Thursday, September 17, 2015

The Scariest Things are in Real Life (Guest Post by Andy Peloquin)

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!