This is a shadow that might chase me in a bad dream. Parts of my dream might be very clear—the trees, the underbrush—and parts might be blurrier and more emotional, like this creature. (artwork (c) Fran Krause via Gizmodo)
It was Franklin D. Roosevelt who, in his first inaugural speech in 1933, famously said, “the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself.”
And while that may well be true, the fact is there are a great many other things to fear as Netflix’s recent hit film, Bird Box, made all too clear with a tense, edge-of-the-seat narrative where the monsters were never seen but wreaked horrific, world-ending havoc as peoples’ worst fears caused them to, often gruesomely, kill themselves.
As Gizmodo, rightly observed in a piece where it profiles works by artists who were commissioned by Netflix to represent their deepest fears, “Nothing is scarier than what lives deep in our own imaginations.”
In Bird Box, of course, we don’t see what makes people so fearful that they end their lives, a spectre so awful that the only way to survive it is to hide indoors or wear a blindfold outside, but here we do and the results are illuminating and eye-opening, and subject matter aside, beautiful to behold for the insight they give into the human soul and the bravery of artists willing to express what they fear.
Being stuck in a finite closed space and circling round through pitch black, featureless rooms, and eventually realising that there is no way out, House of Leaves style, is the thing I am most afraid of. (artwork (c) Alison Sampson via Gizmodo)
It’s empty here, but I can feel them lurking from just out of my sightline. I can feel their gaze all around me, weighing me down so low that I’m beginning to break. Eventually I’ll crack in half and become empty too. (artwork (c) Marie Enger via Gizmodo)
Brain cancer attacked my father without warning like a hateful poltergeist mutating his mind and body with violent force. Having witnessed this, it has become a insidious specter that will haunt me forever. How do you fight something that can’t be seen, comes without warning, and has no cure? (artwork (c) Aaron Campbell via Gizmodo)
In the lines of fear of fear itself. It’s about the physical materialization of fear in the body. For most it feels like something sinks from the chest to the stomach, there is pain in the physical body, but nothing is in fact hurting the body. It is an anticipated pain reaction for the concept of a threat to the well-being (no pain) of the physical body. (artwork (c) Vanesa R. Del Rey)
