The Crazy Fears of a Horror Professor
Prompt #2: What fears do you have that someone might consider odd?
Perhaps my fears–or rather discomfort– are odd not so much for the average child or even adult but for my profession. So with utmost shame and candor, I will say it: I refuse to place any book with a cover featuring reasonably realistic renderings of ghosts, witches, skeletons…or a creepy face in my bedroom.
You see, I’m a professor and scholar of horror literature — and I’ve been doing the latter for nearly 30 years if you include my grad school days. But let me backtrack a bit.
This terror of such images started when I was 5. I remember a comic book that I wanted so badly because it was “scary.” I suppose the supernatural already fascinated me, partly because I had already sat alongside my mother at the age of 3 watching Dark Shadows when it first aired; I was weaned on horror, as I tell my undergraduates year after year. But I guess this comic book must have been just a tad too frightening for me because I later cried, wanting my mother to destroy it: in fact, I would not sleep until she tore it up. I am still deeply embarrassed to admit this.
Then when I was 6, I was entranced by a pop-up book, The Wishing Ring, of which our school library had a copy. I wanted one for myself too. But there was one illustration that fixated me: a gruesome, headless monster behind a closet door. As my mother noticed that I kept looking at it, she decided to stick a little smiley face on it — probably afraid I was going to have her rip up this book too.
At any rate, I don’t know why that illustration loomed over my imagination, especially since the headless monster is revealed by the conclusion of the book to be just a mannequin and all of the seemingly supernatural entities just ordinary household items or furnishings. Books like these from the late 1960s were in step with the new cartoon series, Scooby Doo, that dealt with the explained supernatural and the Nancy Drew detective novel series— successors of sorts to the original late 18th-century English mistress of horror, Ann Radcliffe, whose haunted castles mostly turned out to be not so haunted. Spooks do NOT exist was the message in our new age of enlightenment — or at least, for children.
Nonetheless, my fear of these illustrations was never enough to deter me from watching horror movies or reading ghost stories. In fact, the 8- or 9-year-old me couldn’t wait for Friday and Saturday nights when Mom and I watched such shows as Creature Feature and Ghost Story/Circle of Fear on our black and white TV. Most of the time, I was fairly disappointed that a movie wasn’t sufficiently frightening.
As time passed, I would eventually write a doctoral dissertation on the 18th-century Gothic novel at Oxford under the supervision of the late Romanticist Marilyn Butler — and continue researching and dissecting horror through the years: learning why, for instance, Irish writers glommed onto the vampire in the late 19th century. Why the idea of the double fascinated Scottish and Irish writers alike. Why child abuse was a central theme in American horror of the 1970s. And how Hollywood vampire flicks of the 1950s and especially 60s reflect the fears of communism and scientism while aligning with the ideas of second-wave feminism as I’ve just discussed in a chapter for the forthcoming Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. In short, I’m a seasoned pro who understands how horror was created and why it appeals.
So when I hear a strange noise late at night, I am far more likely to think it’s an intruder than some otherworldly entity. If my cats suddenly look rapt with attention, I’m more likely to think they have detected an insect or mouse than that they’ve detected a spirit. And if my previously difficult to open door suddenly blows open — as it did a few years ago, causing all the other doors in the hallway to blow open as well (the cats looked truly alarmed then) — I am unlikely to think it was caused by the spirit of my dead mother just when I was writing about her. It was merely a very windy night.
But, of course, knowledge and logic can’t entirely quell all of our quirky tendencies — which is why I’m writing about my crazy reluctance to put books with “scary” covers in my bedroom.
Interestingly too, I have never been able to place a skeleton or ghost Halloween decoration on my lawn despite my fondness for this holiday, And despite that my large front yard that sits atop a hill is probably the perfect scene for a tiny graveyard. I am simply content to admire them in other people’s yards.
Beyond that, I wonder if there’s a part of me that is possessed by the early, primitive fear that somehow these pictures of objects will come alive in the middle of the night and “get” me? Or have I absorbed my mother’s superstitious belief that anything dealing with death is somehow morbid (despite her own interest in horror)? Maybe I’ve watched too many Poltergeist and Annabelle films where dolls and other inanimate objects suddenly come alive. Or read too many stories such as M.R. James’ “The Mezzotint” (1904) where an engraving changes each time the protagonist looks at it, taking on more disturbing aspects. Or maybe I’ve taught the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, with its haunted portrait, one too many times — an idea that is replicated in Disney Haunted Mansion ride with its haunted portrait gallery.
But I take some comfort that I stand in reasonably good company with Stephen King, who has admitted to keeping his feet under the covers for fear that something will grab them from under the bed–and that he checks under the beds for monsters on a nightly basis. Maybe because in the world of horror, anything is possible. That is what keeps the genre going — and folks like me researching and writing about it.
© Frances A. Chiu, July 21, 2023
@Writingpromptjourney @nonfiction
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