Dressing up, beautifying, casketing, embalming, burying and cremating are vital and solemn duties, but they all require a daily confrontation with your own mortality, which can be pretty frightening.
Other phobias that persist intomodern times may have been fixed much more recently than snakes and spiders, say in the late Paleolithic age, about 100, 000 years ago, or even morerecently.
It seems that men with traditional views of masculinity are more likely to suppress outward emotions and to fear emotions, supposedly because such feelings may lead to a loss of composure.
Mages should nova and sheep people off of the warlock, rogues should stun and blind them, warriors should hamstring them, priests should fear them, and so on.
We will however be able to make scarier films by focusing on the amygdala, the part of your brain that processes information pertaining to threats and fear.