Why are ghosts scary?

I’m sure I’ve talked about this on this blog before (in fact it’s mentioned in the endmatter/extras/bonus material that comes at the end of Falling), but something that became a big deal to me at some point when I was rewriting was a reason for the supernatural phenomena depicted to exist.

When we watch horror movies or read horror stories, the reason scary stuff happens is for us, not the characters. The author/screenwriter/director wants to scare us, because that’s what we expect from the genre.

But who decided ghosts or the paranormal had to be scary, other than the artists who’ve imagined and bought stories about ghosts and monsters to life?

If you’re talking about a creature feature, the shark, crocodile or otherworldly beast might just want to eat, propagate itself or defend its territory. If you’re writing about a psychotic serial killer in a ski mask, they might not even want to scare you, just kill you… which is inherently scary, and especially so when they’re stalking you throughout Camp Crystal Lake (Friday the Thirteenth), Haddonfield Illinois (Halloween) or your dreams (A Nightmare on Elm Street).

But why are ghosts scary when they appear to the living, apart from their inexplicable nature? They only show up in darkened, creepy mansions on stormy nights or in abandoned asylums because it’s scary for us as the audience.

The 2017 version of Stephen King novel adaptation It wasn’t out in cinemas when I was writing Falling (or even rewriting it), but it perhaps unwittingly shone a light on what turns out to be somewhat of a fatal flaw in King’s story, one neither the novel itself nor the Tommy Lee Wallace miniseries of 1990 made as obvious.

The antagonist of that story was a shape shifting, demonic monster-thing that could appear at any time to anyone as whatever it wanted but Andy Muschietti’s monster (get it?) hit and its sequel makes you realise there’s no rhyme or reason about why, where, how and who it decides to attack.

According to the lore, it feeds off fear, so it kind of makes sense that it torments the members of the Loser’s Club before it intends to bump them off. But how about the random collection of young secondary characters it just sets up to kill and consume? I can think of at least a couple of them who weren’t frightened in the least. In fact the very reason Pennywise appears in his usual form (a clown) is to lure in his favourite food of little kids.

Are preteens just some sort of amuse bouche, the adults it’s been gunning for all these decades the laboured-over meal it’s going to enjoy when they’re ‘cooked’ enough? It’s never explained.

When I rejigged Falling to (hopefully) make a lot more sense, I wanted the ways ghosts and hauntings work to make sense to me as a (very) amateur scientist.

I wanted the mystery the characters (particularly Tim the parapsychologist) were trying to answer to be not where Great Aunt Mabel left the secret will or who killed Sir Stanley in the parlour 100 years ago, but the way we sense electromagnetic phenomena and the way electromagnetic fields interact with the bioelectrical fields in our brains, expressing themselves as brain states – which we feel as the inchoate sensations of ‘feelings’ and ’emotions’ – and the way the entity at the centre of the mystery wants to elicit the emotion we feel as fear.

I talked about the theory for the way all that stuff works right here, and that was the bedrock for doing one of the things the LMR (last major rewrite) was intended to accomplish.

Every time something scary happens, I wanted there to be a reason. Not just so it scares you, the reader (though as my customer and patron, that’s the most important reason), but so it makes sense in the story, adhering to the way my potted parapsychological phenomena theory works.

As Tim explains more than once, the entity behind the phenomena hasn’t set out to scare the characters – in fact it might even be a stretch calling it an ‘entity’, because that gives it human-like intent. It just figures out that’s the best way to achieve whatever impulse drives it, no different than the impulse for water to fall downhill, pooling until it spills over, or an electrical current to move through a circuit when a switch closes it.

I wanted the scares in the story to be very ‘in’ and ‘of’ the story. I wanted the characters to be scared for very good reasons that make sense to the behaviour of the phenomena, and you being scared too is – while the most important effect – just an effect.

Have I succeeded?