Fear (or - my thoughts on what scares us as humans, the horror/thriller genre, Silent Hill, and going to bed on time)

This is me at 1:09 AM and my thoughts.

Spoilers: I have no idea what's coming!

So I have now watched P.T. twice today which makes it four times overall.  If you are not familiar with P.T. and you like to scare yourself check it out on Youtube.  Fair warning: Pretty much everyone I've talked to or showed it to has been quite unsettled by it.  And if you watch it being played with commentary expect plenty of expletives.  You'll see why.

Actual Spoilers about P.T.!!!

I have got to say that for some time I have been a huge fan of the Silent Hill series.  Sadly my experience started with SH8: Shattered Memories on the Wii which, I know, is not Silent Hill's best moment.  Still, I thought the story was good.  First time I had played a plot twist like that before in a game.  And hey, it was my first SH.  I then got some of the older ones in a bundle and am slowly...very slowly working my way through SH2.

Loving it!!!

Games like Silent Hill, Dead Space, Slender, Amnesia, and F.E.A.R. have brought an interesting thought to my brain: what is fear?

I enjoy scary games and films and have dabbled a little in horror/thriller fiction writing myself and it strikes me as a very difficult genre.  Not everyone is scared by the same things, obviously, which makes it tough from the get go.  You have to decide who your target audience is and continue from there.  It is difficult to make something that is going to scare a wide audience just because fear is such a subjective emotion/concept.  I find dark, tight setting with heavy subject matter unsettling (Dead Space) and am scared by situations of unavoidable yet anticipated demise (Jurassic Park/Dead Space/pretty much and zombie film).  However, all I have to do is show my wife a picture of a snake and she loses it.  So as an artist in the horror genre: what do you do?

Subject matter aside, there are so many different kinds of horror to choose from!  You can have body horror (Saw/Hills Have Eyes/Event Horizon), cat and mouse (Anything that takes place in a cabin/Alien/), supernatural (Exorcist/Poltergeist/Paranormal Activity), monster (Godzilla/Them!/War of the Worlds), or you can go for the sub-horror/thriller types like psychological (Hide and Seek/Shutter Island), Sci-fi (Apollo 18/Europa Report), or crime (Silence of the Lambs/Raven).  And this is just the meager list my sad, tired little brain can conjure at a time when it should be sleeping.

I'm working on a paper that looks into what fear is and am attempting to categorize it as broadly as I can.  What are the base things that scare us as humans?

I am very rapidly running out of words!  I did a terrible job of keeping this up this week but hope to get some more time possibly tomorrow after allowing my mind to reset.  We will see what happens.