I really don't like to watch horror
films alone that stuff is terrifying you
Now I'm sure many of you recognize this
situation. You put on a horror film, you
turn down the lights, turn up the volume,
and sit back. You’re watching as monsters
come creeping out of the dark in search
of prey. Your heart goes out to the four
characters in the film and you start
squirming in your seat as the monsters
get closer.
Your pulse accelerates, your palms get
sweaty and your hair stands on end. This
is when you begin to throw nervous
glances into the corners of the room.
What was that sound? Surely it didn't
come from the television. Was that
movement in the shadows? The horror that's
on the screen bleeds into your system
and into the surroundings. The world
around you turns threatening and scary.
You cover your eyes but it doesn't help.
Pretty soon you'll have to switch off
but even though you shut off the film,
your heart keeps hammering and you'll
probably have nightmares tonight. Still
maybe you ought to put the film back on.
You're kind of curious after all. That's
my Saturday night in a nutshell. Anybody
else ever been in that situation? Of all
the strange things that humans do
watching horror films has got to be one
of the strangest. It's also a really
interesting behavior scientifically
speaking. As a horror researcher
I've thought about it a lot. Why do we do
it? Why do we watch horror films and
read horror novels and play horror
video games and why are there so many
spooky creatures in our worlds of
make-believe? And what is horror? Horror is
a kind of entertainment that's designed to
spook people. To make them scream and
shiver with fear and break out in a cold
sweat.
Think Stephen King and Paranormal
Activity and The Exorcist.
It's a consistently popular and
profitable genre. Stephen King has sold
more than 350 million books worldwide. In
the last 20 years in the United States,
horror films grossed close to 8 billion
dollars. It's weird it's weird because
horror is by definition designed to make
its audience feel bad. A good horror film
inspires negative emotion. It makes us
feel disgust and dread and terror and
anxiety and fear. Let me ask you how many
of you seek out war films from time to
time? Show of hands. Please raise your
hand if you sometimes seek out horror. Okay
that's about half, that matches my own
research along with some colleagues. I'm
looking into the personality profile of
horror fans and we're finding that more than
half for about 54% answer in the
affirmative in response to the statement:
I tend to enjoy horror media. Only 29%
say they don't agree with this statement
and the remaining 17% can't make up
their mind. You know they're probably the
ones who would die first in a horror
film. Next would be the ones who say
they don't like horror. Anyway people really
do tend to like the kind of
entertainment that's designed to make
them feel bad. Why is that the case and
how does horror even work? Those are the
kinds of questions I've been researching
and here is what I have found out. Horror,
in whatever medium, from films and
literature to video games and virtual
reality, works by exploiting an ancient
and evolved set of biological defense
mechanisms. Let's call it the evolved
fear system. If we want to understand how
that system works and why it became part
of human nature we have to look at the
evolutionary history of our species.
Now, our evolutionary ancestors found
themselves in a world that was full of
danger. There was the threat from
predators and creepy crawlies and
invisible microorganisms or disease and
the threat from other humans. In response
to those dangers our ancestors gradually
evolved a
fear system that would keep them alert
and alive. In other words our species
evolved to be hyper vigilant and highly
fearful because being hyper vigilant and
highly fearful kept our ancestors alive
in a dangerous world. The world may now
be less dangerous than it was in
ancestral times at least in terms of
predation. We're not in any immediate
danger of being attacked by a
saber-tooth cat on our way home from
work, but we are no less vigilant and no
less fearful
than our evolutionary ancestors and
horror entertainment takes advantage of
that aspect of human nature. So horror
entertainment works by transporting us
imaginatively into virtual worlds that
are full of danger. In horror films and
literature we follow and mirror
protagonists as they confront terrifying
threats. Take Stephen King's The Shining
for example, here we follow a family who
has snowed in at a haunted hotel. In the
novel's most famous scene the young boy
Danny goes into room 217.
He walks nervously around the room and
into the bathroom where a hotel guest
killed herself some years before. The
hotel is now supposed to be empty of
guests but to Danny surprise there is
somebody in the bathtub or something. To
Danny's horror it's a corpse.
It's the corpse of the woman who killed
herself. She's lying there bloated and
purple and with glassy white eyes. She's
rotting like meat festering in the trash.
And then she starts to get up. King provides
a detailed and really vivid description
of this moving corpse and as readers we
are forced to hold that image in our
minds. That's bad enough but we're also
given a detailed description of Danny's
response to the situation. We learned
that he tries to scream and wets himself.
We are made to mirror his fear and
revulsion and that strengthens our own
responses to the horrible image. Our fear
and revulsion become mixed with
sympathetic anxiety for a character in
danger.
It's a strong emotional cocktail.
Interactive and live-action media turn
the screw on horror entertainment .Or
video games for example make you feel as
if you're the protagonist in a digital
attraction visitors walk through scary
sets populated by scare actors. Here's a
picture from dystopia haunted house
Denmark's scariest haunt. What you see is
a couple of visitors were confronted by
a big guy with a machete.
He's called the chef and you can take a
guess at what's on the menu here. Around
5,000 people pay for this every
Halloween and around 300 visitors never
make it all the way through the haunt.
They have to abort their visit because
it's too scary.
They have fainted from fear and they
have wet themselves in terror. Why do
they do it? Why do people pay good money
to experience true fear and genuine
terror like the people in this picture?
They do it because they have an evolved
appetite for vicarious experience with
threat scenarios and those scenarios or
horror entertainment work because they are
structured to target the evolved fear
system. Just consider the monsters that
populate our horror entertainment from
scary folk tales to haunted attractions.
Such monsters are universal in the human
imagination and the most horrifying ones
reflect ancestral threats. Just think of
the enormous white shark from Jaws you
Know. Duh duh duh duh duh duh
the threat depicted here is the threat
from an enormous man-eating predator.
That kind of threat really captures our
attention and sparks our imagination by
engaging the evolved fear system. Now the
film itself is pretty unrealistic but
that doesn't matter.
Horror monsters don't have to be
realistic to frighten us they have to
engage the evolved fear system. They have
to have qualities that match or over
match those of ancestral dangers and the
white shark in Jaws has that in spades.
It's like an ancestral predator on
speed. Faster bigger stronger and much
more dangerous. Media psychologists have
documented how thousands of people were
traumatized by jaws. Many viewers even
became afraid of swimming in pools and
freshwater lakes after watching the film.
Consider another well-known and highly
unrealistic monster. The zombie now
zombies don't exist in the real world
and we have no archaeological evidence
to suggest that they ever did but every
well-raised child is able to mimic the
behavior of a zombie. You know they're
groaning the outstretch the limp arms
and the classic stumbling walk. The
monster has really infected our popular
culture in a big way. A zombie is a
effectively targets the evolved fear
system in fact the zombie targets the
fear system from two angles
because it combines the threat of
predation with the threat of contagion. A
zombie is a predator it wants to eat you,
it is also contagious it will infect you
with its disease. It is visibly
decomposing creeping with rotten
pathogens. I mean look at the poor
creature.
[Applause]
You can tell that these horror monsters
engage the evolved fear system from the
behavioral and physiological effects of
the good horror film. You know the goose
bumps and the hammering heart and the
screams. These are all evolved defensive
reactions goosebumps are a relic from a
distant past when we were covered in fur
and goose bumps or piloerection would
make our first stand on end and so make
us look bigger to scare off an attacker.
Cats do the same thing by the way. Our
hearts beat faster to pump blood to the
big muscle groups so that we're ready
for fight or flight and screams send a
signal to other people a signal for them
to help or get the hell away. Horror taps
into the evolved fear system but that's
not all. Horror can help us calibrate that
system. It's like when you take your car
to the mechanic for a check-up the
mechanic carefully goes through all the
vital parts of the car and he or she
will make sure that the airbags and the
anti-lock braking system work. Hopefully
you'll never need them because you don't
want to get into a situation that
requires an airbag to deploy but you
certainly want them to work. Same with
the fear system. Through exposure to
horror you give it a test run make sure
it works properly and keep it nicely
tuned. Horror lets us learn what it feels
like to be truly afraid and it lets us
learn how to handle negative emotions. It
lets us maintain and refine coping
skills that we may apply in critical
situations in our own lives. There isn't
yet much experimental research into this
but we do have some support from
psychological science. One study suggests
that hardcore horror fans require more