The Case for Horror:
Why We Need Scary Stories
Since before you knew its name, you knew fear.
As a child, you knew it well.
How your heart pounded harder and faster if you lost sight of your parents. How your breathing became shallow if a nightmare roused you from your sleep. How your body flinched at the boom of a thunderclap directly overhead.
As an adult, you know fear even more intimately because, as you grow up, it takes many forms. Being afraid of abandonment and bodily harm are joined by new fears like losing your job or the roof over your head, being alone forever or never knowing a moment’s peace again, hurting the people we love or being hurt by them.
No matter what any of us do, fear is an unavoidable part of being alive. It doesn’t matter how rich you are or how privileged your status in life is—we will all feel fear in our lives.
This also occurs on a broader, societal level. A prosperous society is not-so-secretly paranoid that it will all crumble in an instant. A society that becomes very good at slaying the monsters of its day inevitably gets very good at creating the monsters it must slay tomorrow.
This is true across culture, geography, and time. Fear has always been with us. Fear will always be with us.
Why do we need scary stories, then? Why do we need horror at all? Do we need more reminders that the world is full of terrible, shocking things? Is it not enough that we are bombarded from all sides with disturbing stories thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, push notifications, and social media feeds? Do we really need to be confronted more?
What is the point?
Simply put, of all the types of stories that humanity has devised to help it navigate the world, none is so uniquely equipped to navigate fear like horror. No other genre has the same ability to cut through our defenses and show us the darkness in our hearts, which we like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Without the introspection that horror offers, we risk becoming bound to our anxieties and fears. Without truly looking at what shakes us to our core, we would be unable to grow, to evolve, to appreciate what life has to offer.
We would become ghosts.
We need scary stories because that is how we understand ourselves. Ironically enough, the moment of confrontation sets us free.
As Stephen King put it in his seminal nonfiction book, Danse Macabre, “We need ghost stories because we are ghosts.”
“…of all the stories that humanity has devised to help it navigate the world, none is so uniquely equipped to navigate fear like horror.”