Fear: From flight or fight to soft power sorcery

Last week, I said I would write a little something about fear in my next post. And I will. Now, my initial thought was to write about the fear of success. But after an intense re-watch of series one through five of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (and a traumatising reintroduction to the alien fear demon from space. Ick!), I thought to myself; why complicate things? I’ll just write about fear, full stop.

If you, like me, still remember the far too brief heyday of Crystal Pepsi, you may at some point during the early 90s have been glued to the TV set every time Are You Afraid of the Dark? was on. I loved it. Plenty of jump scares, but the stories were just far-fetched enough that you wouldn’t lose any sleep over having watched them. Around the same time, though, another show reared its ugly head; The X-Files. Also very much supernatural in character, but the show was so well written that you didn’t need too much persuasion before you believed the stories to be true – apart, perhaps, from the episode with the insects. The Smoking Man did it for me. This was the real deal – the aliens were coming to get us.

Anyway…

What really freaked me out with The X-Files was the fact that it had too many real aspects to it – the more episodes I watched, the more convinced I became that these scenarios could easily play out in real life. It was starting to instil a fear in me, that maybe the government wasn’t paying attention. Or maybe they were hiding the truth? It was all too much for my 11 year old brain. It was starting to affect my ability to think straight. Just when the hormones started to kick in as well. A recipe for disaster – good thing I was too young to vote at the time. Anyway. This sort of brings me to my point, but I’ll chuck in a definition of fear before I go any further.

In an article entitled The Psychology of Fear, Lisa Fritscher writes:

“Psychologists define fear as a protective, primal emotion that evokes a biochemical and emotional response. Fear alerts us to the presence of danger or the threat of harm, whether that danger is physical or psychological. Whereas the biochemical changes that fear produces are universal, emotional responses are highly individual.” (VeryWellMind.com, October 2025)

These biochemical changes equal the flight or fight response. For those of us partial to a good horror film, our emotional response might be equal to the feeling we get when we’re excited – a sort of ‘good’ irrational fear, if you may. We love the jump scares. An article on Inspire the Mind claims that “When we experience “recreational” or “staged” fear, our brain releases dopamine, a feel-good hormone associated with feelings of pleasure”. This view is supported by many other articles linking horror movies and enjoyment – there’s a particularly good one on everydayhealth.com.

Dopamine is like a drug – you’ll be wanting it again. I wonder if there’s any research on whether or not there’s a link between horror fans and ADHD, as the low dopamine levels in such individuals may be causing inattentiveness? I suppose the same would apply to adrenaline junkies. But I digress. And I’m no neurologist.

So, we know that fear activates the fight or flight response. What, then, when fear is planted as a seed and cultivated over time? Instead of a jump scare, that induces said response and goes away once the imminent “danger” is gone, it festers, breeds desperation and develops into something that changes our behaviour, our beliefs, our way of life. Real fear. Real fear affects our ability to think straight. Real fear is what makes us vote for the wrong political candidate.

Oops, another digression.

My point is this; what is instilled in us over time can be just as scary, but instead of shocking us into action, we get wee droplets of ‘proof’ that sustains the fear and makes us paranoid. In politics, this is called soft power tactics. Basically, it’s gaslighting. Fear mongering. Whatever you want to call it. The work of a sociopath.

It’s like the first movie in the Paranormal Activity franchise – the first 70 minutes is just build-up, where they play to your subconscious, making you go on high alert by using subtle noises and music – when that duvet is finally pulled from the bed by an unseen force (which isn’t that scary, if you think about it), you’re already terrified because you’ve been at the edge of your seat waiting for something to happen, because someone has told you that it will. You are no longer in control of your biochemical responses. I’d wager it’s not the scene itself that causes us to jump at it – and stay on alert for the duration of the movie – I think it was the shock coming from the fact that we’d gone waaaaaay past the point of no return for us to shut the stupid thing off.

Sustained fear. Can’t be good.

Ending on a serious note here, but… It’s almost midnight. To be continued, I suppose?

See you next Tuesday. Until then, watch yourself around the thinning of the veil or whatever. Don’t take candy from strangers. Eat you vegetables. Buy my book. And, remember what Betty Ann said:

“If you’re really into a story, you become part of it and you start to imagine what horrible thing might be sneaking around the corner, ready to pounce. It’s your imagination that gets you into a story, and unless you’re very careful, you might need your imagination to get you out.”

Are You Afraid of the Dark?, Season 3: The Tale of the Bookish Babysitter