I enjoy things that creep me out and fill me with wonder. Though an ardent skeptic at heart -- and one who never slips past that line into actually believing any of the wonderful hoaxes and conspiracy theories out there -- it all ties into my desire for there to be something "more" left in the world. Everything real is flawed by virtue of its reality, but we can still dream of amazing, magical things. Of course these aren't good magics I accost here. These are terrifying forces.
Aliens, medical oddities, mythical creatures and cryptozoology, all good. Though my standards would be called into question by some (I tend to find the hokey b-movie creations more convincing than that damnable CGI, which scarcely looks genuine), a sense of realism is important to my fascination.
To that end, you could say my favorite 'setting' for these creatures and anomalies is the relatively recent historical record. Not the 60s or the 50s, but the 1900s, late-1800s... Mankind is as we know them, but the world is a much, much smaller place. The beauty of this time period is that everything seems so much more genuinely plausible. Today the world has been scoured, and the great mysteries have been definitively debunked. The Coelocanth's extraordinary rediscovery was surely made possible by its ocean-home. It's unconscionable that we could find a new prehistoric living creature of any good size living among us on land today. But in 1889, it seems, if not plausible then possible that a 'lost world' could be found, or that a "Rex" dinosaur could be roaming the bowels of Kasai, or that hobbit-sized barbarish homonids could cohabitate with human beings, or that strange creatures had been found, and their skeletons preserved.
Everything seems more plausible in that volatile period of last discovery between the 19th and 20th centuries. Before the world wars. The Aurora Crash somehow seems more real than similar stories that occur in the glow of modern day. Even ghosts and ghouls, which I tend to dismiss more readily than other oddities, seem so much more alive and genuine in the dim magic of recent past. There's just something magical about that time period for me, something that allows my imagination to go wild.
I don't like the trend in recent times for cryptozoologic and oddity-themed programs to attempt a scientific and clinical viewpoint. Shows like MonsterQuest invariably come up with the answer that these creatures don't exist at all, and they never give you anything truly awe-inspiring to view, or much of a good fright. The ghost-themed reality shows are painfully feigned, and they don't even utilize their fakeness as an excuse to get dramatic like the old show Real Scary Stories, whose "kids with a camera" scenes mirror those used in modern shows but always included ten times the amount of action and scares.
The clinical angle just doesn't do it for me. There used to be such a craft put into inventing a scary atmosphere, a powerful mood. When I was a kid you would see tons of incredible documentaries on Discovery Channel following old-world expeditions to find Bigfoot and they always had an incredible feel to them. Today's serial programing can't compare to the likes of Sightings and Beyond Bizzare.
Click the links only if you're ready for a fright! O.O
"The moral of the story, is try not to get too old." -- Neil Young
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