dread fascination

English

Noun

dread fascination (countable and uncountable, plural dread fascinations)

1. A malignant supernatural influence produced by the evil eye.
   • 1895, Frederick Thomas Elworthy, The Evil Eye, →ISBN, page 43:

     Fair was Eutelidas once, with his beautiful hair, But admiring his face in the stream, on himself he inflicted A dread fascination, and wasted away with disease.

   • 1905, James Thomas Herbert Baily, The Connoisseur - Volume 11, page 56:

     Hence this charm, with its mermaid or siren and its pendant bells, must have been considered to possess the power of attracting to itself the dread fascination, and thus averting the evil eye from the person of its possessor.

   • 2013, Horns of Honor: Regaining the Spirit of the Pagan Horned God, →ISBN:

     The Etruscans, said to be the most ancient people of whom we have any preserved records in Europe, were evidently, like most primaeval races, strong believers in a future state, and took great pains to protect their dead; we may even suggest that precaution, lest the dread fascination should injure the bodies of their helpless departed, may have led to burning them, and thus we arrive at the ultimate origin of cremation, certainly not the earliest method of disposal of the dead.

   • 2016, John H. Elliott, Beware the Evil Eye Volume 3, →ISBN:

     It was an apt allusion to the then, and still, universally prevalent belief in that power of 'dread fascination' which the writer of the Epistle so well knew they [the Galatians] would comprehend.

2. A response to something characterized by staring, an inability to move or intervene, and feelings of dread.
   • 1886, Edna Lyall, In the Golden Days, page 167:

     Her heart beat so fast that it nearly stified her; she stared in dread fascination at that spectral figure, which was Hugo and yet which was not Hugo, for the face was pale and transparent, the eyes shone strangely — he looked altogether unearthly.

   • 1892, The Sunday Magazine, page 190:

     It appears to be in that strange mental condition which most of ourselves must often enough have experienced in the case of dreams — a kind of dread fascination, which enchains all the mental faculties, and causes, as it were, a failure of the faculties of the brain.

   • 2016, David Game, D.H. Lawrence's Australia: Anxiety at the Edge of Empire, →ISBN, page 200:

     Jack's first sighting of her produces in him a dread fascination: “And then Gran opened the door leading from the parlour, and stood there like the portrait of an old old lady, stood there immovable just looking on, like some ghost.

   • 2017, Thirteen O'Clock Press, The Call / Welcome to the Dance, →ISBN, page 178:

     We watched in dread fascination as he skipped lightly down the steps.

3. An obsessive interest in something that evokes feelings of fear or that hurts the person with the interest.
   • 1868, Jonathan Green, The Reformed Gambler:

     In Cincinnati, in Boston, and wherever he has been he has secured the sympathy of the best portion of the community, and has been the means of rescuing thousands from the dread fascinations of this modern Circe.

   • 1977, The Armchair Detective - Volume 10, page 83:

     We can also see that one element in crime fiction always remains the same: our dread fascination for the unknown, for the darker side of human nature, and the everpresent phantom of danger.

   • 1990, Alan Sica, Weber, Irrationality, and Social Order, →ISBN, page 101:

     We need not take certain events, particularly concerning his father, Max, and his mother's religiosity, quite so far as Arthur Mitzman in order to recognize Weber's dread fascination with the role played in some bourgeois personalities by ultimate, absolutistic values and otherwise irrational vectors.

   • 2013, Les Robinson, Changeology, →ISBN:

     Of course, what also lies outside the comfort zone is hope: the possibility of bettering oneself. We intuitively know this and so the scary zone has a dread fascination.

   • 2016, Carrie Chang, Eggie, I Presume?, →ISBN:

     Eggie, who cursed me for my dread fascination with churches, spires, and cathedrals, and such, ordered to hold my head straight as he sketched a neutral diagram of me under a violet ruby cross in the wuthering light, joking a bit that I looked like a weathered fat lady that was floating in mid-air.