When you read about the monsters under the bed, deep down in your
heart, you know they're not real. Sure, they may scare the pants off you
and force you to sleep with the lights on for a few nights, but that's
just your mind playing tricks on you.
Fear is a very primitive
instinct. Fear of the dark comes from fear of the unknown. When you
don't know what's out there in the darkness, your mind creates
terrifying ideas of what "could be" lurking out there. Fear of
"monsters" is an evolutionary fear of the predators higher up in the
food chain.
All of these things are what make horror novels,
movies, and TV shows so enjoyable. We almost "dare" ourselves to watch
them, sort of as a "rite of passage" to prove that we are tough enough
to handle them.
Those things are scary in their own right, but do
you know what's the most terrifying in the world (at least for me)?
It's the things we HUMANS are capable of.
In every vampire story you've read, how many of them carried out anything remotely resembling the Holocaust?
In stories of demons and devils, how many of them tried to convince hundreds of their followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid?
In
all of your stories of zombies, how many of the undead creatures
kidnapped, tortured, and gruesomely murdered their victims?
No, it's not monsters we need fear, but it is we ourselves that should be the cause of our greatest fears!
What's
worse is that even apparently "normal" can be driven to do all of these
things. You always hear about the sadistic psychopath was such an
"ideal neighbor" or "such a nice man". After reading about some of the
things that murderers like Charles Manson or Ted Bundy have done, it
makes me shudder to think about the people who gave birth to, lived in
the same house with, were in relationships with, and who married those
people.
And the worst part is, they all seem perfectly "normal"!
There are only a few things that can help experts to identify
sociopaths and psychopaths, but the average person has no way of knowing
if the person they're having dinner or sharing a cab with is the next
Ted Bundy.
That, for me, is the single most terrifying thing in
the world. I'll take all of the Friday the 13th movies, Walking Dead
zombies, and Stephen King novels any day, over some of the people who
live on this world. They are driven by the voices in their head,
abnormal brain chemistry, or many others causes--to me, that is the
scariest thing!
