The Face of All Your Fears: All Your Fears Unleashed

I hate to reuse this title, which I get from the song "Blinded by Fear" by the melodic death metal band, At The Gates, but it's a good title for this subject: real fear. It strikes me lately how silly our fears are today. In the first world we fear very trivial things, such as the fear of success, fear of talking to people, fear of our children (in the spirit of my other post with the same title), or anatidaephobia (the fear that somewhere a duck is watching you), et cetera. Then there is just a whole list of things that I would hesitate to call fears, but first world problems in general are simply pathetic. So why the critique on how lame our first world fears are? Because society has gotten to the point where we don't have anything real to fear. There is no great big ocean whose bounds know no end, or the creatures that inhabit that ocean. There is no dark forest filled with wicked beings of malicious intent. There are no ghosts in the attic or demons in the basement. Science and rationality have explored nearly ever crevice of the known world to tell us that there is nothing to fear, save for fear itself. And to be honest, being scared of fear itself is pretty lame.

I simply propose that we need real fears again; to fear real things, or at the least things that could be real. I had the honor of watching the video web series called Marble Hornets. It belongs to a sub-genre of horror called "found footage." We are all familiar to some degree with this genre, as Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield belong to it as well. Found footage essentially makes the viewers feel that the events in the film really happened and a camera used during the events was later found and released to theaters. While they are still fiction, they are presented as very real. It's a sort of immersive experience where the film follows us outside of the theater or beyond our television. They bring the horrors in the film into our reality, whereby we might question if these things exist.

Found footage horror reinvents horror to some degree. We can do anything with CGI, special effects, and cinematography that nothing in horror films are all that scary anymore. Found footage allows old, cliche ideas in horror to be brought back to life, and make them even scarier by bringing them into our reality. We can suddenly question whether or not their might be a witch in the woods (Blair Witch), or a serial killer in our house (Poughkeepsie Tapes), or a ghosts in the abandoned mental asylum (Grave Encounters), or succubi and children ghost and haunted houses (V/H/S).

Marble Hornets proposes something interesting, not a cliche horror entity, but rather something new entirely: Slender Man (albeit not invented by Marble Hornets). The Slender Man myth is quite young, but its myth and legend have been growing recently. Marble Hornets plays with this and brings it into new avenues for horror: the internet. As a web series we are brought to believe that this guy, Jay, posts these videos after something horrible happened or if he finds something new in his investigation. We are led to believe that his YouTube account keeps getting hacked and some antagonist who is posting strange videos, known as ToTheArk.

Suddenly we can be scared of the unknown again. Is something out there? Is something there when I turn my back? What about around the corner? What made that noise in the bushes? AHHHHH!

We need real fear back. We need to be scared of what is in the darkness. We need to be scared of what lies in the woods or below the waters; scared of what's behind the shower curtains or under the stairs. Why? So we won't have these petty fears we have today. And perhaps that is what is wrong with society: our fears are so petty that we act like imbeciles. I think the Cold War was the last time we had anything real to fear, and our fear of terrorism is a close runner-up (since that's the point of terrorism: create real fear).

And while I'm at it I might as well fully plug Marble Hornets (enjoy not sleeping):
Marble Hornets videos