Funny Picture

Jason Zinoman posts a provocative essay in Slate that says that monsters are scarier when you know as little as possible about them, certainly about their past.

The wisest sentence ever written about horror is the first line in H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 literary history of the genre, Supernatural Horror in Literature: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." If our greatest fear is of the unknown, then too much explanation is usually the enemy of truly frightening horror. What distinguished [the film] HALLOWEEN from its imitators is that its relentless killer is impossible to explain. Michael Myers has no psychology or motivation and barely any back story. The scariest thing about him is the suggestion that his mask isn't hiding anything. Rather, that's all there is.

Discuss.