Are you afraid? Fear is such a generic thing that it’s hard to say how any genuine fear could possibly be described by that term alone. We experience many different kinds of fear, each with its own kind of disturbing sensations. So, when we say that we’re spooked, we refer to a specific emotion.
Spook is a Germanic word that’s leaked into Scandinavian languages, and into English as well. As it’s moved around, it’s taken on several different shades of meaning. The original meaning appears to have been as a noun that described a ghost.
So far as that goes, the feeling of being spooked seems fairly straightforward at first. Being spooked is the kind of emotion we feel when we encounter a ghost. We’re frightened… but by what exactly?
A ghost is spooky because it’s a representation of someone who is supposed to be dead, but turns out to be lingering, half-alive in some sense, present without being present. If ghosts were real in anything more than a psychological sense, we would have to incorporate them into our society, count them in the census and give them voting rights. They might soon take control of any democratic process, outnumbering the living.
Ghosts aren’t real in that sense. They’re hauntings within the minds of the people who hallucinate them, or sense them without really seeing them. A ghost, then, can be thought of as a repressed feeling about someone who is dead and gone, but remains behind as an emotional shadow. When it breaks back into conscious awareness, we’re taken aback, and reality itself seems to crack.
There’s something of this feeling of cracked reality in the Scandinavian twist on what’s spooky. In Sweden, a spook is a scarecrow. In Denmark, the same word refers to a kind of joke. At the core, whether it’s disturbing or not, the experience of being spooked is a jolting realization that things are not as we expected them to be. In a field of vegetables, we find an apparition, strangely human, yet inhuman, occupying the uncanny valley in between.
Feeling spooked can be like hearing a joke in the sense of having a sudden realization of an underlying truth that had previously escaped notice. In the paper Horror and Humor, Noël Carroll writes that, “There has been a strong correlation between horror and comedy since the emergence of the horror genre,” and quotes horror movie director Stuart Gordon’s observation that, “The thing I have found is that you’ll never find an audience that wants to laugh more than a horror audience.” The line between a laugh and a scream is thin, noted suspense master Alfred Hitchcock.
In either case, whether we’re spooked like a horse running from a loud noise, or bent over in laughter, we’ve been thrown into sudden, involuntary movement, overcome with a feeling of intense provocation. Even when we have a low level kind of spooky feeling, it’s in anticipation of this jump scare that we shiver.
