What Do We Fear?

What do we as a culture fear at any given time? I’ve been giving this a lot of thought and I keep coming back to the same conclusion: we fear the unknown. H.P. Lovecraft said, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Think what you will of Lovecraft, but he had a profound effect on horror and literature, and his own fears of the unknown leaked into a lot of his stories.
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If we move throughout history, we can see the face of horror changing slightly, at least the exterior of horror. For example, let’s look at Bram Stoker’s Dracula and dig deep into the subtext of that story. Deep down, it was a fear of sexuality, alien outsiders (think race, not cosmic), and a fear of barbaric or degenerative ideals. Bottom line, the culture didn’t understand these things, and they were unknown to them, therefore, the fear of something different arose.
​Moving forward, we can look at the werewolf, Mr. Hyde, and even the Hulk. These characters represent a fear of losing control and letting “the beast” take over, or giving into our base desires. Loss of control is a constant fear with mankind and it was characterized by these creations, where, given a certain set of circumstances, the darker side of an individual was pulled into the light for all to see, always with dire consequences. But if you were to get down to the root of the situation, people didn’t know what would happen if they gave into those desires, and we’re right back to square one, fear of the unknown.
​Fast forward again and take a look at the zombie uprising which is probably one of the newer popular phenomena. Zombie epitomizes that loss of control, they also characterize a fear of pandemic or disease. They represent the breakdown of society and structure, but really the whole sub-genre of zombie apocalypse works because we just don’t know what would happen in a situation like that. Fear of the unknown. ​Fear of the unknown permeates almost everything horror related, it’s why alien movies work (cosmic this time), it’s why slashers work (where is the killer now?), it’s also why movies like Paranormal Activity work (what will happen next, why is such-and-such happening). Fear of the unknown simply gets reskinned to fit the topic du jour. What do you fear?