Why are Deep Sea Fish So Horrifying

I recently saw the amazing deep sea episode of BBC’s Blue Planet documentary series. If you are a fan of HP Lovecraft and “horrors from the deep” kind of stuff, you will love this show.

Watching this episode and the more pleasant “open ocean” episode that it’s paired with, I got wondering: what causes deep sea fish to be so terrifying (at least to this human), while dolphins are cute and sunny and get to play in the upper levels of their environment? Is it an evolutionary thing? Is it something from the subconscious, ie. knowledge that the bottom dwellers feed off of the dead?

Going down a weirder path: could it be related to some aspect of heaven and hell and the various other planes? Why should “below” be so commonly understood to imply evil, while “heaven” and the “higher planes” are conceptualized as being physically above us? Could those concepts find their origin in ancestoral memories of these creatures from when we all lived in the sea hundred of millions of years ago?

All I know for sure is that these things scare the bejeebus out of me.

Written by Parker on August 6th, 2006 with comments disabled.
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