Contending with the Creeps

23 Aug, 2026

I keep subjecting myself to scary movies, in spite of the fact that the long-lasting and excessive fright they induce is just plain ridiculous. I mean look, I’m ostensibly so advanced in maturity that the AARP wants my name on its roster; you’d think by now, especially with all the film theory I’ve imbibed, I would’ve learned to handle predictable tropes and tricks and ceased cowering under the covers with people who can be forgiven their terror because their brains are still forming. Nope.

A few years ago, I devoured everything I could find about ghost- and folklore, the psychology of paranormal belief, somatic factors that contribute to hallucinations, etc. Learning all about, say, the ways sleep paralysis can toy with you did indeed lead to my being much better able to handle the fear worms any number of directors tried to implant in viewers’ brains. For a good few years, in fact, things bumping in the night said nothing other than that humidity levels were changing or that a branch had hit the roof. And then, in a bout of overconfidence, I listened—in full daylight, mind you—to four or five episodes in a row of Danny Robins’s Uncanny, a podcast in which the host and some apparent experts, and the audience itself, try to unravel the story of a guest’s weird encounter. Damn it. There I was again for at least another couple of nights, the theme song’s “I know what I saw” repeating over and over in my head as my powers of reasoning abandoned ship, and I tried and failed to sleep with the light on.

The thing is, although I’ve not allowed myself to do so, I want to listen to more. Why??!? I don’t believe in ghosts or demons or what have you, and so much of what speculation about them entails is the remnant of bad or twisted theologies,¹ cheap shock tactics, schlocky forms of wish fulfillment, and desperate attempts to be convinced there’s more to life than bills and pointless jobs and social media scrolls. There are at least two questions here, then, where the situation pertains to me: if I think it’s bunk, why does it scare me so badly; and if I get so terribly spooked, why in the world do I keep subjecting myself to it?

Unsurprisingly, I’ve gone back to the books to try and get to the bottom of this conundrum. Joanna Bourke’s Fear: A Cultural History is where I’ve started.² I don’t think it’s going to help me here, but it’s a good compendium of what kept Britons and US Americans up at night during (mostly) the twentieth century. War and what comes with it loom large; I’m guessing had the book been written in the last few years, we’d also be treated to expanded discussion of climate-related dread, as well as the ways fears of contagion took on new forms. With the introduction of radio in particular, mass panic and the potential for it come into play—and again, an updated version would probably look at social media’s capacity to stoke the same infectious phenomena, especially now that AI is jumping into the game.

But again, seeing how others’ overreactions work, and hence indicting my own, doesn’t really get at the problem. My companion reading here is On Anger, a collected volume put out by the Boston Review Forum—because as it turns out, the only way I dissipated a flare-up of terror last week was by virtue of being fed up with myself and the whole situation.³ I’m too old for this shit, I steamed, wanting to punch the pillow. I need and want my sleep, and I’ve got work to do tomorrow, and can’t just take a nap or the day off, or muddle through an assignment that requires my full brain power. Yes, sometimes comedy can overcome fright—Scary Movie seemed made in that vein, and there’s plenty in horror films that’s so ridiculous you can’t help but laugh—but when it most recently came down to it, it was rage that washed the creeps away.⁴ As with Bourke’s Fear, although I’m enjoying On Anger, I don’t think the book’s exploration of an emotion as part of moral philosophy will do much to unravel my own psychological mystery.

Until I’ve come up with something better, then, the next time my brain starts playing tricks with me, I guess I’ll have to take a cue from Martin Luther, who thought ghosts were really just the devil trying to trip him up. The ever-classy theologian offered this script to make the spirit go away: “‘Devil, I have to sleep now’…. If he keeps on nagging me and trots out my sins, then I answer: ‘Sweet devil, I know the whole list. But I have done even more sin which is not on your list. Write there also that I have shit in my breeches. Hang it around your neck and wipe your mouth on it.’”⁵ If I can successfully deliver the scatalogical diatribe, the anger might just revert to comedy after all, and I can fall asleep laughing.

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