'Overcoming Terror': A Holistic Investigation into Using Horror Media to Manage the First-Person Experience of Fear and Anxiety

Though a useful evolutionary adaptation, in a modern world marked by a stark lack of saber-tooth tigers attempting to eat you, fear often oversteps its proper place. Living full and satisfactory lives in the modern era often requires overcoming fear as often as allowing it to guide you. Not only do anxiety disorders run rampant and rampage through more than a few lives, I do not feel bold in stating that everyone struggles with their own fears and anxieties to degrees large and small. This project utilized writing a combination of research inquiries and pieces of horror fiction and poetry to attempt to show how engagement with horror media and associated topics can not only be exciting entertainment (as we often view movies, books, etc.) but also help people to practice managing that first-person experience of fear in a way which might be applicable to their real lives. This was done through a blog style format split into four different topics: Thalassophobia, Cosmic Horror, Nightmares, and Predation. Posts were made at a minimum of twice a week for six months resulting in 41 original pieces reaching a total word count of 50,000. This CEDAR archive download contains only eight of the original pieces written for the project but should serve to give a sense of its overall objective and methods. Depending on the time of your viewing, I'd encourage you to attempt visiting the original blog at https://oneweekremaining.com/ to experience the project more fully.