Scream: Chilling Adventures in the Science of Fear by Margee Kerr

Author:Margee Kerr [Kerr, Margee]
Language: ara
Format: epub
Tags: Self-Help, Anxieties & Phobias, Emotions, Psychology
ISBN: 9781610394833
Google: kgErCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2015-09-29T20:38:08+00:00

Getting to the forest was an adventure itself. The idea of visiting it made little logistical decisions seem surreal and even darkly funny. When is the best day to visit the Suicide Forest? Do you go after breakfast? I’d spent my previous day at the Fuji-Q Highland, riding the roller coasters and screaming my head off. I contemplated the idea of a bus loop between the forest and the park: it could be the “thrill-therapy” loop. I immediately felt guilty for such an insensitive thought, but part of me was still riding the physical and mental high from my day of screams and laughs. Did that make me ridiculous? Was it immoral? I didn’t know, which confirmed my decision to continue on.

I rode a series of trains and buses, and I couldn’t help but wonder about the intentions of everyone around me. Was it possible that someone on this vehicle was going to take their own life? But passengers thinned with each transfer. In fact, I was the only one at the station boarding my last bus. I felt the eyes of a group of young girls on my back as I stepped on and realized that I was the conspicuous one. I displayed all the warning signs—a stranger, traveling alone, not dressed in hiking gear, sitting silently the whole trip.

I took my seat and tried to look like a happy tourist for the few passengers already onboard. I didn’t want anyone to think I was going to kill myself or, just as disturbingly, to scavenge. This is another of the unsettling realities of Aokigahara: knowing it is a popular suicide destination, people now go into the forest looking to rob the dead of their valuables. Even worse is that some go looking for macabre souvenirs like bones, nooses, and the highly sought-after and profitable footage of finding a “real” suicide victim.

It may sound grotesque, and it is certainly appalling, but there is an appetite for real images and artifacts of death. There are a few plausible explanations as to why: one is the attraction/repulsion dynamic discussed in Chapter 3. But researchers Philip Mellor and Chris Shilling suggest that because real death has been so far removed from our lived experience, we go looking for places and images that make the unknowable more known, making us feel more secure and in control. As Susan Sontag famously stated in her book Regarding the Pain of Others: “The feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures . . . and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt.” This may seem counterintuitive: we are inundated daily with stories of tragic and gruesome deaths and the fictionalized representations in movies, in video games, and on TV, resulting in habituation or desensitization. But engaging with death from a distance, passively or symbolically, is not the same as confronting the reality.

Growing up on farms, I saw death everywhere, and I realized quickly that like most things, it’s not the same as in the movies.

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