From Vampires to Aliens: How Horror Reflects Humanity | SiYun Lee | TEDxBISHCMC Youth
Many people experience that feeling of fright and horror as a survival mechanism: you sight a dangerous predator, adrenaline
starts coursing through your body, your muscles contract rapidly, allowing you to run away and survive yet another day. However, as humans, we have come a long way from the ooga booga cavemen. We have come from telling our children about how we were almost killed by a wooly mammoth by the campfire to speculating how chatgpt will kill us all. In this talk, I want to go through the most iconic horror villain tropes from each era, from vampires to supercomputers. Are we as a society scared of these horror tropes because of an animalistic instinct to avoid predators or does it reflect something deeper - something that makes us human? By the end of this talk, I hope that I will introduce everyone to even more niche genres of horror and shake away the stereotype that horror is a cheap, juvenile genre that simply relies on jumpscares and cliches.
I’m Siyun, an individual passionate about the sciences, and an avid reader of horror. Since the beginning of my obsession with the genre, I have read and become obsessed with many different subgenres of horror, from supernatural to slasher to cosmic to evolutionary horror. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx
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