Many of the people I know, whether friends or acquaintances or neighbors, automatically give greater credibility to films, literature, plays, TV shows and the like when these things are filled with darkness. I don’t. These people, whether local or national or international, tend to say things like, “Man that was good. It was so dar-har-har-hark. Dark film. Good stuff.” Such sentences, aside from being contradictory, actually expose a shallow criteria for judging philosophies or aesthetics.

At this point, you and I should talk about the dark.

What if I told you that there’s no such thing as the dark? What if I added that there’s no such thing as cold? We impose “dark” and “cold” upon the world by the way we respond to varying degrees of light and heat. On the heat spectrum you can find Absolute Zero, but this is merely an absence of heat and energy. Non-heat is Absolute Zero. A dark room never emits some substance known as “darkness,” but rather absorbs or hides the waveparticle we call light. The color black does the same—completely absorbing light. Tolkien described Shelob as constantly consuming light until she consumed herself, like Ungoliant’s parasitic nature, and even Melkor was described as falling “from splendor through arrogance to contempt for all things save himself, a spirit wasteful and pitiless. Understanding, he turned to subtlety in perverting to his own will all that he could use until he became a liar without shame. He began with the desire of light, but when he could not possess it for himself alone, he descended through fire and wrath into a great burning down into darkness.” Fire—the wedding of heat and light which casts, by contrast, cold and shadow to those outside its circle, that same fireside circle where we first gave birth to stories.
Darkness is a negation, a void, an absence, a cannibalistic parasitic thing that, when everything else has been consumed, consumes itself. Black holes, because of this negativity, crush everything into a formless density. Curious that we Anglo speakers have called stupid people both “dense” and “dim” or “dimwitted.”

My point is not that artifacts of culture should feel like a round of Candy Land—and, in fact, even Candy Land has its Molassas Monster and Lord Licorice. Certainly bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. We should use these things in stories and value them in culture as elements of the truth—especially since tragedies are comedies stopped halfway through.

My point is that when we consistently loiter and linger in darkness, we’re killing time in a negation. An absence. A lacking-thing. To praise darkness for darkness sake is to praise something dense and dim. To automatically favor dark films over lighter films simply for their darkness is to give credence to something shallow, parasitic. More specifically, the dark parts of films or books can neither scare us nor move us emotionally unless there is light from which to fall, light toward which to climb, and light through which to illuminate all of those corners and basements and rock bottoms by the end. Stories move from light, toward light, by light because The Greats pen their stories to enlighten us all.

In fact, the most fascinating horror stories seldom show humans venturing into the sewers or goats tromping down under the bridge. What really terrifies us is when the troll comes out from under the bridge (or the sewers in IT) to threaten us. We don’t linger in the void. Rather, the void spouts its trolls at us in the same way that Heaven dispatches her angels. When the void spits out elder monsters and the heroes of old call to arms, then and only then can we hear a good telling of a great story.

Or, put simply, stories can’t exist in a void.

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