Background Research: Why are people afraid of the dark?

The main factor in 'Are't You Glad You Didn't Turn on the Light?' is the use of darkness to increase the fear and apprehensiveness of the audience. As part of researching into the Urban Legend I have decided to research into why the dark is such a powerful fear to focus on and hopefully find inspiration for initial designs. 


As with all fears, emotion is triggered from each person's individual subconscious mind as a way of protection from a possible danger, which is based on the primitive aspect of our minds where the main concern is survival.

Achluophobia    (Fear of darkness)

Fear of darkness or Achluophobia is an irrational fear of darkness, the person suffering from Achluophobia will usually think that monsters or other evil things will harm him as soon as he stays in a dark place. The Achluophobia may impact their life to the extent that he may not sleep unless the lights are turned on.

Most people usually experience phobias specifically due to an emotional trauma in a situation. However with achluophobia, the fear of darkness can also be due to the primal instinct's every person has due to not being able to know what is there due to the usually reliable sense of sight being distorted making any threats harder to defend against.

Basically the fear of the unknown, rather than the darkness itself is what the fear is representing. On its own it is not often scary but the lack of sight makes a person anxious as you could never know if you truly are in immediate danger or not.

Through this I have discovered that due to the darkness reducing the vision it has inspired me to create within at least one of my final looks a form of altering the perception of the face of the model as this will recreate the basis of achluophobia where the sight is hindered and so not everything is visible.