fat and singed flesh fills the air. A fresh kill, becoming fewer and fewer in the ever-lengthening nights.
Ragged fingernails tear flesh from bone, gripping the tender meat. But their eyes—dark, glowing like embers—are focused across the blaze, unmoving and rapt as a dirty, blood-soaked hand raises in the air. No one moves; they only listen. Droplets of red glisten and fall to the ground from a fresh wound that stands out angry against matted hair and strong muscle.
In a language long forgotten, low and rumbling, the hunter gestures toward the darkness, a place far from the warmth of the fire, where none would dare go in the night. He leans in, shadows dancing across scarred skin. We don’t need to know the words to understand the message: Danger. His eyes glint in the firelight; he bares his teeth and curls his fingers like claws. He growls, loud and fierce. The others jump, unable to look away. He tells of a monster, one with fangs and strength enough to wound a warrior. He relays a tale of mortal peril, survival, and morality: Do not go into the darkness. Avoid the place where the monster dwells, or you might not be as lucky as I was.
We have been telling horror stories since we learned to speak. Somewhere between Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, humans moved away from gestures and focused communication in the face and mouth. This offered a host of advantages. It allowed us to keep our hands free for survival tasks like throwing rocks or wielding spears. It allowed for communication over long distances and enabled cooperation, leading to hunting parties of formidable warriors. But it accomplished one other goal that changed the trajectory of our species forever: the sharing of ideas.
When climate change turned the lush African woodlands into open Savannah, early near-humans banded together. A tactic that ensured survival among much larger, faster predators. But communities rely on cooperation, and cooperation requires agreement. While a shared interest in not being eaten can get the ball rolling, complex problems arise once cooperation becomes cohabitation. Humans have fought over how to handle that ever since.
The Greater Good
Truth is, people struggle to coexist. The British evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar revealed via in-depth research that once a group exceeds roughly 150 people, “Dunbar’s Number”, our ability to maintain stable social relationships collapses. Without a reason to bond, such as family ties or direct survival, large communities fracture, often violently. In the harsh pre-industrial world, things turned deadly, quick.
Yet, humans live in cities of millions. Even in early Sumerian and Babylonian cultures, thousands lived and worked together, focused on common goals. How did this happen?
Spoiler: Stories.
Like our blood-soaked hunter, stories provided the glue that held communities together. They provided guidelines, expectations, and a basis for shared beliefs. Language gave us the ability to share complex ideas, and communities formed around those fictions. Groups separated by thousands of miles and tens of thousands of years came to a remarkably consistent set of core beliefs. These principles are what we now recognize as basic “humanity.”
When those principles clash, war, genocide, and horror follow. These guidelines—built on narratives millennia old—are essential to our survival. Without a shared agreement on what “is” and what “isn’t,” we collapse into chaos. This brings us back to the conflict of survival: personal instinct vs. group cohesion. An individual faced with death will fight to survive. But an individual faced with the death of their offspring or tribe will fight harder, even sacrifice themselves. We have hard-coded those early Savannah experiences into an instinct that is virtually unshakable: Preserve the species at all costs.
The Modern Religion
In 500,000 B.C.E., the story was the rule. First-hand accounts became legends. Legends became cultural norms. Violating these norms meant banishment or death. Eventually, these oral traditions evolved into religion.
Religions rise, mingle, and bind ethnic groups together. Religion offers a bottom-up solution to a society that falls into chaos when laws are enforced only by other humans. Self-policing with spiritual reinforcement is remarkably effective at holding societies of millions together. At the heart of religion are stories - told and retold.
However, religion has a flaw: inflexibility. It often defines itself by inalienable “facts,” a concept incompatible with evolution and cultural mingling. The Persian Empire briefly managed a balance of tolerance. Cyrus the Great, liberator of the Jewish community and deliverer of Zoroastrian concepts that likely influenced the New Testament, had little concern for the religious inclinations of his subjects, so long as they remained loyal to the Empire. In this paradigm the uniting principle was obedience. It may have worked, but this concept was incompatible with the worldwide social order. Descendants of the ‘god king’ were ultimately defeated by Alexander the Great and the rising power of empires in the west. Intellectualism had new ideas to share.
It was Greece, the cradle of Western philosophy, that codified a leap in human understanding: Fiction.
Aristotle gave us the framework: “The historian speaks of what has happened, the poet of the kind of thing that can happen.” (paraphrase) Fiction gives us the ability to propose scenarios, live within them, and draw conclusions without facing actual peril or potential death. It allowed for the rise of philosophy, psychology, and dramatic re-enactment.
Real to Reel
Fast forward. It’s the 20th century. Humans develop the motion picture. For the first time, tales of morality and survival no longer require a storyteller to be physically present. Narrative takes many forms: romance, comedy, drama—but one stands apart, horror. Concerned entirely with our most primitive directive: survival.
Horror has evolved from the cautionary tales of Neolithic humans, providing critical warnings in the dark, cold nights, through the confines of strict, dogmatic codes of conduct, into the theoretical and exceptionally adaptable realm of fiction. In horror, we tell a story to an entire culture at once. Most importantly, horror allows us to react. It not only establishes the rules…it changes them.
We see this in the monster films of the early 1900s. The tropes of xenophobia (Dracula), the sympathetic villain (Frankenstein), and the conflict of primal urge vs. civilized behavior (The Wolf Man). Our stories evolved into the post-Vietnam disillusionment of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the crisis of faith in The Exorcist, and the dangers of cultural erosion in Halloween. In each of these, the narrative reflects the state of society, independent of the storyteller’s intent. The artist in this case acts as a conduit to a fundamental truth rather than a director of philosophy, though the two occasionally collide. Every story carries seeds of the fundamental instincts of human psychology.
It is a byproduct of HOW we tell stories and, more importantly, how we receive them that carries these narratives forward, generation after generation, consumed, integrated, and reintroduced time and again. The psychological process, deeply ingrained since the early evolution of primates and encoded in the genetics of the human mind, the presence of mirror neurons, the theory of mind, and the persistent, irrepressible inner monologue that we each possess that constantly absorbs information and parses it as a clear and actionable narrative.
But WHY?
Self Scare is an exploration of this process. What is it about horror that ignites a reaction in us? Why is it irresistible? As we’ve seen, without horror, humanity might descend into chaos. It shows us who we are and warns against who we can be. It provides a guidebook for preserving our species. In this series, we explore exactly how that works and what it means for our future survival in a brutal world.