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To find out why exactly so many of us are drawn to creepy things, from pictures to stories, both fictional and real, we spoke with Michael Grant Kellermeyer, the editor in chief of Oldstyle Tales Press, an independent publisher based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. The publishing house specializes in critical, annotated and illustrated editions of classic ghost stories, weird fiction, and gothic horror from the Classical Era of Supernatural Fiction (1795 - 1935).
According to Kellermeyer, human beings, especially in today's culture, have a love-hate relationship with mortality. “In one sense, Death and the dark side of life are our greatest enemies, but in another sense, it makes life delicious and potent: we are drawn to brushing elbows with death (either in reality - say, by skydiving or doing extreme sports - or by proxy - say, by reading or watching media about people who work in dangerous jobs or who survived disasters).”
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He explained further: “While in previous generations, death was ever-present - certainly not a good thing - 21st-century Westerners are much less likely to have ever seen a dead body (even the majority of funerals either tend to be cremations or closed-casket), so as much as we do not long for more death in our worlds, we do certainly have an obsession with this part of our existence which we are all fated to encounter, but which is so tidily hidden from us.”
Kellermeyer believes that as a result, “psychoanalytically, we try to touch hands with this stranger who is destined to make our acquaintance by poring over true crime podcasts, horror movies, and spooky artwork.”
The editor in chief added that “we love horror (which is by definition an artform concerned with the gradual approach of death, whether natural or supernatural) because it allows us to vicariously experience something that is so taboo in our culture, but which we all - at the final moment of our life - are destined to encounter.”
Kellermeyer argues that a good, creepy story should leave a great deal to the imagination and should focus on insinuations which leave the imagination primed but wanting more.
So he gave one such example: “The great British horror writer M. R. James was a master of the chilling tease, knowing just what to expose in order to pique curiosity, but holding back enough that we can't get a good look. In a story called ‘Wailing Well,’ he has a shepherd describe a family of zombie-like ghosts to a group of boys: ‘Rags and bones, young gentlemen: all four of 'em: flutterin' rags and whity bones. It seemed to me as if I could hear 'em clackin' as they got along. Very slow they went, and lookin' from side to side.’ One of the boys asks what their faces looked like: ‘They hadn't much to call faces,’ said the shepherd, ‘but I could seem to see as they had teeth.’”
The key here is that we get a teasing taste that tells us something about their nature: “they aren't right - they're ragged and bony and move about in a wobbling, unstable manner,” Kellermeyer told us. Moreover, “they are malicious - they are clearly searching for something and while they have no faces to speak of, by God do they ever have teeth to tear with. A good horror story piques the imagination but lets it suffer in suspense,” he explained.
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As a scholar of 19th and 20th-century horror, Kellermeyer can definitely say that the sources of collective fears are both basic and unchanging and very subject to fashion and the cultural moment. “All fears essentially boil down to four things: fear of losing control; fear of the beast within ourselves; fear of the beast in other people; fear of oblivion and mortality. But the way these fears take shape has changed: in Victorian literature a major source of fear was insanity or losing civility in some manner: become more animalistic.”
The editor in chief explained: “For instance, a truly chilling trope in Victorian literature was a ghostly man seen roaming the countryside without a hat or coat. This may seem silly to us, but to them - in a society where a sane, healthy man wouldn't be walking outside bareheaded in his shirtsleeves - the way that death has made this man's ghost so forlorn was truly frightening: his fate has left him vulnerable and stripped him of his propriety.”
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