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| THE ANATOMY OF FEAR Tim Curran |
| You know the old bit: Where do you get your ideas? Luckily, as a bargain basement shockmeister I’ve only been asked that a few times. Stephen King claims he’s been asked it so many times it makes his blood run cold. Therein lies the price of fame, I suppose. Still, it’s a legitimate question. Where do we get our ideas? If you write horror fiction for a living or for kicks or even if you just read the stuff, the question has crossed you mind. If you’re like me, you lay in bed at night and ask yourself these things. It’s the best time to ask yourself anything. There’s something about those few shining moments before you drift off to sleep…the trapdoor to the cobwebby cellar of the mind is wide open. Because it all has to come from somewhere. Nothing exists without beginnings. Nothing survives without roots. Nothing flourishes without nourishment. Even blasted, black graveyard trees, so said Mr. Lovecraft, are fed with noxious nutrients from below. And what of these nutrients? Where do they come from? And on what do they grow fat so that we, in turn, may grow fat and afraid on them? Dreams. Imagination. Fantasy life. The dark undercurrents and subterranean eddies of reality. The bones beneath the flesh and the spirit beneath it all. Fear, as such, feeds on childhood terrors. It is the fear of the dark, the fear of strangers, the fear of punishment, the fear of abandonment, the fear of isolation and alienation. Dark closets, darker attics, shadowy cellars. Strange parking lots, sinister houses, unknown persons. Faces half-glimpsed in the dark windows of lonely houses. Being left with strangers. Being abducted by strangers. Being different from others. Being hated. Being lost. Being alone. A rich and fertile garden of paranoia and anxieties from which sprout the cold flowers of adult terrors. As children, we bring many of these things on ourselves via our imaginative and morbid natures--children, all children, like adventure and fear. That’s why as kids we poke the maggoty cat on the side of the road with a stick or repeat that oft-told tale of the babysitter who cooks the infant in the oven. There is nothing more exciting (or fun) than blind, unreasoning horror. We get a good dose of this from fairy tales, which themselves are often filled with the dark archetypes we horror writers later make such good use of. With that in mind, let’s take a quick look at fairy tales. It’s necessary, I think, for fairy tales often provide us with the very first seeds of unease that we later cultivate into bigger and darker things. You know the prototypes--man-eating giants and cannibalistic witches, grandmother-devouring werewolves and flesh-eating ogres. A lot of professionals have spent a lot of time trying to sort out the origins of some of these tales, the best of which, of course, were gathered from German folktales in the 19th century by Ludwig and Wilhelm Grimm. Cannibalistic witches are common folk-themes, hag-tales, as evidenced by Black Annis of the English, the Scald Crows of the Irish, or even the Assyrian wind-demon, Lilith. Supposedly, the Grimm’s tale of Hansel and Grethel was based on a little cutie known to German peasants as “The Child-Eater of the Black Forest.” And the original version did not end with the children being triumphant, but as supper…nor were they the first or last. Anthropologists have speculated that our fascination with hairy giants may stem from race memories of our ancestors having encounters with the giant ape, gigantopithecus. . Even H.G. Wells took a stab at this line of thought in his essay, “The Grisly Folk,” in which he theorized that surviving relict populations of Neanderthals may have been the inspiration for our forest ogres, that “the Neandertalers thought the little children of men fair game and pleasant eating.” Wonderfully gruesome stuff, eh? |