10.

But these claims might well be only speculation, and, in my case, more than that: wishful thoughts from someone who’s read too much Poe and is prone, rather immaturely, to romanticize death. Certainly other scientists would probably say so. Some claim that morbid curiosity is only a desire for strong physiological arousal: the unseemly attracts us because it is more stimulating to our bodies than are more pleasant events. This theory implies that repeated exposure to the morbid can desensitize us and thus result in an appetite for increasingly horrific episodes. For instance, as television viewers require more and more destruction to achieve their desired physiological stimulation, they will become less and less capable of empathizing with actual suffering. Morbid events will devolve into commodities—objects to be consumed for crass pleasure. The result of this cultural insensitivity will be, in the words of Jack B. Haskins (whom I cited above), “an increase in anxieties, pessimism, distrust in other people and institutions, and non-caring which will have negative survival value for our species.”

Well, if fascination with the macabre is unethical, then I’m one heinous bastard. See you in hell. I won’t be alone when I greet you. My nine-year-old daughter, Una, will be right by my side.

Several months ago, Una asked me to read her a story that would give her nightmares. When I asked why, she said that she enjoyed bad dreams; they were like movies, and they didn’t really scare her. In particular, her nightmares reminded her of the old horror films she and I used to watch Wednesday nights. The Mummy, Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man: these classic Universal films never frightened her, nor did other dark stories, such as the early Batman comics. She in fact loved monsters of all kinds, and spent many afternoons drawing them, mainly deranged robots and the folkloric Japanese demons known as the wicked oni.

I admit that my daughter, though by most standards normal, is a little unique in her love of monsters. But her attraction to the macabre puts her firmly in the mainstream. Her playmates and classmates, boys and girls alike, constantly turn sticks into weapons, squash insects, concoct bloody fantasies, and pretend to kill each other.

Children have probably always been drawn to violence. Certainly the centuries-long popularity of gruesome fairy tales suggests that this is so. In the nineteenth century, European scholars anthologized some of these stories. The most famous of these collections is that of the Brothers Grimm. Their stories—including “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Cap,” and “Sleeping Beauty”—originated long before, probably in the Middle Ages, when the tales were a thriving part of a popular culture at odds with ecclesiastical authorities. The narratives were frequently bawdy, violent burlesques providing relief from oppressive rules. When the Grimms expurgated these stories for polite audiences, they removed the erotic elements, more or less, but kept the violence, and thus presented “a world in which villains are regularly decapitated or boiled in oils and giants are slain or tricked into cutting the throats of their children.”

Those are the words of Maria Tatar, a professor of German at Harvard. She argues that the violence was likely retained to teach kids a lesson. Take another famous German children’s book from the nineteenth century, Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter, translated as Shaggy Peter, from 1845. In one story, Conrad the Thumb-sucker is chased by a sinister-looking tailor who carries a huge pair of shears. When the tailor catches the boy, he lops off both thumbs. Another tale features Pauline, who likes to play with matches. She accidentally burns herself to death, and her story grimly concludes with two of her friends mourning at her grave. Then there’s little Kaspar. He won’t eat his soup, and so dwindles to a stick figure, and ends up, like Pauline, dead. A soup bowl serves as his tombstone.

Parents might believe that this hyperbolic violence keeps children in line, but the strategy frequently backfires, with children expressing unbridled merriment at the macabre episodes they are supposed to fear. More recent authors of children’s books—Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, and Maurice Sendak—have tried to sympathize with this juvenile delight. Recall the scene in Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which the gluttonous Augustus Gloop suffers the gruesome grindings of the fudge machine.

Tatar says that what distinguishes children from adults is precisely what sadistic moral tales have tried to repress: “exuberance, energy, mobility, irrepressibility, irreverence, curiosity, audacity.” Among these powers—constant challenges to the “civilizing” agendas of adults—curiosity seems the most important because it “fuels development” by driving children to “push the limits of what is permitted to them and to ignore prohibitions.” Time to blow up Barbie.