The horror genre reaches back into the primeval fears of our psyches, the demons buried deep in the collective subconscious, the fundamental terror of the human condition.  But how much have people changed over the course of recorded history?  The faces of ancient times are such distant shadows of our own experiences, so alien in culture and superstition, what themes of dread and fright could we expect to share in common with the inhabitants of a world so far removed from our modern frame of mind?  The answer, actually, is quite a lot.

One of the most ancient works of surviving literature is The Odyssey, the epic verse recounting the tale of Odysseus and his decade of wandering as he tries to return home after the fall of Troy.  Attributed to Homer, it was set down in writing somewhere around the 8th century B.C., but almost certainly reflects an oral tradition already old at that time, describing events on the order of four hundred years earlier.  So at, say, three thousand years in the past, the tale of Odysseus provides an insightful window into the sources of terror haunting our earliest antecedents.

Of course, The Odyssey is not predominantly a horror story and has a lot more to it than a parade of monsters.  The fearsome creatures encountered by Odysseus exemplify the extremes of his trials, serve as foils for his ingenuity and determination, and illustrate the terrifying threats lurking in the terra incognita beyond the edges of Greek civilization.  But key passages do work as straight-up scary stories, and I don’t think that dimension was lost on the audiences of the time.  The ancient Greeks knew how to spin a good yarn, and clearly could appreciate the chills and jolts of a decent monster story.

The most famous is Polyphemus, the dreaded Cyclops.  Massive, brutal, strong enough to heave huge boulders from the shore at a departing ship, and, best of all, with the iconic single eye in the center of the forehead.  You just have to hand it to the Greeks for classic imagery.  This creature is humanoid, able to converse, but happy to dash the brains of a few sailors against the rocks and consume them in front of their terrified companions.  This is a monster who would function in the same horrifying capacity in a modern horror film.  With the mass, strength, homicidal urges and an element of facial deformity, Polyphemus is not unlike the grisly protagonists of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Friday the Thirteenth.

Of a similar stripe and equally horrific are the lesser known Laestrygonians.  These are a seemingly civilized people with a village, a chief and a marketplace, yet contrary to the basic laws of hospitality they respond to a polite greeting by attacking and devouring Odysseus’s men.  The appearance of social order, masking bloodlust and cannibalism, is a regular hook in modern horror, from vampire stories to Children of the Corn.

There’s a pretty good witch in The Odyssey, Circe, a seductress who turns the sailors into pigs.  Another shape-shifting element is the demi-god Proteus, who transforms into various creatures in an effort to escape a wrestling grip.  Witches are standard Halloween icons now, and shape-shifters like werewolves and vampires are common horror staples.

The sea is a fertile source of horrific predators, and The Odyssey features several examples.  The Sirens hypnotize sailors with their compelling song, drawing them in to wreck on the rocks.  Scylla is a classic six-headed sea monster.  Charybdis is a consuming whirlpool, a colossal personification of nature’s fury.

On top of all that, there’s a visit to the Underworld, mixing the torments of the damned (including Tantalus and Sisyphus) with creepy ghost stories.  There’s a chilling passage where Odysseus journeys to the dark edge of the beyond and fills a trench with the blood of sacrificial sheep, drawing the bloodthirsty shades forward to drink: “And now the souls of the dead who had gone below came swarming up from Erebus – fresh brides, unmarried youths, old men with life’s long suffering behind them, tender young girls still nursing this first anguish in their hearts, and a great throng of warriors killed in battle, their spear-wounds gaping yet and all their armor stained with blood.  From this multitude of souls, as they fluttered to and fro by the trench, there came a moaning that was horrible to hear.”  That, droogs, is real horrorshow.

Put it all together, and you’ve got a decent cross-section of the same kind of creatures that haunt modern visions of horror.  Recognizing that the primary thrust of The Odyssey is not to frighten the audience, it is nevertheless apparent that the scary parts of the story retain their force three thousand years later.  And I bet in another three millennia that will still be true.