Fear Amplification Quotes

Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased by tales, so is the other.

Rumor goes forth at once, Rumor than whom No other speedier evil thing exists; She thrives by rapid movement, and acquires Strength as she goes; small at the first from fear, She presently uplifts herself aloft, And stalks upon the ground and hides her head Among the clouds.

When threats become unspeakable, unshareable and even unreadable, their power over us only grows.

A scary movie puts a lot of people, a mob, in one place. There are advantages to that because the panic runs through the audience. If it's a good movie, the fear jumps from one person to the next. You can find yourself screaming just because everybody around you is screaming. There's a real atmosphere of terror. It's also visual, which means that you can't look away from this thing - it's happening. You're in the dark. It's like a nightmare. It's like a dream. It's very, very visual. It works on all those levels.

Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.

Impatience turns an ague into a fever, a fever to the plague, fear into despair, anger into rage, loss into madness, and sorrow to amazement.

This is how I feel about horror films: there's enough scary things that happen in day-to-day life. Sometimes just going and getting the mail is scary, when you open your bills. And so, sometimes I feel like scary movies are just tapping into those anxieties and magnifying them.

We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.

Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions.

Fear creates fear.

I have a little mantra: 'My fear grows fat on the energy I feed it. And if it grows very big, it probably happens.'

Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, The numbers of the feared.

Talking about my fears to others feeds it.

The relentless note of incipient hysteria, the invitation to panic, the ungrounded scenarios - the overwhelming and underlying desire for something truly terrible to happen so that you could have something really hot to talk about - was still startling. We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. [...] That, you could conclude mordantly, is the real soundtrack of our time: the amplification of the self-evident toward the creation of paralyzing, preëmptive paranoia.

When you're trying to sustain a high level of intensity and panic, sometimes it actually helps to have something happen that makes you really afraid because even if in real life it wouldn't make you that scared, to take that little bit of fear and be melodramatic about it, I guess, and convince yourself that it's worse, can be effective.