BA6 - Research

Fear of graveyards. An interesting fact about the fear of graveyards is the name or term used as a phobia name; Coimetrophobia. It can mean that a person might have graveyard anxiety or just graveyard fear. Why is that we have this fear though? That is part of why I am doing the church scene with the gravestones. I believe it’s partially down to how we look them psychologically but also I feel it’s down to our western culture and how they are portrayed in many different media such as movies or short stories. In different cultures around the world graveyards are seen as calm and sacred places in which people don’t fear them but here we think of them at night with the typical ghostly sightings and eerier noises. In reality though graveyards are quite harmless, you can walk through during the day and sometimes they can look beautiful and if they allow you to at night they are no different to a walk through the park. So why do we fear them, well I first stumbled upon HowStuffWorks website, the science section to be more specific and there’s an article on ‘What makes graveyards scary?’ (Lamb, year unknown). 

Reading the article its clear to see that we fear graveyards because of the sentimental value we treasure with them, we try to escape death as a natural instinct and can fear death yet we preserve the very existence of dead people with gravestones, coffins and their belongings inside. This then contributes to the reasoning behind the fear of graveyards, we do not want to die and so graveyards only remind us that eventually no matter what we end up in one. It’s not just the typical horror movies that make us see them that way either, it’s also the societies in which make up stories about different ghostly sightings and ones where the ghost may chase you, some us may see this as silly old nonsense but deep down and very much psychologically we fear them, whether it be the actual architecture of them or whether it be the very thought of ‘what comes next’ with our lives after we’re dead. This then makes my project difficult in order to explore the idea of what makes us fear graveyards, to the best of my ability I have tried replicate what might appear to be your standard graveyard and church scene. Have the scene set up with night time lights, a back story behind and maybe the player will be a bit frightened of the place, who knows? One thing for sure it’s up to the individual in what they think of graveyards because we all might see them in a different light.

Here’s the opening paragraph to the article and straight away it should apparent that it’s you stereotypical scene of a graveyard; ‘Under the wat­chful gaze of crumbling saints and baby-f­aced cherubs, you hurry down a path lined with mausoleums. Eventually, you pass crops of headstones glinting in the moonlight, each engraved with the Cliffs Notes version of the dead person's life. You practically run past sunken graves and dying flowers, hoping upon hope that the sound you hear is just the wind and trying to shake the feeling that something is following close on your heels.’ (Lamb, year unknown). I keep looking through different articles and various posts that people have made about why people fear graveyards and it seems to be a common assumption; people fear them for either the ghosts, un-natural beings that might grab you or just psychologically fearing them through either the stories that they have heard or the fear of the unknown.

link below

Lamb, Robert - What makes graveyards scary, year unknown. Available from: <http://science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/afterlife/scary-graveyard.htm>

Image 3. Available from: <http://designora.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Zombies-in-Graveyard-Free-Halloween-Wallpaper.jpg>