As a form of fear, horror has little ambiguity about it. The thing in a horror movie is an obvious threat, a clearly terrible thing, a wicked terror that seeks to do harm for the sake of harm. It’s bad. It’s evil. Our role is to hate it and to run from it.
It’s simple, which is part of the rather dull appeal of the horror genre. Horror enables people to feel as if the world is morally clear, to identify what’s wrong and act against it without need for hesitation.
The eerie is more sophisticated than horror. When something is eerie, it provokes a slowly growing sense of dread, arising from the sensation of being stalked by a presence which is always on the edge of perception. The eerie isn’t ever seen directly. Often, we can’t be sure whether we’re just imagining it.
Eerie things don’t come running straight at us, like a predator with its sharp teeth bared. They will never jump out of the dark to spook us. The eerie lurks. It hints. It whispers. The eerie is like something that we should have remembered, and we remember that we should have remembered it, even as it remains mostly forgotten.
To have an eerie feeling is thus to simultaneously feel afraid and to be unable to say exactly what we’re afraid of. It’s a fear that feels foolish as soon as we turn on the light, but remains ready to reassert itself the minute the lights go out.
We get an eerie feeling when we walk past the shadows, because we know, deep in our hearts, what is there, waiting to be unseen.
The eerie gazes out at us, but not with an eye for capture, for we have already been in its clutches, unknowing, for quite some time. We keep it in our peripheral vision because to look at it directly would be to acknowledge the emptiness of the illusion of what we have been.
As a guest on BBC Radio 3 explained, “Eerie is the sensation that you might be about to go through a possibly distressing cognitive upgrade of some kind.” Eerie is the thing that we know that we willingly unknow but never completely forget.
