The Anatomy of a Scare

Edgar Allan Poe and R.L. Stine.

What makes something “scary”? What is that mysterious element that makes spines tingle, stomachs tighten in disgust? What’s in a haunted house, a scary doll, an undead killer, a dark, still room, a cold breeze whispering secrets in your ear? What forces the hairs in the back of your neck upright, contracts the skin on your arms into goosebumps? I’ve heard the phenomenon explained evolutionarily—we are instinctively programmed to be afraid of things that threaten our safety. This is why we recoil at the sight of spiders or snakes, jump and scream when something unexpected lurches into our view. This is why we’re afraid of the dark—how can you know that you are safe when anything can be creeping up behind you, or lurking in the corner? This is only one type of horror, though, and it is far from the most potent. The type of fear that these imminent dangers produce is brief, fleeting. As soon as the stimulus goes away, so does the fear. A child’s bedroom does not remain scary at daybreak. A movie packed with jumpscares but lacking in substance might provoke a few screams, but it will not elicit any lasting emotion. There are deeper types of fear. There is fear of the unknown, where our fears of ghosts, demons, or even death itself can be classified. This may be related to the evolutionary fear of danger, but is more enduring, because by definition, it is the state of not knowing whether one is in danger or not. If the presence of danger is dubious, equally hazy is the point in which the threat subsides. Perhaps it is never over. This is also a more abstract fear, requiring an intelligent, imaginative mind. A creature who can only think about its immediate environment and its next meal cannot comprehend such abstractions. It’s more human than the jumpy, animalistic fear linked to survival. However, there is one type of fear that is even more disturbing. It is the type of fear that keeps you up at night, not observing, looking over your shoulder, but instead thinking. It is inseparable from humanity—in fact, it might even be conceptualized as fear of humanity. This is the fear of the distortion of oneself, of the darkest things that human beings are capable of. It is this type of fear that makes a horror story last.

In order to illustrate this, let’s examine some classics, starting with Edgar Allan Poe: the man many people would think of first when asked to name a classic horror writer. Poe is famous for his unreliable narrators, those speakers who have crossed the delicate barrier that separates sanity from madness, yet do not realize that they are insane. In fact, the crazier Poe’s narrators become, the greater the lengths they go through to convince the reader of their sanity. Take, for example, his famous story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” It begins with the narrator pleading for the reader to believe that he is sane, even as the story he is telling clearly illustrates the contrary. He confesses to murder fairly early on in the story, and reveals his motive: his dislike for his victim’s eye. He goes on to document an entire week’s worth of slowly, painfully slowly creeping into the man’s bedroom with the intent to kill, watching him sleep, then retreating. He recalls the murder, and its aftermath.

As he’s telling this story, it is his tone that is truly unsettling. He does not see the absurdity in his motive. He does not express any remorse. This does not mean that he didn’t feel remorse—it was distorted, buried deep within him. The story ends with the police arriving, the old man’s body already expertly hidden beneath the floorboards. The narrator, confident in his work, shows the police around the house, his calm demeanor ending all of their suspicions. This was when his guilt resurfaced. Buried deep within him, it had morphed into something uglier: paranoia. The police were about to leave, he’d nearly gotten away with murder. Then he panicked, heard the man’s heartbeat echoing from underneath the floorboards. He noticed that the police did not react to this sound, and this disturbed him even further. He felt that they were mocking him, certain that they could hear the noise too. He confessed, hysterical, and led them right to the body. These were the actions of a madman. Yet, even when retelling this story, he was adamant about his own sanity. This madness is where Poe derives the true horror of this story. It is common to think of evil as something reserved for cartoon villains. We do not realize that evil is rarely done purposefully, and if it is, it is done in order to fill some intolerable void. We do not realize that the madman always considers himself sane, and that he could live within any one of us.

Now let’s consider another story of Poe’s, published eight months after this one: “The Black Cat.” This time, our narrator is a good man gone bad. He was once a kind, softspoken man, a lover of animals. However, he’d gone cold, succumbed to alcoholism and ever-increasing rage. He and his wife owned several animals, which they’d acquired before he’d turned bitter, and he’d taken to abusing them as an outlet for his anger. In one particularly disturbing moment he gouged his cat’s eye right out of its skull. He admits that he did this precisely because he knew that he shouldn’t—he elicited a type of thrill from intentionally doing evil. Eventually, he killed his cat—hung it in his backyard. After this, he felt remorseful. The cat was his favorite pet, after all. He got a new cat, eerily identical to the first, complete with a missing eye and a patch of white around its neck in the spot where the other’s was compressed by the noose. His intention was to repent, make up for his previous sin. This went wrong. He began to resent the new cat even more than the previous one, tried to kill it, this time not for the thrill, but from pure hatred. This went wrong. As he attempted to murder the cat, his hand was stopped by his wife. He killed her instead in a fit of rage. At the end, we have a scene resembling the end of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” He hides his wife’s body in the house, this time in the wall instead of under the floorboards. The police arrive looking for his victim. He shows them around, confident that they will never discover his crime. Only this time, what betrays him is not his conscience, but his victim. He had accidentally trapped his cat in the wall next to the body, and it was still alive.

We do not realize that the madman always considers himself sane, and that he could live within any one of us.

There are some similarities between the two stories. Both have narrators who do not recognize their own insanity. Both detail a murder—in fact, “The Black Cat” contains two. Both murderers bury their victims’ bodies right in their own house, perhaps as a testament to their unfeeling demeanor, or a symbol of how we can never really be free of our terrible deeds. In many ways “The Black Cat” reads like a more mature version of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The narrator’s motives are more developed. While the narrator of “The Tell Tale Heart” has virtually no characteristics apart from paranoia and calculated madness, the one in “The Black Cat” has a backstory. The reader has some idea of who he was before he went mad. He was once a good man, corrupted by alcohol and unresolved rage, and eventually a crippling guilt that distorts him more and more with every crime. He seems real. His story could happen to anybody. And his descent into madness was so gradual, so natural, that he did not suspect at all that he might be crazy. The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” takes such great lengths to convince the reader of his sanity that it is obvious he does not truly believe his own words. He is trying to convince himself of them, surely, but if he truly believed himself sane, the fact that the reader might disagree would never have crossed his mind. The narrator of “The Black Cat” has no such awareness. He tells his story with the same matter-of-factness, justifies his actions with the same remorselessness, but he does not acknowledge that there is anything strange about this. And, at the end, when he fools the police into believing that he is innocent, it is his arrogance, not his subconscious remorse, that ultimately betrays him.

What is it about these stories that unsettle us? For one, they are possible. Sure, there’s a supernatural element to “The Black Cat” (in the form of the ‘zombie cat’ that presents itself to the narrator as a perfect copy of the first). But the truly unsettling thing about these stories is that they blur the line between the real and unreal. The narrators hallucinate, justify the unjustifiable. How could someone claim to love somebody, and then elaborately plot to kill them? How could these heartless murderers come to exist at all? I consider “The Black Cat” the superior of these two stories because it hints at an answer to this question. Consider this line, from its second paragraph:

“From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions”

The narrator used to adore his wife, precisely because she was as kind and loving as he was. They lived happily together for years before he turned callous and moody. He abused his wife, blaming his transgressions on alcohol. I do not believe his excuse. Alcohol may exacerbate a moral disease, but it is incapable of causing one. Addiction is a response to some internal corruption. But how did this man get corrupted? Poe’s story does not answer this question. The reader is just supposed to take this transformation for granted—the focus of the story is what happens next. To examine the process of corruption itself, I will discuss another horror classic, one which derives its ‘scares’ from this very type of change in character.

I would guess that, at any given moment, most of the fear being experienced in the world is occurring in the minds of children. Children are always afraid. They do not know as much as adults—there could be a danger lurking around any corner that they simply have not encountered yet. They have not yet settled into the adult worldview that they know everything there is to know about reality. To add to this, their imaginations are far more active. Monsters under the bed, ghosts that grab your ankles as you sleep. In a child’s mind, who’s to say these things do not exist? Any strange sound or shadow could be a ghoul, or a murderer. We forget, as adults, the fearfulness of childhood. It is for this reason that I believe children’s horror must elicit the most terror of all. Its audience is more receptive, more innocent. Things which adults have grown callous to are still terrifying to a child.

I often assert that a good children’s story and a good adult story differ only in subject matter—their structure, and their impact, are the same. A classic is a classic, and for this reason, my next subject of analysis will be a children’s story, undoubtedly many people’s first introduction to the horror genre. I am talking about a classic Goosebumps story: The Haunted Mask. I was not a fan of the Goosebumps series as a kid. I was easily frightened back then; the mere idea of reading a ‘scary’ book would have been enough to give me nightmares. Thus, my first introduction to The Haunted Mask came as an adult. Reading this book with my overly analytical adult mind undoubtedly gave me a different perspective. I was not ‘scared’ the way an adult might be, but I did feel a decent amount of suspense. I was impressed, enough to argue that The Haunted Mask has more ‘depth’ to it than the two Poe stories I previously examined. It contains wisdom—perhaps more than R.L. Stine even intended (or perhaps not—and, either way, does it really matter? ). It has become a modern classic, one of R.L. Stine’s most widely read works nearly thirty years after its publication. It is considered by the author to be his ‘best Halloween story,’ and for good reason. Like all classics, it grasps at something which is fundamentally true. It tackles that elusive question: what makes good people turn bad?

Like all classics, it grasps at something which is fundamentally true. It tackles that elusive question: what makes good people turn bad?

The story is simple. Its protagonist is a young girl who is easily frightened. She is always teased by her friends because of how easy she is to scare. Her most frequent teasers are two boys from school who pull pranks on her all the time. It’s Halloween night, and it’s time for our protagonist to get her revenge. She goes to the store and buys a really scary mask from a creepy man. The mask scares her, of course, but she ignores this—after all, she’s scared of everything. She soon finds that she is not the only person to be scared of this mask. Suddenly, the timid girl wields the power to make total strangers cower with fear before her. She goes trick-or-treating, feeling powerful, ecstatic, intent on scaring the two bullies on Halloween. There is only one problem: the mask has also turned her mean. In addition to giving her the power to scare people, it compelled her to use it. She found herself frightening little kids, being mean to her best friend, without really understanding why she was doing any of those things. After delivering her scare to the boys, she found that she couldn’t take the mask off. It was stuck on her face! Terrified, she went back to the man who sold her the mask. He told her that his masks were the result of some kind of experiments gone wrong (he called them the “unloved”). At first he said that he could not help her, that the mask was stuck on her face forever. Then, he told her that this wasn’t exactly true. The masks could be taken off exactly once, with an act of love. It is ultimately the girl’s remembrance of her love for her mother that gets the frightening mask off of her.

It is a remarkable story. Its symbolism is airtight. The girl is made fun of, so she turns mean. She enjoys turning mean—it saves her from being a victim. For once, instead of being scared, she can scare others. I love the little detail where she suppresses her own fear of the shop full of terrifying masks. In a real-life transformation from good to evil, pretty to “ugly,” such suppression of fear often happens. The person might be repulsed by the facade that they put on. But they have been taught that their feelings do not matter, that it is wiser to ignore them. And then, as always happens when one puts on a facade, it becomes their personality. It is impossible to pretend to be mean for self-preservation while still remaining a nice person. It can be done once or twice—there is a detail in The Haunted Mask where the girl has trouble taking the mask off after scaring her brother, the first person to see the mask. She acts on the compulsion to be mean to him, and then finds that the mask is very difficult to take off. She can take it off, but not easily. This is like a person who has become mean for the first time. They can go back, but with effort. However, once it’s become a part of their personality, they can’t just “take off the mask.” It becomes who they are. It is probably true that only a grand gesture of love can save them at that point. They have to undergo a complete transformation, let love back into their life.

I bet all of the mean, angry people that we see in this world have undergone such a transformation. Perhaps they all started out wielding masks, defending themselves against the cruel world that they lived in that did not accept their meekness or their sensitivity. Perhaps somewhere along the way they lost the person underneath the mask—after all, you become who you pretend to be. I do not think it is a coincidence that the masks’ creator named them “The Unloved.” There is no love in the life of a person turned bitter and mean. But what comes first? Is it lack of love that turns a person this way, or is it the transformation that alienates them from the people around them? I think that, in most cases, it is the latter. But it is interesting that the protagonists in both “The Black Cat” and The Haunted Mask turned mean precisely because they were too nice.

I was terrified of demonic possessions as a kid. There was nothing scarier to me than the idea of being trapped in a body controlled by something evil. What was even scarier was the idea that I might be possessed without even knowing it. How different is this from the mask analogy? How different is it from “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”: stories where the narrators have turned evil, lost touch with reality, yet still remained convinced of their sanity? Loss of self: that’s what makes such stories scary. They acquaint us with our dark side. We like to forget that we are capable of evil. Perhaps we acknowledge this capability in our enemies, but it exists in all people. Even the supposedly nice ones. Even you. There is nothing scarier than a story which shows you exactly what you are, exactly what you could be.

I’m reminded of a favorite quote of mine:

“The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.”

Perhaps a variation of this is equally true: the scariest books are those that tell you what you know already, and wish you didn’t. If so, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and The Haunted Mask are all unlikely culprits. Maybe this shouldn’t be so surprising. After all, all the best books are reflections of the human condition. Is there any other way to write a classic?

Let’s start a dialogue. What scares you? What are your favorite horror stories? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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