One of my sons was deathly afraid of spiders and needles when he was younger while one of my other sons was afraid of sudden loud noises like thunder and fireworks. One time my noise-fearful son was so afraid of an approaching storm that he slipped from my eyesight at the beach, running several blocks back to the vacation house where we were staying with friends, without telling anyone. He was more afraid of the noise than of getting hit by a car. One minute he was playing quietly in the sand with his brothers and the next minute he was gone. In his young imaginative mind, the threat of thunder was more terrifying to him than anything else- including crossing over a highway of cars traveling at 50 mph. But as extreme and irrational as that sounds, we have all been in his shoes, trembling with fear of something our imagination tricks us into believing is bigger, badder, or stronger than it really is.
In Stephen King’s Danse Macrabe, King describes how the best scary writing is not all about the ghost or monsters, but more about universal human anxiety. He says individuals can be deeply terrified of their “safe spaces crumbling from the inside out”. Whether it is our own built up anxieties or other scary stuff swirling around inside our heads, these thoughts and feelings could eventually rise to the surface like volcanic lava ascending from the inside hollow tube of a monolithic mountain.
In King’s Carrie, the main character shows us how everyday terrors like isolation, rejection or being an outcast can tap into our fears to trigger an inner monster to emerge, causing havoc for those we encounter or that we perceive to threaten us. When asked for advice on how to begin scary stories like Carrie and so many others, King suggests to “start with the ordinary” since that is often where the monster lives and hides.
That way when the abnormal occurs, the reader will feel the threat to his or her own sense of stability and sanity. The monster inside may trigger the fear but the threat to the character’s safety, security, identity, family or loved ones is what keeps the reader on the edge of her seat. “We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.” It’s about “finding our hidden phobic pressure points and entering the secret rooms of our minds.”
In the 9/18/26 Readers Digest article; 52 Stephen King Quotes that will Haunt You Long After You Read Them , author Kelly Kuehn says “King has spent decades proving the scariest things can lurk in the most ordinary places and that sometimes the words that haunt us the most have nothing to do with monsters at all.” Quoting Stephen King, Kuehn shares from “The Shining”: “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.” And from King’s “IT”, “ Eddie discovered one of his childhood’s great truths. Grownups are the real monsters.”
We spend our lives worrying about external horrors while we ignore that our own minds are the ultimate monster inventors. Fear creates an internal infrastructure fueled by anxiety, neediness, and “worst-case” scenarios whereas the ultimate irony of human fear is that our own imagination regularly manufactures horrors far worse than reality usually delivers, making us the true authors of our own torments.
Albert Einstein once famously said Imagination is more important than knowledge and Franklin Roosevelt said The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. When our imagination teams up with our fears, together they become the monster.
As Halloween approaches, I ask what is more frightening; the external monsters we are afraid to face or the ones growing, living and hiding inside us? It is far easier to avoid, overcome or destroy the monsters on the outside than those hiding within. And it is within our own power to either nourish and grow them, or starve and kill them before they ever get the chance to escape.
This idea reminds me of the old Cherokee tale that traces back to mid 20th century Christian sermons, that speaks of the two wolves that fight inside us. When the old Cherokee grandfather explains to his grandson that there is an evil wolf inside, carrying anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies and ego and a second wolf who is good, carrying joy, peace, love, hope, forgiveness, humility, kindness, empathy, patience, generosity, truth, compassion, loyalty, and faith, the grandson looks up at him and asks which one wins the fight. The grandfather responds, “ the one who wins is the one we feed.” It is up to each of us to decide which one we feed and which we starve because they are usually both there hiding somewhere deep inside.
When our own deep neuroses cease to remain as mere phantoms of our thoughts and begin to dictate our behavioral realities, the external world grows more vulnerable, at greater risk to the damage caused by the monsters we allow to break free. A monster trapped in the subconscious will torture the self while the monster that breaks free-into the world, will torture everyone else, manifesting into a mirror of our collective internal restlessness, sins and rot. We are not passive victims of a scary world; we are the intentional and unintentional authors of its horrors.
In Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D’s 2021 article in Psychology Today, Hayes says; “The Greatest Horror story ever told doesn’t happen in the pages of a book, or on the movie screen. Instead, it happens inside of our own heads.” He continues; “ the human mind is a masterful storyteller, and although it may have good intentions, it does not change the fact that these “personalized horror stories” can hinder us, and hurt others, in real life.”
Despite that two of my sons reacted fearfully in response to the scary things conjured up by their imaginations, those self-created, contained monsters were at least limited to whom their targets would be; it is the apprehensions, anxieties, insecurities and fears inside each of us that we allow to escape out into the world, that have the capacity to overcome not only each individual’s own story, but the collective story we write together as one.
