Halloween, fear, and what children learn from being briefly frightened.

I had to think about this for a moment. She's twelve, and she says things like this sometimes — observations that sound casual but have a complete philosophy inside them.

Fake scary is worse than real scary because it doesn't let you practise.

She's right, I think, in a way that the psychology of fear backs up. Fear is an emotion with a function: it prepares the body for threat response. When fear is triggered and the threat is real, the response serves a purpose — it mobilises resources, sharpens attention, produces a decision about what to do. When fear is triggered and the threat is fake, the response still fires, but without a resolution. The system activates and then has nowhere to go.

This is why jump scares in bad horror films feel cheap. The system fires. Nothing happens. It's like a car alarm triggered by a gust of wind.

Good fear — useful fear, her 'real scary' — is different. Real fear has an object, a location, a specific quality. It can be investigated. It can be sat with. It can be talked about. And in being investigated, sat with, and talked about, it loses some of its intensity and gains a kind of usefulness: it becomes information about the self.