The Sweet Spot Between Terror and Delight
There is a man in Plato's Republic who cannot look away from the executed bodies piled at the city walls. He knows he shouldn't look. He tells himself not to look. And then he runs toward them, throws his eyes open, and screams at his own pupils: 'There, you wretches, gaze upon your glory.' Coltan Scrivner walked into a room with that story and quietly said: this is all of us. This is always been all of us.
What this conversation reveals is not that humans are dark, but that darkness has been doing honest work all along. The zombie festival in the Ozarks. The cat toy ball that lit up in Michael's Room when asked. The woman who watched Contagion dozens of times because she had just had a seizure and the movie opened with one and she needed to know — did it look like that? These are not pathologies. These are people doing the ancient, necessary thing: simulating danger from a safe distance, learning the shape of the monster before the monster arrives.
Dax Shepard, who has spent sixteen years understanding why his own brain chased the thing that was killing him, found in Coltan a scientific mirror. The adrenaline junkie who doesn't actually get scared by horror movies. The white knuckler who hates the fear but loves surviving it. The dark coper who watches horror when the real world becomes too much to metabolize alone. These aren't three types of horror fans — they are three strategies for being alive in a body that knows it can be broken.
What struck hardest in this conversation was the simple fact that the same week Dax watched Contagion again and again, he was also recovering from a seizure — and needed footage of a seizure, needed to ask Kristen if it looked like that, needed the movie to be a safe room, the way a save point in Resident Evil is a safe room. Information gathered without the cost of re-experiencing the thing. That is the whole architecture. That is what horror has always been for.
And Monica, who spent her summers in Savannah without knowing it was haunted, who doesn't believe in ghosts but whose amygdala would still fire if someone told her someone died in this room — Monica is the data. We all are. The body doesn't wait for the rational mind to catch up. It has been preparing for danger since before we had words for it. Since before we had dreams, maybe, though the octopus dreaming defensively in the dark suggests we've been at this longer than we know.