This essay is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What do we fear? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
I have to say, I’m not particularly confident in my own understanding of the true nature of fear, even though I make my living drawing horror manga. While there are many different types of horror — the abnormal mental states of psychological horror, the disturbing phenomena of occult horror, slasher horror, Gothic horror, science fiction horror, endless horrors — my efforts are mainly focused on the terror stirred up by the supernatural.
I can give free rein to my creativity when I set out in pursuit of the abnormal and unusual, of things that only come into being when I put pen to paper and draw bizarre worlds full of ghosts, monsters, curses and supernatural abilities.
My stories start from idle musings like “I’d hate it if this happened” or “it would be so scary if someone like this existed,” and from half-imagined images that provoke unease. I approach terror from the viewpoint of the senses, not from an academic perspective (I don’t have any expertise in the fields of psychology or pathology).
The question “what do we fear?” is one we could ask not only of humans, but of living creatures in general. While I don’t know whether more primitive creatures experience anything we would call “emotion,” they nevertheless have an instinct for fear, which is key to staying alive. Thanks to fear, a creature steers clear of danger to live another day.
I’m sure readers will have differing opinions as to whether my manga is scary or not, but I do aim to draw things that evoke terror. The truth is, however, I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat. Having a job that requires me to scare people while being a coward myself might seem like a contradiction, but it’s precisely because I am a coward that I draw scary stories. I believe a sort of ghoulish curiosity drives my interest in seeing and hearing about scary things and pushes me to create them.
Why would someone be curious about things that go bump in the night when they’re actually a scaredy-cat? The way I see it, this curiosity stems from a desire to prepare mentally for the terrors that might befall you in the future. It’s like studying frantically before a test, repeatedly practicing a speech or a presentation or carrying out drills to prepare for a natural disaster. Maybe we’re unconsciously trying to use the gore in splatter films to build an immunity to the unfamiliar so we can keep the terror to a minimum when we do encounter a ghost or need to escape from a chainsaw-wielding homicidal maniac.
To me, that’s the “why” of fear. Now I’d like to consider the “what.”
Boiled down to its essence, we fear things that lead to the death of our physical bodies or our social selves. The more undefined those things are, the more we fear them. While I can’t speak with certainty to every single fear, it does seem to me that when we perceive something that hints at death, a tiny seed of anxiety sprouts in our minds; when that unease closes in on us, it turns into terror and sends us into a state of panic.
People don’t like anxiety. It is the source of something disagreeable, the first glimmer of terror. We shrink from anxiety, from unease, and lean into security. I think this is the essential truth of all living creatures. Anxiety triggers phobias in a variety of forms in hypersensitive people — fear of heights, closed spaces, dirt and germs, pointed objects, clusters and holes, other people, our own bodies and on and on. Our fear might not be as extreme as a phobia, but we still live more or less tortured by anxiety over death, and we will most likely never be able to escape it. That is the fate of the living.
Since death is a fate we cannot escape, we must learn to get along as best as we can with our anxiety about it. How do we do that? To me, one of the best ways to make peace with anxiety is to devour horror stories and cultivate a resistance to fear. Since this conclusion just happens to suit my own interests, I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.
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