… Just Be Careful Out There.
Many classic horror icons, such as Geger’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. The characteristics shared by these faces are imprinted in the human mind.
Many things frighten humans instinctively. The fear is natural, and does not need to be reinforced in order to terrify. The fears are species-wide, stemming from dark times in the past when lightning could mean the burning of your tree home, thunder could be the approaching gallops of a stampede, predators could hide in darkness, and heights could make poor footing lethal.
The question you have to ask yourself is this:
What happened, deep in the hidden eras before history began, that could effect 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?
… Just be careful out there.
Posted in Beings & Entities
May 13th, 2008 at 11:14 am
This one’s never made sense to me. Pyramid Head is NONE of the things that they reference in the last paragraph. At all. I think the original writer just threw him in because he’s popular.
May 13th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Sorry. Misspelled “affect”. Can’t take it seriously now.
May 15th, 2008 at 1:38 am
inb4 dinosaurs
May 17th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
Pyramid head and the Xenomorphs don’t have dark sunken eyes, they don’t even have (visible) eyes. Pyramid head doesn’t have sharp teeth, and the Xenomorph doesn’t have pale skin. Maybe find something that has all these before putting them in the story eh?
May 19th, 2008 at 10:48 am
rather than argue semantics maybe we should consider what the author was getting at.
Why ARE those things so scary to us (regardless of which named characters have/don’t have them)?
May 23rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
You have a point, icarus.
Someone on /x/ actually explained this once. The sunken eyes and pale skin remind us of sickness and death, which we wanted to avoid lest we ourselves get sick, thus the fear of those things. Most predators have elongated faces and sharp teeth.
Enigma revealed.
May 31st, 2008 at 5:57 pm
“Sorry. Misspelled “affect”. Can’t take it seriously now.”
Fagoot.
tr.v. ef·fect·ed, ef·fect·ing, ef·fects
1. To bring into existence.
June 2nd, 2008 at 8:17 pm
Hmm. I like this idea. It does have a very real basis in being a prey species. Its kind of easily explained that way, but I like the way the author did it better.
June 20th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
actually, it’s probably just scary to us because there is no creature that ever looked like that. It’s unique, and we fear that.
June 22nd, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Anon 6 is probably right.
Still though, with the teeth.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:21 am
Pale skin, dark, sunken eyes?
Sounds like the recently deceased, or someone suffering from scurvy.
So were either afraid of the dead/death, or were afraid of a sudden lack of fruits.
June 30th, 2008 at 2:31 am
Razor-sharp teeth makes sense (so much sense in fact, that I would question your mental processes if you didn’t catch this).
Elongated heads? Now that’s a hard one. Maybe other early proto-human species had elongated heads. Maybe there was a species in our early evolutionary history that hunted us. Maybe it was an accidental genetic defect that managed to weasel itself into humanity’s psyche over a few hundred thousand generations.
July 8th, 2008 at 10:04 pm
I say…. Pyramid Head is still awesome.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
people fear anything that seems unnatural - desease, deformation…
July 26th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Pyramid Head is pale with an elongated head
The Xenomorphs have elongated heads and sharp teeth
July 30th, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I sitll love this one.
It makes me want to draw.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:08 am
Readman:
The elongated heads are a throwback to days long past. When humans weren’t the top of the food chain, many things wanted to nom on our tasty, tasty flesh. Most large predators had elongated heads.
July 31st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
So, essentially, we fear creatures who are pale, with dark, sunken eyes, razor sharp teeth, and elongated faces because of a combination of our instinctual fears. Firstly, our fear of death (pallid skin tone, dark, lifeless, eyes) and secondly, our instinctual fear of predators (razor sharp teeth, elongated heads).
Perhaps our fear is additionally intensified by the combination of both fears. The fact that death (fear no.1) could result from an encounter with a natural predator (fear no.2) ensues that we are especially afraid of Xenomorphs and Pyramid head - characters that play on both instinctual fears.
August 3rd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Your all fools.
These traits may be similar to other ones, but dont be fooled. Whatever creature has given us this species-wide fear, its waiting.
In the dark.
In the deep.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:02 pm
Haha, Darkest, the Messenger of Evil, made a typo.
“You’re”, not “Your”
August 6th, 2008 at 2:52 pm
he should have used the grudge girl or something.
SHE is scary lookin.
August 8th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
I always think of elves when I hear this one. not the tolkien-tall-and-pretty ones, or the santa clause Happy-munchkin ones, the old fashioned kind that liked to kill and kidnap people and let them go hundreds of years later.
Sorry, I have to post this quote now.
Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
Nobody said elves were NICE.
Elves are BAD.
– Lords and Ladies
August 17th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
amidoinitrite?
August 19th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
Like other people have said, there are understandable reasons for fear of all these qualities. Combining them like this is an interesting idea, but seems kind of random when only two examples are given and each of them has only two of the four qualities.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:10 pm
humans fear what is different
we also fear the unknown…no creature in our world looks like said description and therefore we fear it because it is not familiar to us
September 10th, 2008 at 12:58 am
This… I like this. Gave me chills.
September 10th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
@ The person formerly known as ‘noneya’
I WENT TO A CAMP THAT HAD AN ELF LEGAND AND I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUNNY TO STEAL THE ELF PUPPET HE HE HE…
IT WASN’T
September 14th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
Vampires.
Stock up on holy objects.
September 17th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
Its aliens, dumb-asses.
Elongated heads? Aliens.
Pale skin? Grey aliens.
Sunken eyes? Aliens.
Sharp teeth? Predatory aliens.
L2Logic
September 17th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
anon,at the tope,you say pyramid head is nothign of these,well,hes pale skin,isnt he,and he does have an elongated face,althoug htis a giant elongated metal pyramid
September 26th, 2008 at 11:48 am
THEN WHO WAS TEETH?
September 26th, 2008 at 11:49 am
September 26th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
To “Choker”: Perhaps both. I still prefer my hypothesis of vampirism.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:43 am
I’m pretty damn sure the author was reffering to vampire dinosaurs.