Similar to our love for stimulated horror is our love for real threats. We consume cases and newspaper articles and documentaries and more about serial killers, medical mysteries, murderers and kidnappers and all forms of human evil.
You know what else we find interesting? Not just fake humanity horror, or real humanity horror...but the dead.
Victims? To murder? To illness? Natural causes? With our fascination with the dead, it lies more with how old the dead in question are, and how their bodies are preserved.
Mummies.
They're a popular comedic trope, especially in the form of linen-clad figures chasing a gang of teenagers around a haunted house set to upbeat music. They give us an incredible scientific insight into the lives of humans who have lived before us. And of course, they creep us out.
Some of the more interesting and well researched mummies are the ones that look almost as if they could still be alive. One of my personal favorites (favorite mummy?) is the 500+ year old Incan Ice Maiden. Found in Argentina on the volcano
Llullaillaco with two other mummified children, she's almost perfectly preserved by the frigid temperatures of the mountainous landscape. To look at her you would think she may be asleep. Her hair still has lice in it and her lungs still have an infection lingering. To learn more about the Incan Ice Maiden, click this link.
Mummies are fascinating perspectives on human's natural fear of death. Leaving our flesh vessel, i.e, dying, scares us. The debate on whether our essence is separate from our body is ongoing, and may never be solved. Mummies are a very real representation of death and the passing of live, so perhaps that s why we are so fascinated by them.
(Image credits: http://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/418736/Amazing-tale-of-the-Inca-ice-maiden-a-human-sacrifice-left-to-die-500-years-ago & http://www.how-to-draw-cartoons-online.com/cartoon-mummy.html)
(The Incan Ice Maiden)
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