What are you afraid of?

Fear is the way our brain responds to danger. But why do we enjoy it so much? That is a question I can´t answer because I am not a Biologist or Doctor, but I can say that we enjoy being afraid when we know we are safe, like when we are watching a movie we can turn off, or reading a book we can close.

Edgar Allan Poe brought our nightmares to the page, using his original imagination and taste for macabre themes to takes us, readers, on a trip to the unknown. After all, it is the unknown that scare us the most. The ultimate unknown is death. When we think about our expiration date we might ask ourselves: When will it happen? How? Will it hurt? What happens next?

Most of Poe’s characters head directly to doom and despair, and oftener perish in an unsightly manner. No matter how much Poe´s characters try to escape death or ignore it, it always catches up to them.  

Of course there are other authors that have been able to make readers feel afraid, not in the same manner as Poe perhaps, but just as afraid. George Orwell brought Room 101 to the literary world in his novel 1984. What is Room 101? It is the place where your nightmares come true. You and only you know what that is.

In Orwell’s novel, Winston (the protagonist) attempted to escape the omnipresent Big Brother, yet he knew he would eventually be caught and punished for trying to rebel against the system. He is then brought to Room 101, where he is threatened to have his face eaten by rats: What he feared the most.

When people in Orwell´s novel rebel against Big Brother, they go into Room 101. When Poe’s characters attempt to avoid death, they die (or worst in some cases). In both cases the outcome is the same. There is no escape.

A concrete example of how this is true in Poe’s stories is The Masque of the Red Death (1845). In it, Prince Prospero locks the gates of his castle in an attempt to keep the red plague out. He celebrates what he thinks is his triumph over death by having a masquerade ball. But the Red Death itself shows up at the ball, and all the attending drop dead to the floor. All that is left is “darkness, decay, and the Red Death” (Poe 10).

In Orwell´s case, Winston might as well be dead. Room 101 took his humanity. He can no longer feel, and he no longer has hope. He belongs to Big Brother.

What is most dreadful, death of the body or death of the spirit?

I believe it is impossible to know the answer to that question without being in a situation that requires you to choose. We like to think that we are smarter than Poe’s characters, more accepting of death than Prince Prospero, and stronger than Winston. We all like to think that we would rather die standing than live on our knees. But would you really endure hours of torture and face your greatest fear?

And that is where the real horror is, inside us, buried underneath our personal convictions and well-rounded values. Take that away, and we are the monsters.

Fear has always been a subject of interest to artist of all time periods. Some write about it lightly and others take a darker route, but always the ultimate fear is facing your own mortality.

To end on a light note I´ll leave you with my favorite quotes about death, and a trailer for the movie Dread (2009), directed by Anthony Diblasi, which is about students doing a research project about people’s greatest fears, and of course, things take a dark turn, because it is a film meant to entertain.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure” (Barrie 75)

References:

Barrie, James Matthew. Peter Pan. Broadview Press, 2011.

Orwell, George. Nineteen eighty-four. Random House LLC, 2009.

Poe, Edgar Allan. The masque of the Red Death. United Holdings Group, 1980.