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An Existential Excavation
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There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Every October (and for many, beginning in September), something peculiar happens.

Otherwise rational human beings begin decorating their homes with skeletons, gravestones, severed limbs, and representations of decomposing human remains.

We carve grotesque faces into vegetables, dress our children as murderers and monsters, and voluntarily enter darkened buildings populated by people who are there specifically to scare us. We watch violent, terrifying movies—and we love it.

We spend billions of dollars celebrating things that we normally expend considerable effort to avoid.

Halloween is the most conspicuous expression of something much larger.

We are fascinated by Gothic cathedrals, abandoned castles, moonlit graveyards, vampires, ghosts, and dark, melancholy music. We cultivate elaborate black leather and lace Gothic appearances, and transform symbols of death and danger into objects of beauty, desire, and fascination.

The human mind is exquisitely adapted to recognize and avoid danger. Why, then, do we deliberately seek out experiences designed to provoke fear? And what might our fascination with darkness reveal about our pursuit of happiness?

Pull up a chair.

The shadows are growing long, and something is scratching at the window.

We have some excavating to do.

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The Delicious Terror of Being Afraid

Fear is among our oldest and most useful biological adaptations.
Long before human beings developed language, philosophy, or the questionable judgment required to invent reality television, our ancestors possessed neural systems capable of detecting threats and preparing the body to respond.

Our fight, flight, or freeze response evolved over millions of years—involving coordinated activity across multiple brain regions and physiological systems—to maintain the difference between survival and becoming lunch.

So why would we deliberately activate them?

First, fear becomes an entirely different experience when we believe we are safe.

Imagine you go to the local haunted house. Your heart races, your breathing quickens, your muscles tense. Somewhere in the darkness, a chainsaw roars to life.

And you paid twenty bucks to be there.

Your nervous system responds to a perceived threat while your conscious mind retains enough awareness of the situation to recognize that the danger is simulated.

That distinction creates what we call recreational fear.

In a 2020 study published in Psychological Science, researchers equipped 110 visitors to a haunted attraction with heart-rate monitors and examined their responses to frightening experiences.

They discovered that the relationship between fear and enjoyment followed an inverted U-shaped curve: too little fear was boring and too much fear was unpleasant.

In other words, there appears to be an optimal amount of (simulated) terror.

The experience offers physiological excitement without real exposure to the consequences of genuine catastrophe. We get to confront the monster, and afterward, we get to go home.

Preferably with popcorn.

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Monsters in the Laboratory

There is another, potentially more consequential explanation for our attraction to darkness:

Perhaps frightening experiences help us prepare for the things we fear.

Evolutionary approaches to horror suggest that fictional threats may function as simulations, allowing us to explore dangerous situations without experiencing their full real-world consequences.

A post-apocalyptic nightmare becomes an opportunity to imagine how we might respond in a real-life situation.

A study published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2021 by Coltan Scrivner and colleagues examined relationships among horror-film preferences, morbid curiosity, and psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Horror-film fans reported less psychological distress during the pandemic, while people with greater morbid curiosity demonstrated higher levels of positive resilience. Fans of apocalyptic films reported greater preparedness.

We rehearse conversations before difficult meetings and imagine possible outcomes before important decisions. We practice emergency procedures before emergencies occur.

Why wouldn't we also rehearse fear?

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Freud Opens the Crypt

In his 1920 work Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud proposed that human motivation could not be explained entirely by our pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain.

He had become fascinated by the tendency of some individuals to revisit psychologically painful experiences; to behave in ways that appeared fundamentally contrary to their own well-being.
Freud eventually proposed the existence of a death drive: the Todestrieb.

In his later theoretical formulations, he contrasted destructive tendencies with Eros, the forces associated with life, preservation, and connection.

Freud suggested that living organisms might possess an inherent tendency to reduce tension and, ultimately, return to an inorganic state.

Life, in this formulation, contains within itself a movement toward its own dissolution.

It is a magnificent Gothic image: the seeds of death residing within the living, the darkness waiting inside the light.

Freud’s death drive might reflect a deeper human preoccupation with the forces that threaten our existence. We are, after all, living organisms capable of contemplating our own extinction.

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The Seduction of Darkness: Eros Meets Thanatos

Gothic culture contains an extraordinary contradiction: spend three hours applying makeup to look dead—and another three hours to look irresistibly attractive.

Dark lace. Black leather. Fishnets. Corsets. Dramatic eye makeup. Pale complexions and heavy boots. Elaborate jewelry and hair dyed midnight black, crimson, or deep violet.

And, of course, carefully fitted vampire fangs.

These aesthetic choices can communicate mystery, rebellion, theatricality, individuality, sensuality, and power.

Goth culture is neither exclusively erotic nor reducible to fashion. It encompasses music, literature, visual art, and an appreciation for melancholy and the macabre.

Consider a particularly revealing example of our attraction to darkness:

The vampire was once primarily an object of supernatural dread: a parasitic creature that violated the boundary between life and death. Yet modern vampire mythology frequently portrays these creatures as extraordinarily beautiful, seductive, powerful, and desirable.

The vampire is simultaneously predator and lover, dead and eternally youthful, dangerous and irresistible.

The bite itself becomes an extraordinarily potent symbol of intimacy, vulnerability, penetration, surrender, possession, and transformation. The neck, ordinarily a vulnerable region of the body, becomes an erotic and transformative focal point.

From Bram Stoker's Dracula to Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, Gothic fiction has repeatedly employed vampirism to explore forbidden desire, sexuality, power, and the transgression of social boundaries.

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A Love-Fear Relationship

Fear and sexual excitement partially overlap, physiologically, although their neural and hormonal mechanisms are not identical.
Under certain circumstances, arousal associated with one experience can influence emotional responses to another.

A famous 1974 experiment by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron examined this possibility by approaching men in different settings, including a frightening suspension bridge. Men approached by an attractive female researcher after crossing the bridge were more likely to produce sexual imagery and subsequently contact her than men approached in a less arousing setting.

Gothic eroticism offers a cultural expression of this fascinating relationship: soft lace against hard leather, exposed skin against severe clothing, beauty against decay.

The vampire image's greatest appeal is not that it represents death, but that it represents desire powerful enough to transcend death.

Eros and Thanatos; creation and destruction. The longing for immortality and the inevitability of physical decay.

All embodied in a creature that is eternally young, eternally hungry, eternally desirable, and eternally dead.

We don't necessarily want the vampire to kill us; we want the vampire to want us.

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Jung's Shadow Knocks at the Door

Carl Gustav Jung approached the darkness from another direction.

Where Freud explored unconscious drives, Jung became increasingly concerned with the relationship between consciousness and the parts of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge. He named one important aspect of this relationship the shadow.

The shadow includes characteristics, impulses, emotions, and possibilities that an individual rejects, suppresses, or fails to recognize as belonging to the self. Not everything in the shadow is necessarily evil: it may contain creativity, assertiveness, sexuality, ambition, or other qualities that conflict with our enculturated and consciously maintained identity.But it is frequently associated with the darker dimensions of human nature: aggression, envy, cruelty, resentment.

We possess the capacity to do things we would prefer to believe ourselves incapable of doing.

Perhaps monsters fascinate us because they embody qualities we recognize, however reluctantly, within ourselves.

Dracula is not merely a supernatural predator; he represents forbidden desire, domination, immortality, and the transgression of moral boundaries.

Frankenstein's creature is not simply a grotesque assemblage of human remains; he embodies rejection, isolation, rage, and the terrible consequences of refusing responsibility for what we create.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the respectable physician and the monstrous criminal—are not separate individuals; they are manifestations of the same human being.

The monster is not always waiting outside the castle; sometimes it owns the castle.

And sometimes the monster is looking back at us from the mirror.

We may enjoy an encounter with monsters because they provide symbolic opportunities to confront what we ordinarily prefer to keep hidden.

And perhaps the most frightening revelation is not that monsters exist; it is that they are sometimes disturbingly familiar.

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The Sound of Darkness

We deliberately listen to music that evokes sorrow, dread, loneliness, despair, death, and supernatural terror, and it can make us feel absolutely alive.

The opening of Black Sabbath's eponymous 1970 album offers one of rock music's most recognizable examples: rain, thunder, a tolling bell.

And then an ominous guitar figure built around the tritone, an interval historically associated in popular musical mythology with diabolus in musica—the devil in music.

The historical relationship between the tritone and medieval prohibitions is considerably more complicated than the legend suggests. Nevertheless, its dissonant quality makes it an effective musical device for generating tension.

Black Sabbath transformed that tension into an entirely new musical vocabulary: the ominous became exhilarating; the frightening became beautiful.

And the darkness became something audiences actively sought, to the tune (pun intended) of more than 7.8 million equivalent album sales and counting, 56 years later.

Later artists developed these possibilities in different directions.

Type O Negative combined Gothic melancholy, sensuality, dark humor, and Peter Steele's extraordinary baritone with musical textures that could sound simultaneously funereal and seductive.

Opeth juxtaposed ferocious death-metal passages with delicate acoustic interludes, complex harmonic structures, and moments of remarkable introspection.

My Chemical Romance's Welcome to the Black Parade transformed mortality, grief, memory, and perseverance into a theatrical rock anthem.

The music may evoke darkness, but the listener's experience can be exhilarating, cathartic, profoundly moving.

Studies of sad music have identified several mechanisms through which negative emotional material can produce positive aesthetic experiences.

These include emotional regulation, autobiographical memory, imaginative engagement, aesthetic appreciation, and the complex experience psychologists sometimes describe as being moved.

Experiencing sadness is not the same thing as appreciating the artistic representation of sadness, just as genuine terror is not the same as a musical representation of terror.

The aesthetic context changes the experience.

We can contemplate emotional states without necessarily being overwhelmed by them, and explore suffering without personally undergoing the circumstances that produced it.

We can discover beauty in artistic representations of experiences we would never voluntarily choose in real life.

And sometimes, music provides an expressive language for emotional experiences that ordinary speech cannot adequately communicate.

Perhaps this is why dark music can feel so intensely personal.
It doesn't necessarily create our darkness.

Sometimes it gives form to darkness we already recognize.

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The Sublime: When Beauty Becomes Terrifying

In his 1757 work A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Edmund Burke explored the relationship between terror, obscurity, vastness, power, and aesthetic experience.

Burke distinguished the sublime from ordinary beauty.
Beauty might be associated with harmony, delicacy, and pleasure. The sublime involves experiences so immense, powerful, or overwhelming that they challenge our ordinary sense of proportion.

A thunderstorm rolls across a desert plain.

Lightning illuminates distant mountains.

Thunder reverberates across the landscape.

The horizon disappears into darkness.

The experience may be frightening, but it can also be breathtakingly beautiful.

Imagine standing beneath the towering arches of a Gothic cathedral, or looking into the vast darkness between stars, or hearing an enormous orchestral crescendo, a pipe organ filling a cavernous sanctuary, or a massive distorted guitar chord that seems to shake the foundations of the earth.

Each may evoke something beyond ordinary pleasure.

Awe.

Wonder.

Humility.

The sensation of encountering something greater than ourselves.

Modern psychological research on awe suggests that experiences of perceived vastness and the need to revise existing mental frameworks can influence our sense of self and our relationship to the larger world.

And awe need not be pleasant in every circumstance; it can contain uncertainty, vulnerability, and even fear. But it can also produce feelings of connection, wonder, and transcendence.
Perhaps these experiences remind us that the universe is larger than our understanding of it.

For some of us, that is not a frightening realization, it is magnificent.

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The Uninvited Guest

There is, of course, one darkness that none of us can permanently avoid.

Death.

Whatever our beliefs concerning consciousness, spirituality, or the possibility of an afterlife, biological mortality remains a defining feature of the human condition.

And unlike the monsters inhabiting our favorite horror films, death requires no suspension of disbelief.

It is coming for all of us, no exceptions.

This awareness presents a remarkable psychological challenge.
Human beings uniquely possess the cognitive capacity to imagine futures in which they no longer exist. We are the only creature smart enough to realize we end but not nearly smart enough to understand what that means.

Ernest Becker explored this predicament in his influential 1973 book The Denial of Death.

Becker argued that much of human civilization could be understood as an elaborate response to the psychological problem of mortality.

We create institutions, traditions, religions, accomplishments, and systems of meaning that allow us to participate in something larger and more enduring than our individual lives.

Later, terror management theory developed aspects of Becker's argument into experimentally testable hypotheses. The theory proposes that awareness of mortality can influence behavior by increasing our reliance on cultural worldviews, self-esteem, and other psychological defenses.

The underlying existential question is unavoidable: How does a creature that knows it must die find the courage to live?

One answer is denial.

Another is distraction.

And a third is confrontation.

Which brings us to the Stoics.

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Memento Mori

Remember that you must die.

The phrase has become closely associated with Stoic philosophy, although its historical origins extend beyond the surviving writings of the major Stoic philosophers.

For thinkers such as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, contemplating mortality was not necessarily an exercise in morbidity, it was a discipline of perspective.

Consider how much of human life is consumed by trivial conflicts, imagined grievances, postponed ambitions, and anxieties about circumstances beyond our control.

We behave as though time were inexhaustible.

We wait for the perfect opportunity to pursue the lives we claim to desire, and one day, the opportunity disappears.

The Stoics understood that mortality gives urgency to existence.
Urgency can clarify our priorities.

When we genuinely recognize that our time is limited, we may become less willing to squander it; we may become more appreciative of ordinary experiences, more deliberate in our relationships, more courageous in our decisions.

More grateful for the simple, astonishing fact that we are alive.

Martin Heidegger described Being-toward-death as a fundamental dimension of authentic human existence.

Irvin Yalom, writing from the perspective of existential psychotherapy, explored how confronting mortality can stimulate profound changes in how people approach their lives.

The common thread is not that death is desirable, but that awareness of death can transform our understanding of life.

And that brings us back to Halloween.

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Why the Skeletons Are Dancing

Halloween is an extraordinary cultural invention. For one night, we transform some of our deepest fears into entertainment.

Death becomes a decoration.

The grave becomes a playground.

Ghosts become welcome visitors.

Adults compete to create the most horrifying displays imaginable.

We temporarily reverse the ordinary relationship between fear and avoidance: instead of fleeing the darkness, we invite safe representations of it into our homes.

Instead of suppressing thoughts of mortality, we surround ourselves with its symbols.

Instead of insisting that monsters do not exist, we pretend that they do.

And we have a marvelous time.

But our fascination with darkness extends far beyond October 31.

It lives in our music, our literature, our architecture.

Our fashion and mythology, our fantasies and art.

And sometimes, in the deepest recesses of our own psychological experience.

The darkness can frighten us, fascinate us, inspire us, seduce us.

It can remind us of our vulnerability and awaken our appreciation for existence.

The contemplation of mortality can encourage reflection.

These are not merely considerations for philosophers, psychologists, or people who spend suspicious amounts of time reading Edgar Allan Poe.

They are questions for anyone attempting to live a meaningful existence.

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Why We Crave the Dark

There is a temptation, particularly in contemporary discussions of happiness, to treat unpleasant emotions as problems requiring immediate correction: fear must be eliminated, sadness must be overcome, uncertainty must be resolved.

But human experience is not so conveniently divided. We can be frightened and fascinated, sad and grateful, uncertain and courageous.

We can recognize the inevitability of death while remaining passionately committed to life.

Some of our most meaningful experiences arise precisely because we recognize their impermanence.

Beneath the costumes and cobwebs, the vampires and werewolves, the haunted mansions and creaking crypts, lies an ancient human fascination with the boundaries of existence. We approach these boundaries because they remind us of something essential.

We are alive, but we are temporary. And we have choices to make.

So this October 31, enjoy the monsters, visit the haunted house, and watch the scary movie.

Listen to the music that makes your heart race.

Light the candles, tell ghost stories, and contemplate the mysteries that have fascinated humanity for thousands of years.

And in November, when the costumes have been put away and the jack-o'-lanterns have begun their inevitable decomposition, consider what the darkness might have taught you.

Perhaps the greatest horror is not that our lives will someday end.

Perhaps the greatest horror is reaching that end without having truly lived.

Happy Halloween!

Read my interview with Dr. Mehmet Yildiz here.

My novel, The Calling is available now in print and as an eBook.

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