“Humans are violent creatures,” behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner writes in Morbidly Curious. “However we aren’t just violent; sometimes we are gruesomely violent.” True to its title and language, Morbidly Curious is not short on some of humanity’s worst habits and unhappiest doings. It has the unseen threats of ghosts and disease, the visceral terrors of serial killers and torturers, the uncertainties of dreams, and the mysteries of centuries-old corpses. Scrivner wants to show us at our worst, yet he does so with a prose that practically smiles. It is somewhere in between the easy synthesis of the BBC documentary and the disarming warmth of the cool teacher. Even as the horror is fresh on every page. Because, for Scrivner, to be on familiar terms with our worst is also to be at our best.
Take horror fans, who, despite (or because of) their reliable financial support of the cultural industry, are a much maligned cohort. Scrivner sets the tone with a review of an entry of the Saw franchise that condemns its fans as “depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most other living things.” Scrivner believes that this conclusion is “mistaken.” He wants to correct the scolds, and in American culture, you don’t so much prove that an object deemed prurient is, in fact, wholesome, but that the prurient object is prurient for a very good reason. “Far from being a stain on our psyche, my research shows that morbid curiosity is a common and healthy aspect of our psychology. It’s a relic of our evolutionary history that can continue to serve us in the modern world.”
In that spirit, Morbidly Curious is not simply an atrocity exhibition or even a celebration of horror. Horror is only one facet of the love of the macabre that Scrivner is defending. And he defends it with an intricate yet concise and lucid interweaving of scientific disciplines, unthinkably niche case studies, personal reminiscence, and an easy way with the well-placed (that is, not excessive or alienating) pop culture reference. Scrivner is earnest in his hope that he can unite the morbid with the squeamish in a rare bid for mutual appreciation. “Morbid curiosity is nature’s way of putting us into situations where we can safely learn about the dangers of the world and how we respond in times of fear and anxiety.” And it is his conviction that everyone, deep down, is a little curious by necessity.
Scrivner proceeds in a manner akin to a matchmaker, connecting a predominant fear with the most compatible morbid outlet. Do you have a paranoid, conspiratorial streak? “Morbid curiosity can act as a preventative measure against premeditated or conspiratorial aggression,” he writes. Hence, the craze for true crime. A “tendency to hyperactively detect agency” in insignificant or inanimate things is a gateway to ghost stories and the paranormal. Video games and MMA are extensions of keeping our natural violent tendencies in control. And so on. Scrivner is never lacking for a theoretical rationale, a clever taxonomy, or a laboratory study in order to cement these matches. He describes one in which a psychologist tests whether belief in the afterlife influenced belief in ghosts. Subjects fill out a questionnaire assessing their attitudes. When half of the participants are told that a janitor died in the laboratory, their heart rate and skin conductance are measured against a flickering light. Believers and non-believers had the same “physiological arousal.” Checkmate, atheists?
A literal-minded, doctrinaire spirit drives Morbidly Curious. It is the spirit of Thomas Hobbes. It’s fairly easy to pick up on once the charm of Scrivner’s conversational tone wears off. Morbid curiosity is necessary because the world in which we live is ever verging on a “warre all against all.” It is all rooted in anticipating danger and picking up on threats. “Violence is an integral part of social relationships with animals.” “It’s remarkable that humans don’t impulsively kill each other more often.” “It is a common misconception that our hunter-gatherer societies existed in a state of peace compared to modern societies.” “The violence perpetrated on a bully by an innocent victim will likely be perceived as bad, but the violence enacted on a villain by a noble hero likely will not.” Scrivner never rises to Hobbes’s enduring menace. The smile remains, but it shifts from Bill Nye to Norman Bates.
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Scrivner’s expository lucidity and the single-minded pursuit of his thesis will prove attractive to lay readers of a wide range of gag reflexes. Yet, there is a certain familiarity in the style that brings Scrivner’s project much closer to horror than even he, an organizer of zombie walks, seems to realize. Science and horror have an extensive relationship. Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H.P. Lovecraft all kept abreast of the scientific interests and breakthroughs of their day. But when they filtered them through their imaginative prisms, what came out was less than beneficial. Science was something we abused for narrow purposes and which could just as easily abuse us in turn. Scrivner may not reach any Promethean heights in his efforts, but he has the same blind spots. By that token, Morbidly Curious is its own work of horror.
There is a problem with the very project of investigating how horror works and why we are culturally or evolutionarily drawn to it. To put horror into our service is not far removed from the aspirations of most mad scientists. And as with their aspirations, this one is bound to backfire terribly. Horror has an expressive power that ultimately suffers by Scrivner’s design. Like a philosopher explaining the working of humor would rob jokes of their thrill, this work is, in some way, incapable of beauty or mystery. It assures our anxieties but fails to confound our senses. Thrill and artistry, even the tropes, are given over to pure mechanics. Moreover, horror is robbed of the moral stakes by which a fan is free, and at times obligated, to discern where to draw their own line of what they can or will tolerate, or what a work of horror is actually saying to them. By assigning horror important tasks, Morbidly Curious lets the horror fan off the hook, so to speak. But any attempt to exert control over so strong a force, as so many of the genre’s greatest artists have shown, will not save our necks from being stuck on sharper, rustier hooks.
Chris R. Morgan lives in New Jersey. He has contributed to Lapham’s Quarterly and the Washington Examiner.
