What is Fear?

What scares you?
Not startles, or shocks, or surprises you. Nor a loud noise in a quiet room. Not the pounding heart you get when someone jumps from behind a door and yells "boo!" Not even the sickening adrenaline feeling when a car narrowly misses hitting you.

I mean, what reeeaallly scares you?

What reduces you from a competent adult, with a job and a mortgage, to a small child?
What strips away all your cynicism, your world-weariness, your "been there- done that" attitude?
What pierces your soul, and makes you doubt your understanding of the universe? Strips away your veneer of civilization and awakens the primal nature within? The part we keep buried, where reason fails and emotion reigns? Where fight-or-flight becomes our only response, to what we know to be impossible but accept to be true?

When I was a kid, I was afraid of monsters. Mostly vampires. Truth be told, I was afraid of vampires up until I was about 12. Even though I *knew* there were no such things as vampires, I was still afraid of them. Mummies? Not so much. Ditto for Frankenstein. Ghosts, yeah, to a certain extent- in fact, all the different types of manifestations- spooks, spirits, spectres, ghosts, ghouls, and so on- had a certain amount of fear-inspiring gravitas about them. But vampires were the worst.

What was it I feared? Well, this is kind of the heart of the matter, and the reason for this blog. You see, I didn't fear the vampire killing me, I feared the eternal damnation of becoming a vampire, the cursed undead. The vampire didn't just kill you, the vampire destroyed you. 

Now that I'm older, I no longer fear the monsters, the noise in the night, the Beast, the Devourer. My world has changed, and in many ways gotten smaller, now that the monsters have been banished, forever.

Halloween has changed, too. Gone are the chilling depictions of worlds beyond our reckoning, of creatures which didn't just kill us, but destroyed our existence utterly. Now we seem to rely on the shock factor, the gross-out factor. It's a different type of fear and terror. The creeping fog which contained unnameable horrors from beyond the grave has been replaced by the creeping serial killer, who tortures his victims with ever-increasing brutality. The shared terrors of our medieval ancestors has been transformed into a single, brutal nightmare inflicted on a helpless (and often hapless) coed.

One can't argue with success, however, and the low-budget gore fests currently in vogue certainly draw the fans (and their dollars). That being said, I long for the days when our peasant ancestors were quick to retreat into their homes at dusk, where travel by night was a horror not to be contemplated. Where wolves were the mildest of the many gruesome fates awaiting the unlucky farmer, woodsman, or burghur who failed to heed the advice to stay indoors. I wish for those cold, dark nights where it seems daylight comes late and ends early, and the sun never imparts any real warmth. Where the wind howls with the wolves, and the hooting of the owls heralds the arrival of...things...not *quite* human. Where wolfsbane and mistletoe, garlic and silver were ever-present in any well-stocked larder.

I long for the true fear known by the dwellers of the dark hollows of Transylvania, of the peasants in the Schwarzwald who dreaded the coming of Walpurgisnacht. The Celts who carved turnips to light the paths for the dead during Samhain, lest the dead come to stay...

I long for the feeling which comes over you which has no name, no face, cannot be explained, and has no basis in reality- but turns your blood to ice and chills you to the marrow.

I long for Halloween!