Fear

How Evolution Designed Your Fear

The universal grip of Stephen King’s personal terrors

Image: Andrzej Wojcicki/Science Photo Library/Getty Images

By Mathias Clasen

The most effective monsters of horror fiction mirror ancestral dangers to exploit evolved human fears. Some fears are universal, some are near-universal, and some are local. The local fears — the idiosyncratic phobias such as the phobia of moths, say — tend to be avoided by horror writers, directors, and programmers. Horror artists typically want to target the greatest possible audience and that means targeting the most common fears. As the writer Thomas F. Monteleone has observed, “a horror writer has to have an unconscious sense or knowledge of what’s going to be a universal ‘trigger.’ ”¹All common fears can be located within a few biologically constrained categories or domains.