The Road - And My Nightmares

Cormac McCarthy manages to do it. He manages to play upon innate human fear in a way that is more than a little unnerving. It isn't just abject horror. It isn't merely ghosts popping up and saying "boo". It is a cerebral horror. It is a horror of knowing. Not unlike McCarthy's other novel, "No Country For Old Men", and the scene where Llewellyn has to evade a psychopath who is hunting him down through a tiny bed and breakfast, and down the streets of a city at night, the Man in "The Road" has to face a sort of brooding, terrible threat of mortality.

"He ducked his head and then flicked the lighter and swung the flame over the darkness like an offering... On the mattress lay a man with his legs gone to the hip and the stumps of them blackened and burnt... Then one by one they turned and blinked in the pitiful light. Help us, they whispered. Please help us." (110)

I can't speak for others, but somewhere deep in my subconscious, I am innately afraid of the night, and the dark. So much so, that this strikes the very essence of a nightmare: you have a light, but the darkness is so impenetrable that no form can pierce it. What is more frightening is not what you discover in the light, but rather the details that exist right outside of it.

This device is infrequently used in horror. It is a shame then, that most horror movies would rely on the scares of monsters popping out at you, or perhaps merely just being more gory than the others. However, I recently had the good fortune to play the second installment of the "F.E.A.R." game series, a game about a Paranormal Paramilitary unit investigating a psychic disturbance which levels half of the city in a Veidt-like explosion. Trapped in the basement of a school made for the breeding of psychics, you have to turn on the backup generator, which involves you going down to the basement, alone. Very, very alone. Your flashlight suddenly isn't enough and where it might be enough to illuminate the sector of the room, the darkness is so thick that your tiny circle of light is the only knowledge you have.

This is what McCarthy accomplishes.

It changes the pace as well, and makes it distinctively darker. Survival took on a new aspect. You didn't have to worry about just the dangers of the fallout, or starvation, or raiders, but also cannibals. They were very real, and very close. In fact, close enough that you could walk up to them with no warning.

These then are all of the dangers of the human psyche, living just outside of the light that we like to pretend we have with the torch of civilization, an inconsistant, flickering flame that doesn't destroy the darkness, but merely makes us retreat out of its sight. This is the terrible, bloody reality of humanity that exist and invade all of us.