John asked Alan Moore:

Why do you think people like to be scared?

Alan Moore There are, of course, a number of theories as to why people seem to enjoy being scared. My own personal favourite relates to the emergence of the Gothic movement from the writings of Northampton clergyman James Hervey and his stylish but morbid writings that so influenced the early Graveyard poets. These adopted Hervey’s theme that in cemeteries and from the signs of earthly decay we can learn that only God is eternal. Then came the later Graveyard poets who weren’t really much bothered about God but who really liked all the creepy, ghoulish stuff about skulls and bats and worms, and following them came Horace Walpole and the other Gothic writers who transplanted the same ghastly sensibilities to their novels – from which all supernatural, ghost and horror fiction proceed, and indeed all genre fiction in general. The point is that this craving for a mortal shudder started to emerge at the exact historical point where we were starting to clean up and sanitise the skull-littered graveyards that had once been so commonplace and which had provided Hervey’s original gloomy inspiration. While death and decay had previously been an admittedly putrid part of everyday life, when we got rid of death’s visible evidence from our streets and churchyards it’s as if we were compelled to find another, safer way of approaching the subject namely via the medium of a creepy fiction. I think that in philosophical terms, this is referred to as ‘the return of the repressed’.

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