Lessons from a terrified horror researcher | Mathias Clasen | TEDxAarhus

I really don't like to watch horror

films alone. That stuff is terrifying you

know? 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 horror 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

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

extreme stimulation than to less avid

fans which means that the hardcore fans

build up some resistance to fear

provoking stimuli with exposure. Other

research suggests that by exposing

ourselves to horror we build a sense of

mastery which may be transferred to our

own lives. In this way horror can help us

find and even expand our limits for how

much negative stimulation we can handle.

you know I'm not sure I'd be standing

here today if I hadn't for

myself to watch all those horror films

in the name of science. Sure my heart is

hammering and my palms are a little

sweaty but you guys are a lot less scary

than Pennywise the dancing clown.

So horror can help us calibrate the fear

system and horror can help us refine our

coping skills. That's why so many of us

are drawn to the genre even if we don't

like to watch horror films alone. The

next time you are terrified of a novel, a

film a video game, or in a haunt, just

remember that you are in fact tapping

into and calibrating an ancient

biological defense system. Never mind the

fear and the screams and the nightmares.

Who’s up for a horror film tonight? Thank you.

[Applause]