We are thrilled to be talking with Alan Robert, whom many of you know as the bassist/songwriter for the heavy metal band Life of Agony. A few years back, Rolling Stone rated Life Of Agony’s River Runs Red album one of the greatest heavy metal albums of all time, which I appreciated as the song River Runs Red is one of my favorite songs of all time. And Alan is also the creator of the best selling coloring book series The Beauty of Horror and just announced the newest edition of the series, The Beauty of Horror 5: Haunt of Fame.
Now at Hardcore Humanism, our goal is to help you apply some of the core principles of humanistic psychology so that you can break free from the conventions and expectations that others may put on you, or that you may put on yourself, find your purpose in life and work hard to achieve it. Alan has dedicated himself professionally to a lifetime of artistic expression and has had great success in different mediums. But one of the themes that cuts across much of Alan’s work is the exploration and embrace of horror.
And so I wanted to talk with Alan about the psychology of horror as a genre and theme. And one of the reasons this concept is so important to Hardcore Humanism is because horror, whether in art, music, or film, is often dismissed as frightening, harmful and ultimately damaging, because it explores terrifying themes. And thus people who enjoy this art form are often stigmatized as somehow being damaged or dangerous. But for fans of horror, it is in fact the extreme nature of the art that ultimately can be a safe and healthy form of emotional validation, exploration and expression. And Alan’s ability to bring the energy and thematic content of horror into a very new medium – coloring books – gives perhaps an entirely new population an opportunity to safely understand and experience challenging emotions, while also challenging the stigma that horror and horror fans sometimes carry.
