![]() He has no logical motive to kill, no good reason, except in his own mind. One of horror’s central figures is the psychopath, the slasher, the person who wants only to kill, for reasons often unknown or nonexistent. ![]() I would be hard-pressed to name a horror novel or movie that doesn’t feature death or, at the very least, the threat of death. Horror brings us face to face with mortality and forces us to confront those primeval fears of a horrendous death and, even worse, what may happen to us after we die. ![]() ![]() The fear of death is the very basis of the horror genre. It remains in our brains, hard wired as a self-preservation mechanism. Our prehistoric ancestors were frightened of a noise in the dark because they feared, often with good cause, that the noise was made by something that could kill them. The unknown is usually only scary if you think it might harm you-or worse. ![]() Lovecraft famously once wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” Far be it from me to disagree with the Prophet of Providence, but I would suggest that actually the oldest fear is the fear of death. ![]()
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