This opinion piece was written by Leo O
Y’know, when you think of something scary, you think of vampires, zombies, bats, and all those Halloween creatures. There’s also a dark theme you can put on any fierce animal, let’s say, a tiger, to make it scary. A yellow tiger might look strong, but a black, purple, and red tiger would look absolutely scary. Of course, these are fine examples of the dark.
The thing is, the reason we don’t think of tigers or any natural animal as a monster is probably because they’re not nocturnal. A zombie and a vampire can strike at night, but not a tiger or a lion or a rabbit. It’s why anything zombified makes it scarier than before. What’s scarier, a normal tiger with some brown stripes or a zombie tiger, full of bones and killing intent.
A human can be awake at night, but they aren’t considered nocturnal. Plus, humans are used to humans, so we don’t think humans are so scary. A zombified human? That’s scary, because A, it’s nocturnal, and B, it looks scary. Same goes for vampires.
The point of trying to make is that Creatures-of-the-Night are considered as scary. It’s why monsters are the main enemies of a show or cartoon, and even anime always adds fright with something nocturnal and scary.
But I’ve never seen something really scary in real life. After all, what is considered scary only goes for one person. However, tension is something different. Imagine a room with a bomb ticking off and you’re trapped inside. Sure, it’s unlikely, but it can happen. Now, imagine that but with a horde of zombies coming your way, and you have 2 problems. This is how you make something scary AND tense!
Creatures of the night really help to create some sort of fear, but it’s never supposed to happen by itself. It’s why a final boss zombie that can summon hordes of undead is scarier than one zombie. However, true fear is also hopelessness.
What’s scarier than something that creates both tension and fear? Something that adds those two things and hopelessness together. Now, imagine a bomb which has 50 steps to un-do and 5 minutes to solve it, and a horde of zombies about to kill you. This is very scary.
But we don’t like that kind of fear. Halloween makes horror fun, and it’s why people don’t like whatever I said above. Now, how fun would it be if you have to solve a scary maze for a special prize that you get to choose from? Now that’s pretty fun to do. Even if scary is the opposite of fun, you can still reward people who dare to face fear. It’s one of the things that boost their courage, and even if it can be really scary it can make the horror activity fun and worth it.
However, you should still make it worth it, since if you’re going to give them a piece of candy just for all that effort of going through scary stuff, they aren’t going to take it. It’s why people do big prizes, like $10,000. It’s really amazing to see how people will go for something so small. It’s magic, it’s science, it’s halloween!!!!
The Swerve 