Horror

Fear and fire are alike. Notice how easily they combine in the common image of people sitting around a campfire listening to a scary story.

Now picture the terror of a primordial band as an advancing forest fire consumes their territory. Another living simile, another shared aspect displayed.

Why do people like horror stories?

For some people, that's a real question. Horror stories show awful things happening. They intentionally make us feel unpleasant emotions: dread, revulsion, shock, supernatural terror. Where's the pleasure? Surely horror must desensitize us or, worse, teach us to enjoy its atrocities.

Think of wildfires, of refugees under dark smoky skies leaving their homes behind. Think of walking down a street late at night. Even now, in the 21st century, fear and fire can blaze out of control, become wild forces breaking through civilization. They can drag us back to the primordial night.

Have you ever built and lit a campfire? It's fun. In high school a friend of mine borrowed a plastic lighter and sheepishly returned it the next day empty. He'd been tripping the night before and had watched the flame, transfixed, until the fuel was gone. The domestication of fire was, and is, a big thing.

If the idea of horror bothers you, think of it this way. Just as the campfire is tame fire, the scary story, the horror paperback or horror DVD, is tame fear. You can turn it on and off. It's fear you control. That's how pleasure becomes possible. A primal force, bent to human wishes though a prism of artifice -- or art.