Some of it has to do with controlling our fears. And the adrenaline rush. There are some things that seem to be rooted deep within our collective subconscious. Spirits and the walking dead in nearly every culture on earth, for example.
There was something I read once that talked about how every culture has a primordial fear of some kind of pale face with sunken eyes and elongated faces and sharp teeth. Like it's an instinctual feeling. And it asked, what happened deep in the pre-historic era that could affect the human race so evenly as to give us a deep, instinctual fear of pale beings with dark, sunken eyes and elongated faces and sharp teeth?
Now, it's most likely due to corpses, as in varying levels of decay a body can resemble thisExcept I've discovered some things with. Dark eyes can also feature as otherness.Like looking into space and seeing the abyss staring back