The doomsday clock is ticking as I get closer and closer to needing to get my thesis on horror done. The experiment is finished, the results have been computed (as disappointing as they were) and it is now time to get writing, but I can’t. I have been in a funk for the last 10 days or so and I feel like I have lost a little something. My passion, drive, Lacanian phantasm; Who knows? So I decided that I have ignored by blog a little too much these last few months and I needed to write something that wasn’t necessarily academic.
Today I read an article by Matt Cardin, who runs a fantastic blog about the dark side of creativity and human nature called the Teeming Brain. If you like horror you need to be reading this blog. Today he posted this article in which he shares a quote about why it is that horror fans enjoy horror and it says
“It’s the same reason we climb a cliff and put our foot out over the open air and pull back. We’re daring the nightmare. You never feel more alive than in that moment.” -Benjamin Percy (emphasis added)
Daring the nightmare. Psychology has been trying to understand nightmares since Freud first postulated the interpretation of dreams. But what does it mean to dare the nightmare? To me it seemed like there were two ways to take it. You can take it in the context that the author put it, much like young children will dare one another to got and stand on the porch of an abandoned, and therefore certainly haunted, house. One gets as close to the edge of reason as can be safely done, brushes with horror, and then pulls away. I think many casual horror fans are like this. It is a test of courage, usually a social one, to prove ones,at least in the case of little boys at a “haunted house”, testicular fortitude. How much gross, how much shock, how much ichor can I stand before one has to turn away?
I feel however that there is one more way in which ones goes about daring the nightmare, one simply turns the tables of dare. You walk into nightmare’s realm with a boom-stick in your hands, crying out “Have at thee”. This is daring the nightmare, challenging it to bring on its worst onslaught of irrational and insane rules of engagement. But why would you do this to yourself? Why engage in horror this way? I don’t know if I have an answer to that. Horror authors have said a lot on this idea: King, Ligotti, Lovecraft, M.R.James and few others, but I don’t know if they are right either.
I started out this project of horror psychology actively avoiding the questions about the Why of horror, and trying to first establish the question What is horror. However, what I have found is that in horror psychology, just as in horror itself, all the lines are blurry and the regular rules do not seem to apply. I think that I have arrived to the conclusion that in horror psychology, when one dares the nightmare, you find out what horror is; you find out what scares you; what absolutely petrifies you, and you know that it could never have been anything else. All that is left is to ask why. Why this and not that? If we always knew what it was we would find why did we bother going to seek it? For now I must dare the nightmare that is getting my thesis done. A prospect that sometimes leaves me truly horror struck.
What are your thoughts? What do you think it means to dare the nightmare? Do you think the What and the Why are blurred or are they separate?
Horror Struck 
I really enjoyed the information you put forth about what it means to dare the nightmare. Your educated insight leads me finding your personal opinion intriguing. I have to agree to dare the nightmare is to find its boundaries, be able to test the water, and knowing it is not your reality. Of course the fear, the creepy crawling feeling, when the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight up and you just want to crawl out of your skin in that moment feeling, can be desirable by some (horror genre fans) again knowing that it is not your everyday reality makes for a pleasurable time. It’s a time not spent in the norm of things.