Fear Lurking in our Genes

Ancestral Fears

It could be something as subtle as the feeling of something ghosting over one’s skin or catching a shadow moving out of the corner of one’s eye to cause alarm. It could be a more direct confrontation such as a loud clap of thunder that seems to shake the world.

Everyone is afraid of something: darkness, water, thunderstorms, spiders, heights… and of course, monsters, too. Where do these fears come from though?

There are some fears that obviously come from experiences.

A child wakes up from a nightmare and goes to her parents’ room. They’re watching the movie It. The little girl walks in as the clown is baring his sharp teeth. Understandably, the girl is traumatized. She develops a lifelong fear of clowns.

A boy is being buried in the sand at the beach. The other kids tease him and dump sand on his face. The boy tries to shield his face, but his arms are trapped under the packed sand. He screams for them to stop and ends up with sand in his mouth. He becomes petrified of being buried alive and avoids the beach.

A kid hides in a closet at school while playing hide and seek after hours. His friends can’t find him. He thinks he is a great hider until he realizes that he has been in that closet for too long. He decides to give up and find his friends, but the door is locked. He screams and shouts, but his friends had already left, thinking he was gone. It takes hours for the police to find him. He can’t go into a small space again.

On the other hand, some people have never been given a reason to be afraid of something, but are frightened of it anyways.

A kid who never had a bad experience with heights before goes cliff jumping for the first time with friends. He is excited and eager at first, but when he looks ove...

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...ame has happened with pregnant women who were in the Twin Towers on nine-eleven. At the time of that study, the infants were all around a year old. This suggesting that even stress can be carried in our genetic code.

Here is something to think about… Many classic horror icons, such as Giger’s Xenomorphs, Silent Hill’s Pyramid Head, and other disturbing creatures, share common characteristics. Pale skin, dark, sunken eyes, elongated faces, sharp teeth, and the like. These images inspire horror and revulsion in many, and with good reason… If we look at genetic memory and our ancestors' instincts for survival, what happened, deep in the hidden eras before history began, that could affect the entire human race so evenly as to give the entire species a deep, instinctual, and lasting fear of pale beings with dark, sunken eyes, razor sharp teeth, and elongated faces? (3)