Fear has an undeservedly bad reputation. At least partially. Let us remember that we are here because our ancestors turned away when they saw a snake and did not try to stick a finger in the eye of a lion who was taking a nap. Fear is a defense mechanism, as Enric Soler, relationship psychologist and professor at the Open University of Catalonia, explains to us. Thanks to fear, we evaluate the perception of a threat and how we can counter it. In fact, many monster stories are exaggerated stories “that parents use to prepare their children for real threats,” reminds us Stephen T. Asma, philosopher, author of On Monsters, and co-host of the Chinwag podcast with Paul Giamatti, per E -Mail. That is, we tell ourselves stories to deal with uncertainty.
When we look at our fears, we realize that they are not new. As times change, so do monsters, ranging from mythology and religion to the journeys of explorers and the excesses of science. But “among the diversity we find some common universals,” Asma recalls, such as the fear of snakes, spiders and the dark.
Aren't novels and films about rebellious artificial intelligences, from Terminator to Ex Machina, a remake of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein? Stories like these help us pause before dangers to which we have not given importance, as is the case in the best episodes of Black Mirror, or allow us to look at them from a different perspective: In Shelley's novel, the creature is for a very long time the real villain is not monstrous. On the contrary, he is a sensitive and intelligent character who is betrayed and abandoned by Victor Frankenstein. And that's one of the dangers of artificial intelligence: that someone will program it just because they can and not worry about the consequences, like Elon Musk did when he bought Twitter.
This requires someone to create a superintelligence. Our imagination is faster than technology: we're still waiting for an evil doctor to reanimate a corpse, or for a company to produce clones that will serve as organ banks for millionaires. And where are the robots that should take over our jobs? More importantly, does anyone know if they will arrive before Monday?
However, the goal of fear is not to turn us into fortune tellers, but to help us recognize potential dangers so we can confront them. Whether it's a killer algorithm or the end of the world.
The end of civilization is not a new fear: Genesis already tells of the universal flood and the Old Testament ends with the apocalypse. Aside from divine origins, chaos can also have economic causes, as in the novel “The Mandible” by Lionel Shriver. Or climatic, as in The Submerged World by JG Ballard. Or of course pandemics, like in the video game and series The Last of Us. These are not mere fictions: Enric Soler reminds us how the war in Ukraine restored the fear of the nuclear threat in Europe, as it did during the Cold War.
These stories tell something that scares us: we can lose everything without being able to do anything or feeling guilty, apart from forgetting the reusable bag when we go to the supermarket. The heroic protagonists of these stories try to regain control as best they can, often caring for a child who represents hope, future, humanity… All the things that make us yawn because we, be honestly, more would be like Will Forte from The Last Man on Earth, who, after accidentally surviving a pandemic, turns to looting liquor stores.
Be careful: as your brother-in-law says, all excesses are bad. If anarchy scares us, we also fear the excess of order we see in dystopias like 1984. But today the terror comes not from an all-powerful dictator like Big Brother in the style of Hitler or Stalin, but from an agent of chaos like Donald Trump, Javier Milei or the populist played by Emma Thompson in the series Years and Years.
We have a more bearable version of the apocalypse in some films of the '80s and '90s that formed what critic Barry Keith Grant called “yuppy horror.” The threat to the middle class came from babysitters (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), lovers (Fatal Attraction), friends who put drugs in the lemonade (Bad Influences) or even creepy tenants: the script for Suddenly a Stranger Could sign a Vox militant, except Michael Keaton, the annoying squatter, is white. This tradition of middle-class horror has also reached German and Canadian television films, which my mother enjoys on Saturdays after dinner.
The fear is no longer in haunted houses but in the mortgage, and the economic horror is still there, albeit in a different way. In “Philosophy, Terror and the Sinister,” philosopher Enrique Lynch talks about the new monster that emerged after the 2008 crisis: the precarity that makes us watch films like “The Menu,” in which the victims are noble more pleasure than fear to watch.
Another updated fear is curses, which no longer come from the devil but from genetics. Our families are cursed not because we steal an amulet from a witch, but because they might find two copies of the APOE4 gene in us and we have a higher risk of developing Alzheimer's. Curses also serve to talk about mental health and trauma, such as “The Haunting of Hill House,” Mike Flanagan’s series.
In reality, we lost our fear of the fantastic decades ago: in the '60s, “The Monsters” and “The Addams Family” showed us that vampires and werewolves make us laugh and that family and teenagers are disturbing (as in “The Exorcist”). Something similar happens in the comedy What We Do in the Shadows: the energy vampire's conversations are scarier than the fangs, blood and coffins.
Pandemic terror usually has zombies (or infected people) as enemies. David J. Skal says in his recently rebooted Monster Show that these stories are a metaphor for communist propaganda that threatened to infect honest citizens. That began to change in 1978, writes Skal. “Zombi” by George A. Romero (sequel to “Night of the Living Dead”) is set in a shopping center. Zombies are no longer a metaphor for the enemy, but for ourselves. Don't we behave like walking corpses when we get on the bus to go to the office, or when sales start and we fight over a t-shirt?
In his book X, Chuck Klosterman suggests a different reading: We are the zombie hunters. And zombies are tasks that are repetitive and, like zombies, are never completed. There's always a report to complete, another meeting to attend, or an email to answer. Crossing something off your to-do list is like plunging an ax into the head of a living dead person: there's always someone else behind it. Or, worse, in teams.
The stories we tell ourselves help us understand our fears, but also make us more susceptible to manipulation. As Bernat Castany Prado writes in A Philosophy of Fear: “There are political options that benefit from fear. Therefore, they must demonize and suppress the impulses of cooperation and arouse “those of distrust and aggression” who present them as realistic and patriotic. These politicians use fear to make us paranoid and xenophobic.
Like in alien stories. Skal writes that during the Cold War, aliens infiltrated the United States, as did Soviet spies, as in “Invaders from Mars.”
There are stories that try to see this clash of civilizations in a different way. For example, as an attempt to communicate with other civilizations. Sometimes unsuccessful, as in Stanisław Lem's fiasco. Sometimes more successful, as in Arrival, the Ted Chiang story filmed in 2016 by Denis Villeneuve. There is also room for satire on racism and apartheid, as in District 9.
We cannot view foreigners only as a threat. Political polarization risks making us believe that anyone with different ideas is evil or stupid. The possibility of error or the purpose of the agreement is not taken into account: the other is a Martian who threatens our way of life and the only answer is for him to return to his planet. The fact that there is no other planet is just a technical detail that we will clarify later.
Historian Joanna Bourke writes in Fear: A Cultural History that fear has caused us to “think deeply” and realize that we cannot control everything. But it is also a dangerous feeling when, instead of thinking and acting, we hide behind a bush or under the call of a slogan. Being afraid is not for cowards. What is cowardly is not using that fear to figure out what really scares us and how we can respond to it without it paralyzing or dividing us.
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