Would Dracula have the same fascination if he drank blood just because he liked it? No, like their other dead colleagues, the very fact of their existence fills us with horror. If he weren’t stitched together from parts of dead bodies, Frankenstein’s monster would be just a misunderstood, deformed man. We can blame him, not the cruelty of the universe.Ĭertainly, being butchered by a maniac is a terrible thing, but what if there’s something even worse? What if dying isn’t the end? Ghosts, zombies, vampires, the Frankenstein monster, all are terrifying not only because of what they do to the living, but specifically because they are already dead. Or even run a small motel far from the main highway. In horror, the source of this helplessness can wear a hockey mask. It’s scary to think that these people did nothing to deserve such a fate, that even if we behave ourselves and are kind to strangers, death can still come for us out of the blue. It’s frightening when we see horrible things happen to good people-when a sweet little old lady is run over by a truck, when a child is diagnosed with inoperable cancer, when an earthquake wipes out a whole village. This seeming randomness-the same randomness of accidents or fatal diseases-pushes the story into the realm of horror. The victim never did anything to deserve his fate, he never “did anything” to the killer-he may not even know the killer-and yet there he is, about to be stabbed, strangled, axed or murdered in any number of inventive, shocking ways. 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.

Death Mask by Graham Masterton