Welcome to the Pan Historian’s
Horror 2009 Edition

by Clio

"HORROR" • noun
1) an intense feeling of fear, shock, or disgust.
2) a thing causing such a feeling.
3) intense dismay.
4) informal a bad or mischievous person, especially a child.

Whether it is the twists and turns of a Hitchcock movie that throws us into a tizzy, or scenes conjured by our imaginations, humans seem to enjoy the sensation of being scared. We love the adrenalin rush, and the greatest “horror” producer of all times is our imagination.

I remember as a child—I was perhaps 10—when my family was driving home late one October night. I was dozing in the backseat; my parents were in the front. We were taking a short cut through a large forested area where there were no streetlights, just trees with leaf-less branches overhanging the road. It was a spooky drive in the best of times. On the car radio, someone began reading Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven. Mesmerized by the voice, the words and the story, I was terrified. To this day, “quoth the raven, nevermore” can send shivers through me.

We all have things that scare us. It might be being thrust into a new situation. It might be heights or flying. For Zoe, snakes are her worst nightmare. For Joey Aristophanes, it was a handful of spaghetti in a Halloween haunted house that he was convinced was human guts. Despite these fears, or perhaps because of them, we are all attracted to some aspects of horror. While psychologists and others might try to figure out why we are obsessed by horror, the reasons are probably too many and too complicated to be easily explained. They have a hard enough time figuring out what is horror.

Simply put, horror is anything that provokes in us a painful or intense fear, dread or dismay. Too often people think it is all blood and gore, and while those elements have their role in horror, we can be “scared to death” without them. Here at Pan, the Horror Genre features vampires and werewolves, ghosts and zombies, as well as other inexplicable characters. The horror genre is a place where we can use our imaginations to give ourselves and others fear, dread and dismay.

Image credits:
Above right: Artist; Duster Amaranth of Deviantart