The Truest Peace of Fear

Can you imagine driving on a dark country road, swerving, and having to spend the exceedingly long seconds where you’re skidding around at 80 miles per hour contemplating death for the first time? It’s not great. It is, as you can imagine, very scary.

Allow me to preface this. Everything is scary. We’re all so afraid. We’re afraid that we’ll die early and miss out on something, or die late because we removed ourselves from uncertainty too often. We try to strike a balance between living our lives and protecting our lives, and at the end of the day we’re lying in bed wishing we’d done something else, said something different, or lived a little more. We waste the few hours we allow for sleep by scrolling social media, until we wake up to another dreaded day without realising we’d fallen asleep.

There is no cure, no way out but out. And we desperately do not want to face that reality. All we can do is distract our minds from the echoing notes of clock towers by placing ourselves somewhere else. We read, we play video games, we sing and dance and cry along to movies about people we’ll never know.

Sometimes-- the best of times, even-- we indulge in fictional fear.

For the longest time I thought I didn’t like horror. I certainly don’t like jumpscares; that’s not about to change. Where I was wrong was in thinking I didn’t like being scared at all. I avoided things that made me feel that carnal dread, and assumed this was because I hated the genre.

But when I write, it’s horror. It’s dread, sadness, and bleak horizons. If you asked me to reminisce upon my favourite stories, I would struggle to tell you a tale that ended with everybody happy. The stories that have taken up residence in my heart are ones of death and despair and futility, and I think there’s a reason for that.

Perhaps we don’t instinctually avoid fear. Perhaps we crave it. We’re always on the lookout for something to set our hearts ablaze with terror. We’re waiting for metaphorical tigers to leap from the shadows and for very real CEOs to announce lay-offs. We can’t stop looking. If we stop looking for things to be afraid of, we might be killed, and then we will be dead, and that is terrifying.

But real fear hurts. Genuine dread is one of the worst things I’ve experienced. No matter how much my brain might search, I do not want to find it. The next best thing is to supply it with manufactured fear. Feed it terrifying premises, supply it with impossible tragedies, and it’ll focus on them. We can stop looking over our shoulder for the hungry lion; we’ve created our own hell, and we can live there for the time being.

This might not sound much better than living a normal, fearful life, but consider the safety nets involved. If you’re ever too afraid during a video game, you can stop playing. You can tell yourself it’s just a game. If you’re walking down the street at night and someone is following you, you can’t just uninstall stalker.exe. It’s the difference between skydiving and falling in a dream. Both terrifying? Perhaps. But one is safe.

But there’s more to artificial terror than simulating a pain that your brain craves. I don’t often get plagued by happy memories, but the times that I’ve felt fear will creep back into my mind at uncomfortable intervals. Fear is memorable. Fear breaks away what doesn’t matter and solidifies the bonds between you and what does. Fear lets us experience truth, lets us explore things we cannot know.

When I was growing up, my favourite anime was Wolf’s Rain. Might still be, even. For the unfamiliar, it is not a happy story. It’s a stand in for life; you struggle, you experience loss, you try for fleeting moments to find happiness only to have it ripped out of reach. In the end, you die, and nobody really knows if you got what you wanted in the end. Again, it is not a happy story.

And yet I love it. My internet moniker comes from a phrase in that anime (that my young brain completely mistranslated), and I’ll never be able to stop using it because I’m that attached. The outlook on life that that unadulterated fear gave me is inseparable from myself. I can still feel the dread that I felt watching it at 11 years old. It’s timeless to me.

I can’t even name a truly happy story. None of them touched me that deeply.

Now, I look forward to the release of Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!, an enhanced version of the most psychologically distressing game I’ve ever had the pleasure to play. The first iteration of the game disturbed me deeply, and I am forever connected to it through the sturdiest bonds my brain can manage. I’ll play it again, seeking out primal fear, searching for doubt and uncertainty. I’ll spend the game exploring the themes that I don’t let my mind play with in its free time.

Maybe, for brief moments, I’ll think. Not about what I want to do tomorrow, or how I want to spend Summer before its days dwindle into Fall, but about life as a whole. I’ll consider hard things. I’ll be confronted with uncomfortable realities from the safety of my own. It might all be fake, but it’ll mean something.

I experienced this feeling while watching Bo Burnham’s Inside this past weekend. It’s not explicitly horror, but if Netflix is allowed to call it a musical comedy (did they even watch it?) then I’m comfortable digging into its unsettling, psychological nature. Which is to say, it is unsettling in a psychological nature and I completely love it.

It took time for me to love Inside, because my first reaction was to be scared. It scared me how much of this broken man I could see in myself. It scared me to consider reality through the lens of somebody like me; a Millennial watching the world burn and trying to rally the strength to fight while Zoomers call you out of touch. It scared me to realise that I was already old enough to be out of touch. I’m still eleven and watching Wolf’s Rain, right? I’m still sitting with my fiance playing Doki Doki Literature Club and trying to keep my heart rate down. I’m not an adult, and my fiance and I certainly are not married now. We can’t be that much closer to the end credits.

Except we are. That’s what’s beautiful about horror. For all our worrying, we try to push the gravest of realities from our minds. Like the same task being pushed from one daily to-do list to the next, these fears only grow stronger and scarier the more we ignore them.

To rephrase an earlier question; do you want to find that your car is skidding along a dark country road at 80 miles per hour, and spend your precious half-seconds as Schrödinger’s cat contemplating death for the first time? No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to do it again either, frankly.

And yet, I can’t control reality. I don’t know if I’m making strides to paradise or walking with a knife at my back. I won’t know until I have that final “a-ha!” moment.

For now, I’ll feed my brain what it wants, and we’ll think about it all.