| The Hound of the Baskervilles was one of the very
first films I ever saw. My parents took me to see it at a small
cinema in Putney in London. No film has ever effected me more deeply;
it scared the life out of me and I was plagued by nightmares for
weeks afterwards. I have no doubt that the old black-and-white film
would seem laughably tame these days, but as an eight-year old, from
a family with no television, it terrified me.
Stories of the supernatural have always been popular and have
survived every argument science has been able to throw at them. Just
because our intellects tell us that something is impossible doesn't
mean to say that we entirely lose our fear of it; there is, surely,
a direct line from The Hound of the Baskervilles to the television
series The X-Files. Such stories apparently answer a need in us.
Neither fear nor laughter are always entirely logical but they
are often related. As adults we can laugh at those things that
terrified us as children, and yet in certain situations we can still
experience child-like fear. Interestingly, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
creator of the most scientific and logical of detectives, became in
later life a spiritualist, convinced that we can communicate with
the dead. Even our most strongly-held beliefs are not as
unassailable as we would like them to be. Do any of us entirely lose
our fear of the dark?
John Fiske
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