All Hallows' Eve is upon us, and with this holiday usually comes a desire for the macabre. Your average student will likely head to the local movie theater in an attempt to scare themselves into oblivion for a nominal fee. As society has become more "enlightened" and less concerned with the trappings of antiquity, what seems to frighten us also has changed. We no longer derive fear from stories that seek more to unnerve us in a psychological way. Society, with its technological capabilities that enable us to absorb every variety of media with the wave of a finger, has, in a way, desensitized us and has made us more easily bored. As our attention spans shorten and the list of things that are taboo these days are whittled down to but a few, Hollywood and other purveyors of the horror genre seek more to shock us with gore and violence than rely on more mentally disturbing horror. These changes in our conceptions of fear reflect a variety of changes within our society as a whole.
One horror fiction writer who relied on more meticulous means of horrifying us was our very own Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, one of America's finest literary figures, was lucky enough to walk the hallowed halls of this very university, adding to its rich history ... for one semester. His poems and short stories depicting the macabre in grisly detail, exploring such delightful themes as our own mortality and creeping insanity, are renowned worldwide as some of the best horror fiction ever written. Obviously, what is currently deemed frightening is radically different from what scared the average person in Poe's time. As technology and science has vanquished many of the boogeymen of old, much of what Poe wrote about is hardly the stuff of nightmares anymore. His famous short story "The Tell-Tale Heart," wherein a man kills his landlord and buries him beneath his floorboards only to be discovered by virtue of his still beating heart, is quite a creepy tale. But our knowledge of medicine has advanced to a point where many of these stories lose much of their spine-tingling effect when held up to the vast magnifying glass of science.
Now, of course there is no dearth of the supernatural in horror fiction today, but many of these modern works rely on gore, gratuitous violence and sex to get the blood flowing instead of focusing on our psychological state of fear. It is often said that the scariest monster is the one we imagine on our own. Where once writers relied on Poe's style of using the slow, creeping feelings of dread that are delicately drawn to their tension-filled breaking point, we see more and more people relying on cheap scares and blood for thrills. Third-year College student Nick Shaffer agrees, saying, "Our current conception of horror relies on immediate terror instead of the more classic conceptions and feelings of helplessness that Poe sought to elicit." Is this to say we are, in addition to being more scientifically knowledgeable and technologically adept, more violent and bloodthirsty as a society? Showing strong violence has certainly become more permissible in much of today's media, but people in Poe's age weren't exactly angelic either. Instead, the issue still seems to be one of a changing cultural atmosphere caused by technology. Because of great advancements in making more media accessible to everyone everywhere, we are exposed to so much more than people in the past. As a result, we are far more accepting and far less shocked by many things deemed too extreme back in the days of Poe. These changing attitudes as to what quickens the pulse also have their roots in some other drawbacks of the information age.
Our shortened attention spans also play a role in what we fear. We rely on varying forms of media to provide us with constant, instantaneuous stimulation. In turn, the slow and brooding literary style of many like Poe and other horror works, such as Stephen King's "The Shining" and Stanley Kubrick's film adaptation of that work, are far too "boring" for your average young person today. With a variety of more exciting alternatives readily available in all forms, people today don't have the time nor the inclination to indulge in such things anymore. The cognitive aspect of fear has all but been abandoned by mainstream horror movies and fiction.
Poe's writing and horror fiction that depend on the more psychological aspects of horror have so much more to offer than these cheap thrills. Poe's writings in particular, despite changing times, are still worth reading by virtue of the rather unnerving and genuinely creepy way he describes people, things and events. Anyone can write about someone being buried alive, but Poe is able to describe the sequence of events resulting from such heinous acts in a distinctively jarring way. Perhaps we should take a cue from our favorite dropout and indulge in some of his offerings instead this Halloween.
Pietro Sanitate is a Viewpoint writer for The Cavalier Daily.
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