The evil within

While springcleaning I found an article I wrote many years ago and thought I'd save it here for future reference. Considering how young and stupid I was way back then, I'd say its pretty good.


"Werewolves, vampires, witches etc. do not exist in reality but exist as a horrible concept: that the deeper darker side of ourselves, our id, can and will eventually take over and bring us down to the level of beasts. This is a subconscious feeling, so we are not aware of anything more than a feeling of impending doom while watching horror movies. Dr Jekyll/Mr Hyde is an example of how all of us badly want to shed our shackles of dignity and become free to do as we wish. Interestingly the concept of one becoming a werewolf or vampire for eternity after being bitten spawned from the contagiousness of losing control and never gaining it back.

Isnt it strange, therefore, that society as a whole would shun all who lose control - misfits, "vampires", and "werewolves" - when all of us are guilty of an underlying desire for chaos? Perhaps we wish to extract our id from ourselevs and pin it wholly on misfits. We hate to think that we ourselves are to blame for social evils, so we blame Hitler, Dracula, Satan and the like.

And yet, after these evil epitomes are purged from society, evil still lurks in the minds of every single individual in society. The desire to break away from society and fend for oneself at the expense of society remains. Perhaps that explains why, at the end of every horrow movie, after the monster or "source of evil" has been killed, a gnawing feeling remains that perhaps, the evil has not left after all."