(no subject)
Jun. 15th, 2008 10:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynneSo I've been thinking some more about Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead and Midnight, in relation to what's scary. Those episodes sparked these thoughts, but they can apply to any fandom. Spoilers for those episodes, of course.
What people think is scary is a very subjective thing. Someone may want to laugh at something that another person finds terrifying. Still, there are some general, common fears, that writers use to create something that most people would find scary.
Personally, what I tend to find scary is not so much the external monster as the internal one. Sci-fi monsters don't really scare me, but I have to confess that many horror movies do. This is because sci-fi monsters create an obvious difference, one that you can see with nothing more than your eyes, and a common theme in horror movies is that you don't know who the killer is--it could be anyone. And that "it could be anyone" is terrifying--you can defend against the obvious, but not from the unknown.
Moffat's monsters have never scared me. The weeping angels are the closest, because statues are everywhere--it's the familiar turned into the monstrous. It has that element of what scares me, but it didn't really, because they're still statues. They may be able to lull you into a false sense of security, but they can't betray you, or turn against you. The clockwork droids were never human, and didn't do too well at fitting in as humans, despite their efforts. And the gas mask zombies once were human, but still have those obvious, at-a-glance differences--wearing the gas mask, the constant repetition of "Are you my mummy?" Those would be scary in the London Blitz, when gas masks were common and necessary items and you wouldn't be able to tell who was a zombie and who wasn't without hearing them speak, but I for one do not expect to come across anyone wearing a gas mask anytime soon, and so that danger is very far removed.
And I think the Vashta Nerada are the least scary of Moffat's monsters. The Doctor said it: "Almost every species has an irrational fear of the dark." It's not quite irrational, because the scary thing about the dark is that anything could be hiding in it. And the very ironic thing that Moffat did is taking away that nebulous "anything" and instead giving it a name, a history, specific abilities and limitations. Something that is categorized is pretty much always less scary than something unknown, because knowing what something is is one step closer to understanding it, from understanding to communicating with it, and to defending against it.
It presents a very sharp contrast to Midnight, I think. There are two scary things in that episode: the entity, and the passengers, both of which were handled to maximize fear. There's the entity--which managed to remain unknown pretty much the entire time. All we know of it is that it could survive on the surface of Midnight and that it took on the aspects of people it came into contact with. We can also extrapolate that it's evil of a sort, since it was trying to get the innocent Doctor tossed out the airlock. So we don't know what it is, and we don't know how to defend ourselves against it, should it return.
But more than that, it hit on another basic fear of human nature--loss of self. Skye ended up completely under its control, and its mimicry panicked everyone else. It progressed to stealing the Doctor's voice, specifically, reducing the Doctor to the mimic, taking on his persona and doing things with it he would never condone. Being impersonated is a terrifying thing because of what could be done with that impersonation that you could subsequently be blamed for. This entity had a double-whammy of scary, with both enhancing the other. You don't know what it is, so you can't defend yourself against it, and the person who tried understanding it ended up subsumed by it. If it could do that to him, it could do that to you, and what's stopping it? And if it takes over someone else but acts like it's taken over you, with you unable to defend yourself, then what can you do? No wonder the passengers panicked.
Those panicking passengers are the other scary thing. First is that they're extremely ordinary. That was actually my very first thought, upon seeing the dad--how ordinary he looked. But ordinary people can do horrible things.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tsukara brought up the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, and there's also the defense commonly brought up in the Nuremburg Trials, where people claimed they were just following orders. Ordinary people can do horrible things, and sometimes they don't even need an impetus beyond just being told to do so.
And fear is a great impetus. It's a common saying that "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself". That's because of what fear does to you--it makes you stop thinking. It makes you go back to instinct, the very basic "fight or flight". The passengers here try flight, congregating in the back of the vehicle, as far away from Skye as they can get--but they really can't get very far. They're trapped. So they turn to fight as the only other option that instinct gives them, and they're cornered. That's a very bad thing, since someone backed into a corner will fight all the most desperately because he has nothing left to lose.
Fear leads to other nasty things. It created paranoia, which made them decide the Doctor was in league with the entity, and they were happy to argue with him, because he was a safer target for their fear. It also created a mob, and mob mentality is scary. It's extremely difficult to reason with a mob (as I'm sure the Doctor noticed), because it's not reason that's driving them; it's instinct. And instinct says "safety in numbers" and "fight or flight".
And it can happen to ordinary people. It does happen to ordinary people. The Doctor even asks the passengers, specifically, if they could kill a person--and they decide they can, and they will. That's a question anyone might ask himself, and a question one very well might after watching that episode--"Could I do that? In that situation, or a similar one, would I be willing to commit murder?" If it turns out that the answer to that question is yes, even if you're not in that situation, the potential you've discovered in yourself is scary. And if you don't know the answer, that's still scary, because there's still the potential for yes. Perhaps we'd like to think that we would be better than that, but unless it happens to us, how can we know? And that just goes back to the unknown being a scary thing.
It made me think of Star Wars as well. Personally, I found Chancellor Palpatine scarier than all the overt Sith Lords, Maul, Tyranus, and Vader. Palpatine as Chancellor was even scarier than Palpatine as Emperor, or as Darth Sidious in the open. Vader may lock you up and torture you, but Chancellor Palpatine engineered a situation the inspired Padme's wonderful line, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." He effectively made the people want to lock themselves up, with the illusion that it's all their own idea. This is another form of loss of self--loss of free will without even knowing it. To go back to Doctor Who--"Is a slave still a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?" The Doctor decisively answered yes, and I would as well. I would also add that the not knowing is worse, because the freedom is an illusion.
It's a particular aspect of human nature to distrust what is different, a distrust that has sparked off numerous wars throughout history, as well as other atrocities. But it often doesn't occur to us to distrust what is similar, which is what makes it all the more scary and surprising when we are betrayed by the most ordinary of people. I have an interest in biographies of LEOs (law enforcement officer), and I remember that more than one has commented that you could go to the street a serial killer lived on, tell his neighbors about his crimes, and have them comment how surprised they were, that they never thought he could do anything like that.
Midnight was a scary episode because it played on the real as well as the fantastic, human nature as well as the alien menace. Fear of the dark is relegated to superstition, the bogeyman to a childhood fear. On the other hand, fear of the unknown and mob mentality has created situations like the Salem Witch Trials.
And really, between fantastic monsters and human nature, I know which I'm more scared of.
What people think is scary is a very subjective thing. Someone may want to laugh at something that another person finds terrifying. Still, there are some general, common fears, that writers use to create something that most people would find scary.
Personally, what I tend to find scary is not so much the external monster as the internal one. Sci-fi monsters don't really scare me, but I have to confess that many horror movies do. This is because sci-fi monsters create an obvious difference, one that you can see with nothing more than your eyes, and a common theme in horror movies is that you don't know who the killer is--it could be anyone. And that "it could be anyone" is terrifying--you can defend against the obvious, but not from the unknown.
Moffat's monsters have never scared me. The weeping angels are the closest, because statues are everywhere--it's the familiar turned into the monstrous. It has that element of what scares me, but it didn't really, because they're still statues. They may be able to lull you into a false sense of security, but they can't betray you, or turn against you. The clockwork droids were never human, and didn't do too well at fitting in as humans, despite their efforts. And the gas mask zombies once were human, but still have those obvious, at-a-glance differences--wearing the gas mask, the constant repetition of "Are you my mummy?" Those would be scary in the London Blitz, when gas masks were common and necessary items and you wouldn't be able to tell who was a zombie and who wasn't without hearing them speak, but I for one do not expect to come across anyone wearing a gas mask anytime soon, and so that danger is very far removed.
And I think the Vashta Nerada are the least scary of Moffat's monsters. The Doctor said it: "Almost every species has an irrational fear of the dark." It's not quite irrational, because the scary thing about the dark is that anything could be hiding in it. And the very ironic thing that Moffat did is taking away that nebulous "anything" and instead giving it a name, a history, specific abilities and limitations. Something that is categorized is pretty much always less scary than something unknown, because knowing what something is is one step closer to understanding it, from understanding to communicating with it, and to defending against it.
It presents a very sharp contrast to Midnight, I think. There are two scary things in that episode: the entity, and the passengers, both of which were handled to maximize fear. There's the entity--which managed to remain unknown pretty much the entire time. All we know of it is that it could survive on the surface of Midnight and that it took on the aspects of people it came into contact with. We can also extrapolate that it's evil of a sort, since it was trying to get the innocent Doctor tossed out the airlock. So we don't know what it is, and we don't know how to defend ourselves against it, should it return.
But more than that, it hit on another basic fear of human nature--loss of self. Skye ended up completely under its control, and its mimicry panicked everyone else. It progressed to stealing the Doctor's voice, specifically, reducing the Doctor to the mimic, taking on his persona and doing things with it he would never condone. Being impersonated is a terrifying thing because of what could be done with that impersonation that you could subsequently be blamed for. This entity had a double-whammy of scary, with both enhancing the other. You don't know what it is, so you can't defend yourself against it, and the person who tried understanding it ended up subsumed by it. If it could do that to him, it could do that to you, and what's stopping it? And if it takes over someone else but acts like it's taken over you, with you unable to defend yourself, then what can you do? No wonder the passengers panicked.
Those panicking passengers are the other scary thing. First is that they're extremely ordinary. That was actually my very first thought, upon seeing the dad--how ordinary he looked. But ordinary people can do horrible things.
tsukara brought up the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment, and there's also the defense commonly brought up in the Nuremburg Trials, where people claimed they were just following orders. Ordinary people can do horrible things, and sometimes they don't even need an impetus beyond just being told to do so.And fear is a great impetus. It's a common saying that "the only thing you have to fear is fear itself". That's because of what fear does to you--it makes you stop thinking. It makes you go back to instinct, the very basic "fight or flight". The passengers here try flight, congregating in the back of the vehicle, as far away from Skye as they can get--but they really can't get very far. They're trapped. So they turn to fight as the only other option that instinct gives them, and they're cornered. That's a very bad thing, since someone backed into a corner will fight all the most desperately because he has nothing left to lose.
Fear leads to other nasty things. It created paranoia, which made them decide the Doctor was in league with the entity, and they were happy to argue with him, because he was a safer target for their fear. It also created a mob, and mob mentality is scary. It's extremely difficult to reason with a mob (as I'm sure the Doctor noticed), because it's not reason that's driving them; it's instinct. And instinct says "safety in numbers" and "fight or flight".
And it can happen to ordinary people. It does happen to ordinary people. The Doctor even asks the passengers, specifically, if they could kill a person--and they decide they can, and they will. That's a question anyone might ask himself, and a question one very well might after watching that episode--"Could I do that? In that situation, or a similar one, would I be willing to commit murder?" If it turns out that the answer to that question is yes, even if you're not in that situation, the potential you've discovered in yourself is scary. And if you don't know the answer, that's still scary, because there's still the potential for yes. Perhaps we'd like to think that we would be better than that, but unless it happens to us, how can we know? And that just goes back to the unknown being a scary thing.
It made me think of Star Wars as well. Personally, I found Chancellor Palpatine scarier than all the overt Sith Lords, Maul, Tyranus, and Vader. Palpatine as Chancellor was even scarier than Palpatine as Emperor, or as Darth Sidious in the open. Vader may lock you up and torture you, but Chancellor Palpatine engineered a situation the inspired Padme's wonderful line, "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause." He effectively made the people want to lock themselves up, with the illusion that it's all their own idea. This is another form of loss of self--loss of free will without even knowing it. To go back to Doctor Who--"Is a slave still a slave if he doesn't know he's enslaved?" The Doctor decisively answered yes, and I would as well. I would also add that the not knowing is worse, because the freedom is an illusion.
It's a particular aspect of human nature to distrust what is different, a distrust that has sparked off numerous wars throughout history, as well as other atrocities. But it often doesn't occur to us to distrust what is similar, which is what makes it all the more scary and surprising when we are betrayed by the most ordinary of people. I have an interest in biographies of LEOs (law enforcement officer), and I remember that more than one has commented that you could go to the street a serial killer lived on, tell his neighbors about his crimes, and have them comment how surprised they were, that they never thought he could do anything like that.
Midnight was a scary episode because it played on the real as well as the fantastic, human nature as well as the alien menace. Fear of the dark is relegated to superstition, the bogeyman to a childhood fear. On the other hand, fear of the unknown and mob mentality has created situations like the Salem Witch Trials.
And really, between fantastic monsters and human nature, I know which I'm more scared of.
