Modern theorists echo existential psychologists’ observations on mortality.

You wonder what lurks in those shadows outside your window, down the hall, in the corners, or beneath your bed. Dangers exist, you know that. Vigilance helps you survive by alerting you to risks, but it can also keep you trapped. Excessive preoccupation with potential danger,, can lead you right into the monster’s jaws.
Existential psychologists suggest that human beings’ awareness of our fleeting mortality will motivate most choices we make and things we do. We want to make life worth living in the moment, to keep ourselves alive, and to find ways we might continue to exist beyond physical life. For psychologist Viktor Frankl , who later spread existential psychology throughout the world, many of his ideas about this grew out of his years surviving the horrors of Auschwitz and othercamps.
When you read a horror novel, watch a spooky movie, or tell your own scary story, you are making an affirmative choice: You will face that worm, not hide from it or flee. You will practice your hereditary survival response in manageable ways so that you might strengthen yourself and overcome the worm’s power to hurt you: You exercise to exorcise. It’s just as true when you follow uncanny poetry, such as that of Edgar Allan Poe, through one eerie line after another.
Instead of letting terror crush you, you share a spooky story because it lets you mount the worm and maybe nudge it to take you where you need. You do not simply walk that tortuous line between the extremes of vigilance. You ride over it.Greenberg, J., Pyszczynski, T., & Solomon, S. . The causes and consequences of a need for self-esteem: A terror management theory. In R. F. Baumeister ,. Wildfire.