Fear has an undeserved bad reputation. At least in part. Let us remember that if we are here it is because our ancestors turned away when they saw a snake and did not try to poke a finger in the eye of a lion while it was taking a nap. Fear is a defense mechanism, as Enric Soler, relational psychologist and professor at the Open University of Catalonia, explains to us. Thanks to fear we evaluate the perception of a threat and how we can act in the face of it. In fact, many monster stories are exaggerated stories “with which parents prepare their children for real threats,” Stephen T. Asma, philosopher, author of On Monsters and co-host with Paul Giamatti of the podcast Chinwag. That is, we tell ourselves stories to deal with uncertainty.
If we look at our fears, we see that they are not new. Times change, and monsters too, and they go from mythology and religion to the voyages of explorers and the excesses of science. But “under the diversity we find some common universals,” Asma recalls, such as the fear of snakes, spiders and the dark.
Aren't novels and movies about rebelling artificial intelligences, from Terminator to Ex Machina, a remake of Frankenstein, of Mary Shelley? Stories like these help us stop at dangers that we had not given importance to, as happens in the best episodes of Black Mirror, or they allow us to see them from another perspective: in Shelley's novel, the creature is not the true villain, no matter how monstrous it is. On the contrary, he is a sensitive and intelligent character who finds himself betrayed and abandoned by Victor Frankenstein. And that is one of the dangers of artificial intelligence: that someone programs it just because they can and doesn't worry about the consequences, like Elon Musk did when he bought Twitter.
That's assuming someone creates a superintelligence. Our imagination moves faster than technology: we are still waiting for an evil doctor to resurrect a corpse, or for a company to manufacture clones that will be organ banks for millionaires. What's more, where are the robots that were going to take our jobs? And more importantly, does anyone know if they will arrive before Monday?
But the goal of fear is not to turn us into fortunetellers, but rather to help us sense possible dangers so we can confront them. Whether it's a killer algorithm or the end of the world.
The end of civilization is not a new fear: the Genesis already narrates the universal flood and the Old Testament closes with the Apocalypse. Apart from divine origin, chaos can have economic causes, as in the novel The Mandibles, by Lionel Shriver. Or climatic, as in The submerged world, by JG Ballard. Or, of course, pandemics, as in the video game and series The Last of Us. These are not just fictions: Enric Soler reminds us how the war in Ukraine has restored fear of the nuclear threat in Europe, as during the Cold War.
These stories tell something that terrifies us: we can lose everything without being able to do anything or have any guilt, beyond forgetting the reusable bag when we go to the supermarket. The heroic protagonists of these stories try to regain control as best they can, often taking care of a child, who represents hope, the future, humanity… All those things that make us yawn because, let's be honest, we would be more like Will Forte of The last man on Earth, who, after surviving a pandemic by chance, dedicates himself to looting liquor stores.
Be careful: as your brother-in-law says, all excesses are bad. If anarchy scares us, we are also terrified by the excess of order that we see in dystopias like 1984. But today terror does not come from an all-powerful dictator like Big Brother, in the style of Hitler or Stalin, but from an agent of chaos like Donald Trump, Javier Milei or the populist played by Emma Thompson in the series Years and Years.
We have a more bearable version of the apocalypse in some films of the eighties and nineties, which formed what the critic Barry Keith Grant called “yuppy horror”. The threat to the middle class came from babysitters (The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), lovers (Fatal Attraction), friends who put drugs in their soda. (Bad influences) or even scary tenants: the script of Suddenly a stranger a Vox militant could sign it, except that Michael Keaton, the restless squatter, it is white. This tradition of middle-class horror has reached the German and Canadian television films that make my mother happy after dinner on Saturdays.
The fear is no longer in haunted houses, but in the mortgage, and the economic horror is still present, although in a different way. In Philosophy, terror and the sinister, The philosopher Enrique Lynch talks about the new monster that appeared after the 2008 crisis: precariousness, which makes us watch films like more with pleasure than fear. The menu, where the victims are the posh.
Another updated fear is that of curses, which no longer come from the devil, but from genetics. Our families are not cursed because we steal an amulet from a witch, but because perhaps they find us two copies of the APOE4 gene and we are more likely to develop Alzheimer's. Curses also serve to talk about mental health and trauma, such as The Haunting of Hill House the Mike Flanagan series.
In reality, we lost our fear of the fantastic decades ago: in the sixties, The Monsters and The Addams Family They showed us that vampires and werewolves make us laugh and what is disturbing is the family and teenagers (as in The Exorcist). Something similar happens in the comedy What We Do in the Shadows: the energy vampire's talks are scarier than the fangs, blood and coffins.
Pandemic terror usually has zombies (or infected, as the case may be) as enemies. David J. Skal tells in his newly reissued Monster Show that these stories were a metaphor for communist propaganda that threatened to infect honest citizens. This begins to change in 1978, writes Skal. Zombie, by George A. Romero (sequel to The night of the Living Dead), It takes place in a shopping center. Zombies are no longer a metaphor for the enemy, but for ourselves. Don't we behave like walking corpses when we get on the bus to go to the office, or when sales come and we fight over a T-shirt?
Chuck Klosterman proposes another reading in his book x: we are the zombie hunters. And zombies are those tasks that are repeated and, like zombies, are never finished. There's always a report to finish, another meeting to attend, or an email to answer. When you cross something off your to-do list, it's like sticking an ax into the head of the living dead: there's always another one behind it. Or, worse, in Teams.
The stories we tell ourselves help us understand our fears, but they also make us more manipulable. As Bernat Castany Prado writes in A philosophy of fear, “There are political options that profit from fear. That is why they need to demonize and repress the impulses of collaboration” and excite “those of distrust and aggression”, which they present as realistic and patriotic. These politicians use fear to make us paranoid and xenophobic.
Like in alien stories. Skal writes that during the Cold War, aliens infiltrated the United States just like Soviet spies, as in Invaders from Mars.
There are stories that try to see this clash of cultures in another way. For example, as an attempt to communicate with other civilizations. Sometimes failed, as in Fiasco, by Stanisław Lem. Sometimes more successful, as in The arrival, Ted Chiang's story made into a film in 2016 by Denis Villeneuve. There is also room for satire on racism and apartheid, like in District 9.
We can not only see foreigners as threats. With political polarization, we are in danger of thinking that anyone with different ideas is evil or stupid. The possibility of error or the objective of the agreement is not contemplated: the other is a Martian who threatens our way of life and the only response is for us to return to his planet. The fact that there is no other planet is only a technical detail that we will resolve later.
Historian Joanna Bourke writes in Fear: a cultural history that fear has led us “to reflect deeply” and to be aware that we cannot control everything. But it is also a dangerous emotion, if instead of thinking and acting we hide behind a bush or under the shout of a slogan. Being afraid is not for cowards. What is cowardly is not using that fear to figure out what really scares us and how we can respond without it paralyzing or dividing us.
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