Yo, yo daddy-o. Your favourite lunatic here.

Is it possible to have a favourite lunatic? I would say it is. Everyone loves a little madness, don't they? I mean, sure, I'm not actually insane - though it depends on who you talk to. Or should that be whom? To whom you talk? Never mind. What's a little grammar between friends?

And that depends on who you talk to, too. If it's Geoffrey Morely, a nicely rotund resident of this here mental home, a little Grandma goes a long way, but we won't talk about his unorthodox dietary decisions, shall we?

Anywho-be-do. What was I on about? Oh, that's right. I hadn't started.

Let's talk scary.

What's scary? Is it blood? Spiders? Clowns?

Clowns are a good one. I've never been fazed by them myself, but I have known people who are scared silly. Coulrophobia, the full blown phobia, is fairly rare but to be unnerved by the staple circus fool is quite a widespread condition. Is it to do with the odd faces, somehow looking mutilated? Clowns back in the day (way back, I mean, in the Middle Ages) had their facial muscles cut to ensure they smiled even wider, particularly if they weren't able to make the King laugh. Maybe it's the mask which hides the true menace of the person beneath it - a manically smiling face over a potentially much more sinister one.

American Horror Story, of course, gave us Twisty, a clown who lived up to all the fears which lurk inside of those disquieted by the characters, standing head to garishly coloured head with Stephen King's delicious IT.

Blood is inside of us and is meant to stay there. Spiders are little (or not so little) many-legged creatures which can crawl up your trouser legs or across your sleeping face and bite! Of course, we won't talk about how many find their wicked ways onto your mouths at night...

What, though, is scary and why do we have a desire to send chills down our own spine? Why do we take ourselves off to the cinema to be collectively terrified along with a couple of hundred others? Or read a book in bed at night with the lights off (apart from the one which lets you read the words).

Because it's fun? Because we're testing our own boundaries and like to peek our toe out from the blanket of our comfort zone? Because we are all a little warped and want to deny we used to pull the wings off daddy long legs when we were young? Maybe that's the origins of the spider fear. You once had a little collection of their legs arranged neatly on the windowsill of your bedroom and are now afraid those dead spiders' descendants are hunting you down?

Or is that just Phonela, over by the window there, watching the money spider crawl down the bars to make sure it doesn't come anywhere near her? If it sets just one of its feet wrong, she'll be snuggled down in a strait jacket, drugged up to the bloodshot eyes, by evening.

I wonder if, actually, we liked to be scared because, after we've had that adrenaline rush from the clowns and spiders and Saw-like disembowelings and creepy, psychological horrors which delve deep into our psyche to taunt us with our own insecurities, we can turn it off. We can exit the ride, switch on the ride leave the theatre and close the book.

And then we're victorious, even if only for a moment. We've defeated our demons because we've walked away.

Who knows. Dr. Connors, our proud resident psychiatrist in the asylum, probably does, which is why he loves all his residents. We're his spiders and he's pulling our legs off.

What's more scary? The spider or the one tearing their limbs off and enjoying it?

Happy Halloween!