Creepy & Paranormal As Cultural Control

Through movies that make the unthinkable enjoyable, wrote Sontag in her 1965 essay The Imagination of Disaster, “one can participate in the fantasy of living through one’s own death and more, the death of cities and the destruction of humanity itself”. Contemplating annihilation can certainly be a valuable means of reckoning with death, loss, aband

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As Peters writes, paraphrasing Franz Kafka, “Those who build new media to eliminate the spectral element between people only create more ample breeding grounds for the ghosts.”

We explain below how reward systems in the brain evolved to track and encourage our engagements with information at the edge of our own understanding (at the edge of informational chaos) where we find the most error-reducing opportunities, and how horror content co-opts these systems