“They stab it with their steely knives,

But they just can’t kill the beast.”

A couple years ago I found myself writing horror, a gender I never had any ambition in. This happened during the course of doing reality-based sci-fi in a prehistoric setting. I had a team of time travelers exploring Ice Age Europe in a quest to abduct a Neanderthal child for study and possible cloning. Having been an avid wildlife reader as a boy, and devouring every account by big game hunters available, I came to a brutal realization upon researching the mega-fauna of the Ice Age.

As dangerous as the African savannah was for a big game hunter or the Old West was to the lone frontiersmen, the Ice Age was worse in every way. Imagine the most dangerous place you could be in the U.S. That would be prison. Do you want to be stuck in a U.S. prison with only three friends?

Stop and think about that prison, the predators in there, and what they might want from, or do to, you.

Now turn the temperature down below freezing. And those prisoners, we sent them all off for a year to train at MMA camps, have juiced them up with human growth hormones and steroids…

Okay, you get the picture.

This line of thought brought me to consider the elemental aspects of the kinds of horror I traffic in. It came together in my mind this past spring while I was writing the following section in Taboo You: Way of the Terminal Man, which is essentially a handbook for violent urban loners:

Groups of men are embattled, as they will naturally fall victim to other groups. Men first banded together against lone predators, primarily the leopard, which prefers to feast on primates. This organization was then turned inward to police members of the group to insure the necessary cohesion to deal with such a threat. Improvement of this model improved group size, making it possible to prey on lone predators and do battle against collective predators such as the lion pride and hyena clan. This threat marginalized, man then began to turn this capacity on other groups of men. The process has never abated, continuing to this day. It will—if our technology and state apparatus continue to evolve—result in the abolition of male bonded groups. In fact, most male bonded groups are—in the form of gangs—currently battling The State.

As I wrote this chapter in February 2014 an Indian city was virtually shut down by the authorities because of a single leopard rampaging over roofs and through concrete walls! Leopards in Africa and India kill more people than lions and tigers; and mountain lions are munching on upscale joggers on the Left Cost at a comforting right wing rate.

We have left something behind though, the lone predator. Individuals and groups of humans still harbor our natural primate dread of the lone predator. And as our society grows larger, with more physical, social and psychological wilderness in the vast within, the dread of such individuals has even become a TV mainstay. Currently, crime dramas are dominated by the threat and focus on ‘serial killers’; prolific lone killers hunting the helpless Children of The State.

The most popular show of this kind is Criminal Minds, which constantly reinforces the following: an individual cannot combat a serial killer; state and local police cannot combat a serial killer; federal police are superheroes, who, alone, possess the ability to protect us from the lone predator; and, the facilitation of this protection is made possible by a gaudily dressed female computer hacker who can find out anything about anybody [the NSA]. The serial killers are metaphors for lone, individual men, who must be policed by the mega-state at all costs. Criminal Minds is a clarion call and blueprint for The Extinction of Men.

To begin with the thing can silently leap 20 feet, and can drag a man up into a tree. The Indian leopard depicted on the news coverage leaped through a cinderblock wall! To the extent that we have remains of proto-humans to examine we may thank the leopard, as they like to dine in solitude. Leopards prefer to hunt primates and kill with fangs, going for the throat. They are also selective eaters, not big gore hounds like lions or bone munching primal dumpster divers like hyenas.

The fear of the lonely personal death is the fear of the leopard.

The fear of wolves and other types of organized pack killers who eat you before you are completely dead is so profound it made for the werewolf mania of Europe and has been harnessed by such oppressive conquerors as the Romans and conquistadors who used man eating war dogs to great effect.

The fear of being eaten alive is the fear of wolves and hounds. A hyena once leaped over a thorn ‘boma’ barricade, bit off a man’s face, and ran off with it. For a true appreciation of the bite force and ferocity of wolves view the movie Quest for Fire.

Every environment in which our ancestors clawed out a living had an apex predator: lion, tiger, bear. In the Ice Age you had all of them together! The fear of something like a leopard on steroids that is so goddamned big that it can bowl through a group of fighting men and bite off a head is a unique type of terror, often associated with the idea of a lair. In ancient Europe—were so much of our horrific folklore originates—lions were much more solitary and prone to cave dwelling. In primal North America bears were as fast as horses and twice the size of a lion! In the Ice Age you had supersized bears that were even faster.

The lone beast of super proportions was represented in South America by the jaguar which is larger and has more endurance than the leopard, and has grown to 400 pounds. One of these things dragged a horse over a barbed wire fence and swam the river with the carcass! In the far north you have the polar bear. Asia was pretty much owned by the tiger in five varieties. During one tiger hunt in the 1800s in India a bunch of tigers were cornered and rushed the hunters who were firing from the backs of elephants. This essentially became a battle between tigers and men with penny-a-week beaters running for their lives as the crazy white men and the tigers fought it out on elephant back!

For the best film treatment of what such a beast could be—and was sometimes like—view The Ghost and the Darkness, a true story starring Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer.

This is so obviously the crocodile it is not even funny. There is a ton of footage on these things. The horrific element is the total lack of passion, the reptilian alien patience waiting with infinite resolve to eat you.

At the close of WWII in New Guinea a battalion of U.S. troops pushed a company strength battalion of Japanese into a mangrove swamp. With the tide rolling in and darkness falling the GIs decided to wait for morning to pick them off. All night long screams of horror were heard. In the morning a few Japs were found clinging terrified to mangrove trees, most having been devoured by giant salt water crocodiles that came in from the sea like rednecks to the discount buffet.

Until very recently most people on earth thought of people who spoke another language as being sub-humans. Primitive societies did not have death penalties for crimes. Into classical ancient times there was one universal form of capital punishment in most societies: exile. People around the world were so violently xenophobic that you could usually count on the neighbors to kill anybody you ostracized.

The horror of the zombie is the fact that there is zero empathy and no possibility of communication. Well, that used to be the people in the next valley. Now, thanks to the hate politics and corporate ostracism of our media organizations the typical postmodern person can look to the news every evening and see depictions and characterizations of people who would have as little regard for him as an Apache would for a Navaho—both words which mean enemy by-the-way.

The rodeo, zoos, and bullfighting are all descended from animal killing spectacles of the ancient world in which the State demonstrated that it was more powerful than the beasts that the ordinary farmer and wayfarer so feared. My favorite item on this grisly menu had to be the battle in the Roman Colosseum between 400 Praetorian Guards and 400 tigers. This would be just like taking 400 FBI officers and arming them with batons and making them fight 400 gangbanger bread cop-hating pitbulls.

Psychologically speaking a zoo represents the death of predatory fear and the victory of the primate nesting model of life. If you were going to make a horror movie for animals it would be set in a zoo.

Stone Age people often referred to the mammal population as the four-legs, people as the two-legs and to birds and things that swim as members of separate spiritual ‘nations’. If I were an extraterrestrial shaman come to earth three million years ago, and had the ability to speak to the four-legs and knew what I know now about people I would say this:

“Look guys I know you hyenas and lions have your war, and everybody hates the damned leopards, and the dogs are just a pain in the ass and you can’t trust the crocs… But seriously, those tree-climbers—and you need to pass this down to your young—if you ever see one of those two-legged monstrosities climb down out of the trees and it picks up a stick or stone, kill him. Then you need to make a deal with the leopards to clear the trees of all of his blood relatives, because that fixation with sharp rocks might just be hereditary.

“And another thing, if you see the apes making nice with the canines, lookout! Okay, laugh if you will. But if you all let the apes and the canines team up, it’s all over. This place won’t even be safe for me. I’ll probably have to scratch seminar appearances after that point. You’ve been warned.”

Just remember, that when we write horror, we are reflecting a dark light from a very deep pool in our collective soul.