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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 43 |
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HALLOWEEN |
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 A HISTORY CHANNEL SPECIAL MONDAY NIGHT, OCT. 27, 9-11 p.m. REPEATED HALLOWEEN NIGHT FRIDAY, OCT. 31, 10-Midnight |
Why do we fear so many
things? Hey, it's good!
of TheColumnists.com
Next time you awake in the middle of the night, quaking with fear because you can hear the low rumble of a huge beast crouched next to your bed, you now have my permission to grin and say to yourself, "Hey, not to worry. It's just my instinctual 'fight or flight' response kicking in!"
But please don't blame me if that escaped Bengal Tiger from the zoo suddenly pounces on you and starts chomping on your head. I've just been unduly influenced by watching "Primal Fear," the new two-hour documentary from The History Channel, which premieres this week.
Early in the documentary, we learn that early man developed that instinct because saber-toothed tigers--and a number of other predators--roamed freely over the land and the human psyche began to form its own defense mechanism.
The "fight or flight" instinct involves our instantaneous assessment of perils around us. Our senses deliver this information to our brain and starts preparing our body for action, either to defend ourselves or, if there's still time, to get the hell out of there.
Knowing that, I guess we're to assume that fear is good because it automatically maximizes the potential of our body to deal with the impending threat. Of course, I personally feel the flaw in that theory is that modern man reads about, sees movies and TV shows about real-life perils, which gives us time to worry a lot about them. Result: When my "fight or flight" instinct kicks in, I may already be so paralyzed with fear that I run from the tiger and blunder right into a pond full of alligators.
Still, this two-hour program is bound to entertain you because it traces the development of fear from our primal days as a species and explains the technical details of how being frightened actually makes us better able to handle perils--at least in most cases.
"Primal Fear" is loaded with real-life examples of how fear operates. For instance, there's the elderly husband and wife who were out walking in the woods when suddenly a mountain lion popped up out of the ferns and took the man's face in its jaws. There was no time for his instinct to start the man running away from the big cat, but he had the presence of mind to remain calm while his wife picked up a tree limb and started bashing the lion with it. Her instinct to help her husband outweighed her instinct to run, so she hung around long enough to finally inspire the lion to drop its prey and casually stroll away into the underbrush where nobody was waiting to smite it with tree limbs.
The program confirms the existence of "hysterical strength," which humans often develop when faced with peril. It's caused by the body reacting automatically to pump adrenalin where needed to get the maximum effort out of muscles. Did that woman use "hysterical strength" to batter the lion into retreating from its victim? There's no way to tell after the fact, but it seems likely when you consider she was a small, older woman you wouldn't figure would even want to look a ferocious mountain lion in the eye, let alone try shoving her ballpoint pen into the beast's eye, which she did at one point.
To maximize our Halloween delights, there's an extended sequence on the fear of snakes and the manipulation of that fear by religious "snake handlers." We also get a small amount of shark scares and the usual tributes to "Jaws" for making millions of us afraid of shark bites even if we never go near the sea. (Okay, I'll admit I lifted my feet off the theater floor the first time I saw "Jaws.")
Many of our primal fears are worldwide
and universal, among them fear of being buried alive, fear of
drowning, fear of being burned alive and fear of going to Hell.
Using our primal fears against us also has been a specialty of
humans through the ages. The program traces the use of our fear
of drowning all the way from the 1600s, when immersion of people
in water was how we determined if they were guilty of crimes.
(If you drowned, you were guilty?) That is followed all the way
up to today and the controversial use of "water-boarding"
as a torture technique employed by the U.S. and its allies.
And I'm sure you won't want to miss the special section, toward the end of the program, on our primal fear of rats. I wasn't especially afraid of rats before watching this segment, but after learning that their jaws can exert the equivalent of 7,000 pounds of pressure to whatever they bite--which is, I might add, more pressure than an alligator exerts, if you adjust for size--I'm trying as hard as I can to develop a "fight or flight" instinct regarding large rodents.
Naturally, much of this documentary is culled from familiar film clip files and surface-skimming research, and you'll already know a lot of what you're taught, but it's not a bad way to spin out those hours after the kids have hung up their costumes, gone to bed and left their trick or treat candy handy for late-night snacking.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This column first posted Oct. 27, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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