H.P. Lovecraft, the enigmatic once wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” It’s for this reason that we love scary stories. They enable us to safely explore our age-old emotional nemeses and to thrill ourselves with them. The most effective tales of the macabre exploit the natural high we experience when tapping into our primitive fight-or-flight response. No setting is better for achieving this effect than the hypnotic glow of a campfire.
“Sitting in a limited circle of illumination, surrounded by darkness and whatever might be hiding in it, provides an interesting combination of comfort and exposure,” says Mathias Clasen, an assistant professor in literature and media at Denmark’s Aarhus University. “The dark embodies the unknown, so campfires make it easy to sensitize the audience to danger and to spook them.”
Since first learning to master fire around 400,000 years ago, we have become one of the few species that is not afraid of it — and is even drawn to it. “I think there is something about the fire itself that attracts us, though there’s been very little research into the psychology of fire and the fascination it commands,” says Clasen. It’s impossible to know when the tradition of telling scary stories around the campfire began, but there is evidence that fire and storytelling have gone hand in hand for thousands of years.
We are naturally drawn to tales ridden with problems, challenges, and dangers — horror nicely fits that bill.
According to a of interviews conducted in the 1970s with Namibia and Botswana’s Ju/’hoansi people — who were then then living as hunter-gatherers — 81 percent of fireside chats were devoted to storytelling. Daytime conversations, on the other hand, largely dealt with mundane, practical matters. Polly Wiessner, the study’s author and an anthropologist at the University of Utah, suspects that nocturnal storytelling allowed us to better relate to one another and to develop richer cultures.
Those activities also bestowed us with a deep-rooted fondness for sitting around the campfire. As Wiessner writes: “Appetites for firelit settings for intimate conversation and for evening stories remain with us today.” Still other studies that campfires induce relaxation and lower blood pressure and that evolution has us to more safely deal with pollutants produced by a campfire’s smoke.
Over the years, stories themselves have evolved as well, becoming more sophisticated, nuanced, and effective. We are naturally drawn to tales ridden with problems, challenges, and dangers, and horror nicely fits that bill. “Ghost stories often present real, existential threats to the protagonists of the story, since they might get killed,” says Jonathan Gottschall, a distinguished fellow at Washington & Jefferson College and author of “They tap into truly primal fears of ours, including our massive dread of the mystery of what happens to us when we die.” As such, horror stories are likely universal and timeless. “People in various cultures — most cultures and possibly all cultures — have scared themselves, at least partly voluntarily, since human societies with language capabilities developed,” writes historian Peter N. Stearns in .
