The Frighteners

September 1, 2018
Laws, an ordained minister, is also a horror-film buff and a bit of an outside-the-box thinker. We love horror movies, books, and video games, he argues persuasively, not because the world is uglier and more dangerous than ever before but for exactly the opposite reason. We need horror stories because our world is less violent than ever before, at least for the middle class and above. We have, Laws says, a fear reflex hardwired into us, and, before we had societies and laws and all that other stuff, that reflex was essential to staying alive (imagine how the human species would have fared if there was, say, no instinctive fear of meat-eating animals). Horror stories do for us what the world used to do: they stimulate the fear response, and in so doing they keep us healthy. Evolutionarily speaking, horror movies, books, and games are absolutely essential to the human species. This is not simply a defense of a genre that routinely comes under fire for its graphic violence; it's an intelligent, perceptive, and very well written successor to Stephen King's 1981 classic, Danse Macabre.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)