Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  Other fears are universal but relatively transient. As developmental psychologists have demonstrated, children reliably develop highly specific fears along a predictable developmental trajectory. And as evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated, these predictable fears emerge when children are most vulnerable to the dangers targeted by the fears—or more precisely when children would have been most vulnerable to such dangers in ancestral environments, the kinds of environments in which our species evolved. These environments in significant respects diverged from modern environments, but the fears persist. For infants, incapable of self-propelled motion and self-defense, the most dangerous situations—in ancestral environments and now—are the absence of caregivers and the presence of potentially hostile strangers. Hence infants reliably develop separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, which persist until the toddler years (Boyer and Bergstrom 2011, 1035). As children begin to move about on their own, they reliably develop fear of heights (Boyer and Bergstrom 2011, 1037). At around age 4–6, as children begin exploring their environments more extensively and thus become more vulnerable to predation, they typically become obsessed with death, afraid of monsters lurking in the dark, and preoccupied with dangerous animals such as lions and tigers. In middle to late childhood, fears of injury, accidents, and contagion emerge, and in late childhood and particularly early adolescence, social threats become “salient” to children—children tend to become highly anxious of losing status, losing friends, being ostracized, and so on, at precisely the developmental stage where peers begin to be more important to them than parents, and when their major challenge is to “find a specific social niche and build stable networks of reciprocity” (Boyer and Bergstrom 2011, 1037).

  The evolutionary logic behind this preset developmental schedule is clear: Children evolved to develop domain-specific fears at the phase where they would typically encounter, or be particularly vulnerable to, such evolutionarily recurrent dangers. Some people may feel that they grow out of these fears—that they no longer need to check under the bed for lurking monsters before they go to sleep—but most of the fears begin in childhood and persist in somewhat modified forms throughout life (Boyer and Bergstrom 2011, 1038). Stephen King, in a foreword to a collection of stories, told readers that when he goes to bed at night, he is still “at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blankets after the lights go out. I’m not a child anymore but . . . I don’t like to sleep with one leg sticking out . . . The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn’t real. I know that, and I also know that if I’m careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle” (1978, 5–6). King is joking, but all the same, who hasn’t at some point conceded to a fearful, apparently irrational impulse from the limbic system, an ancient and anxious voice from the deepest recesses of the brain telling us to avoid a shortcut across a graveyard after dark or to keep the feet inside the bed covers when we’re alone? Not that we believe in ghosts or monsters or zombies, naturally, but . . . better safe than sorry, right? We may rationally dismiss the ostensibly childish fear targets—the monsters, the creepy strangers, the dangerous animals—but they at the very least live on in horror stories, even horror stories for adults, featuring giant monsters, psychos in hockey masks, and creepy-crawlies hiding in the dark.

  Those fears that are near-universal are known as “prepared fears” (Seligman 1971). They are not hardwired in the same way as the fears of sudden, loud noises and looming objects are. Nobody learns to flinch at a rapidly oncoming basketball. Prepared fears are innate, though, in the sense that they are genetically transmitted but require environmental input for their activation. The human fear system, in this aspect, is relatively open-ended—that is, it is set up for environmental calibration. The evolutionary logic underlying this design characteristic is as follows: Humans evolved to be adaptable (Wade 2006). Our species thrives in all climate zones, from the tropical to the arctic. Yet while some dangers are constant across time and space—the danger of choking, say, or of drowning—there is some environmental variation in threat distribution. There’s no sense for an Inuit child in being afraid of tigers or scorpions, whereas a child from rural India doesn’t need to worry about polar bears. And because our genes can’t “know” in what sort of climate and ecology we’ll grow up, those genes make us able and eager to learn about threats in our local environments. Humans quickly absorb local culture, including norms, language, knowledge about dangers, the sorts of things people in your culture consider edible or not, and so on. Learning, in fact, is an “evolutionarily derived adaptation to cope with environmental changes that occur within the life span of individuals and allows individual organisms to tailor their behavior to the specific environmental niche they occupy” (Öhman and Mineka 2001, 487).

  So, because different environments have somewhat different dangers, not all human fears are instinctual and hard wired. We need to learn what to be afraid of, but such learning takes place within a biologically constrained possibility space. While different environments feature different threats, some threats have been evolutionarily persistent enough, and serious enough, to have left an imprint on our genome as prepared fears, as potentialities that may be activated during an individual’s life in response to personal or vicarious experience, or culturally transmitted information. This explains why there may be surface variation in people’s fears but a stable, underlying structure of fear distribution. The 2012 ChildFund Alliance report “Small Voices, Big Dreams,” which quantified children’s fears and dreams based on responses from 5,100 individuals from forty-four countries, found that the most common fear among children across developing and developed countries is the fear of “dangerous animals and insects” (Childfund Alliance 2012, 10). Even children growing up in industrialized, urban environments free of nonhuman predators easily acquire fear of dangerous animals because such prepared learning is part and parcel of human nature. One study asked suburban American kids about their fears and found that they do not “fear the things they have been taught to be careful about,” such as “street traffic,” but “claim that the things to be afraid of are mammals and reptiles (most frequently): snakes, lions, and tigers” (Maurer 1965, 265).

  Prepared fears include the fear of snakes, spiders, heights, blood, closed-in spaces, the dark, thunder, public or open spaces, social scrutiny, and deep water (Dozier 1998, 83, Marks and Nesse 1994, Seligman 1971). Those are typical phobia objects, quite easy to acquire and very difficult to extinguish. A phobia can be defined as “fear of a situation that is out of proportion to its danger” (Marks 1987, 5), which suggests the very weirdness of phobias: They are extremely real, often crippling, to sufferers, even though phobias either don’t correspond to real-world dangers or exaggerate actual risks wildly. Almost nobody dies from being bitten by snakes or spiders—the most common phobia objects—in the industrialized world. According to recent statistics from the National Safety Council of the United States, the lifetime odds of dying from a motor vehicle accident for a person born in 2007 were 1 in 88. In contrast, the odds of dying from contact with venomous spiders were 1 in 483,457, and the odds of dying from contact with venomous snakes or lizards were 1 in 552,522 (National Safety Council 2011, 35–36). We should be terrified of cars and worry much less about snakes and spiders. But since the threats targeted by phobias have been lethal to humans and our hominin (and mammalian) ancestors for millions of years, we are still born with the evolved propensity to easily acquire fear of such targets.

  A list of Stephen King’s “personal terrors” was published in 1973. This list strikingly reflects the species-typical distribution of evolved fear objects much more so than it reflects the objects, creatures, and situations that a twentieth-century inhabitant of Maine, USA, ought to fear:

  1.Fear of the dark

  2.Fear of squishy things

  3.Fear of deformity

  4.Fear of snakes

  5.Fear of rats

  6.Fear of closed-in spaces

&n
bsp; 7.Fear of insects (especially spiders, flies, and beetles)

  8.Fear of death

  9.Fear of others (paranoia)

  10.Fear for someone else (quoted in Spignesi 1991, 4).

  Personal terrors they may be, but King’s list could be anybody’s list—an American’s list, an Asian’s list, an African’s list, a European’s list. It could be the list of someone living a thousand or fifty thousand years ago. Individuals of the species Homo sapiens tend to be afraid of the same things. People in the industrialized world may no longer face the threat of predation from carnivores, and we may no longer be in any real danger from venomous spiders and snakes, but these animals live on as ghosts in the human central nervous system. Not everybody develops phobia of snakes and spiders, of course, but almost everybody pays special attention to these animals. Snakes in particular have become integral in mythologies, religions, and superstitions around the world, even in snake-free territories such as Ireland (Cooke 1999).

  In an astounding recent experiment, a group of scientists did their utmost to frighten a hapless middle-aged woman (Feinstein et al. 2011). The research team showed her clips from famous horror films (only those clips that had been found to reliably horrify a control group); they took her on a tour of a commercial “haunted house”; and they brought her into a pet store that sold dangerous, exotic animals such as constrictors and tarantulas. This woman, known in the neurological literature only as “S.M.,” is not any random middle-aged lady, though. She has a rare genetic disorder that results in focal bilateral amygdala lesions. Her amygdalae—the “ancient, ever-watchful eyes of the emotional system of the brain,” in Dozier’s phrase (1998, 28)—are calcified; they don’t work. She is clinically fearless. And indeed, the research team failed miserably in their attempts. S.M. laughed at the monsters in the haunted house, found the horror film clips interesting but not scary, and was “spontaneously drawn to the snake terrariums” in the pet store, where she “also attempted to touch a tarantula, but had to be stopped because of the high risk of being bitten” (Feinstein et al. 2011, 34–35). Strikingly, S.M. exhibited no fear at all, but she was quite interested in those objects and situations that instill fear in neurologically normal individuals. As the research team argued in their published account, “fear-inducing stimuli are still capable of eliciting changes in attention and arousal through structures other than the amygdala” (37).

  Fear-inducing stimuli, in other words, don’t just make us cover our eyes or run away screaming, they grab and hold our attention. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes good sense. Given that most of our species’ evolution took place in environments that were much more dangerous than current environments, natural selection would favor those individuals who paid special attention to threats around them (New, Cosmides, and Tooby 2007, Wilson 1984). We are endowed with what the communication theorist Pamela J. Shoemaker calls the “surveillance function” (1996), a propensity to be always on the lookout for potential dangers in our environments. Psychologists have amassed a wealth of evidence supporting this idea. Several studies have shown that people are faster at detecting an image of a snake embedded in an array of mushrooms and flowers than they are at detecting an image of a mushroom or a flower in an array of snake images (see Lobue and DeLoache 2008, Penkunas and Coss 2013, and Öhman, Flykt, and Esteves 2001). Snakes and spiders in particular grab our attention (New and German 2015, Rakison and Derringer 2008). The structure of our fear system and the evolutionary history that gave rise to this system explain not only why we pay special attention to possible dangers around us, but why we are fascinated with the monsters of horror. They are not only terrifying—they are captivating (Asma 2015, Saler and Ziegler 2005).

  Prepared fears—those powerful, near-universal fears that reverberate with deeply conserved dispositions in human nature, that catch and hold our attention—are also the fears most often targeted by horror across media. Horror in film and interactive entertainment uses primitive, fear-inducing auditory and visual stimuli to provoke a jump scare. But in all horror media, from literature and graphic novels to painting and death metal music, we find stimuli that mirror or mimic prepared fears. Predators, both human predators and what David Quammen calls “alpha predators,” figure prominently in our horror art. Quammen’s alpha predators include tigers, bears, crocodiles, the great white shark, lions, and pythons. This grouping of organisms has “no taxonomic or ecological basis”—rather, its “reality is psychological, as registered in the human mind” (2003, 5), and these animals are vastly overrepresented in horror. Most of us have never encountered an alpha predator in the real world outside of a zoo, but we have certainly encountered many on screen and page. The profusion of more or less exaggerated and embellished alpha predators in horror stories reflects our evolved psychological constitution, not present-day ecological actuality.

  Some horror antagonists are fairly faithful representations of actual alpha predators, such as the homicidal lions eating railway workers in The Ghost and the Darkness (Hopkins 1996), or the huge man-eating crocodile in Lake Placid (Miner 1999). Some horror stories are less realistic, if more effective, in their representation of alpha predators, such as the great white shark in Jaws (Spielberg 1975), which seems to have zoologically implausible motive dispositions such as vengeful feelings and a sense of territoriality. Some horror monsters are enlarged predators, such as the giant snakes in Tremors (Underwood 1989), the 35-foot-long serpents with six inch teeth in Dan Simmons’s Summer of Night (1991), or the giant spiders that make life miserable for the characters in Stephen King’s stories. In Needful Things, King offers a chilling description of a spider “as big as a cat” (1992, 676). In It, he ups the ante considerably and writes of a spider “perhaps fifteen feet high” (1981, 1004). In the scene from Cloverfield that I discussed in the previous chapter, the protagonists are attacked by dog-sized spider-like creatures. In the video game LIMBO (Jensen 2010), the young protagonist is chased by an enormous spider (depicted in Figure 3.1). And then of course there’s the eponymous antagonist of the 2013 film Big Ass Spider! (Mendez), which should speak for itself. Those monsters are conceptualized to match input specifications of evolved threat-detection mechanisms—they look just like the sorts of things that we’re biologically prepared to fear, only much more predatory and much, much bigger.

  Figure 3.1: The protagonist in the horror video game LIMBO (Jensen 2010) comes across an enormous and venomous spider. Like most other horror monsters, this antagonist is an exaggeration of an evolutionarily relevant threat. Spiders are potent fear targets, especially gigantic ones.

  Most horror monsters, in fact, exhibit what ethologists call “supernormal” traits (Barrett 2010)—they’re bigger, more dangerous, or cleverer than the real-world organisms that they mirror; they may even be equipped with supernatural abilities. Equipping a monster with supernormal traits makes it more salient and allows it to more strongly activate the human fear system. Take the example of the evil clown, by now a mainstay of horror fiction. Common sense and a lack of archeological evidence suggest that our ancestors were probably not hunted down and eaten by evil clowns at any point in prehistory. Nonetheless, the evil clown is an effective horror monster, and we can make sense of its effectiveness by considering the figure in light of evolved defensive dispositions. The evil clown is a supercharged version of the conspecific predator, a homicidal human exhibiting unpredictable, psychotic behavior. The clown masks its inner life, its intentions and motives, by obscuring its face with paint, thus making it unreadable and unpredictable. Humans decipher other humans’ inner states from reading their faces. We are extremely quick to detect an angry face in a crowd of neutral faces—much more quick than we are to detect a happy face in a crowd of neutral faces, as laboratory experiments have demonstrated (Öhman, Lundqvist, and Esteves 2001), because an angry person could be a threat to our biological fitness. When we are blocked from reading a face, the result is unease or even dread. That’s why many human or humanoid horror
monsters besides clowns have highly distorted faces or wear masks. Just think of masked Michael Myers, the disturbingly impenetrable and inhuman killer of Halloween (Carpenter 1978), or the equally implacable and robotic Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Hooper 1974). The unpredictability and psychotic nature of the evil clown make it a highly salient and very nasty antagonist. It may even have traits that facilitate predation, such as claws and fangs and supernatural means of locomotion—all of which are enjoyed by the most famous evil clown of them all, Pennywise the Dancing Clown from King’s It (Clasen 2014), depicted in Figure 3.2. Common to horror monsters is that they are well-designed to target defensive mechanisms in human psychology, whether they actually preyed on our ancestors on not. Fictional monsters, in other words, need not be biologically plausible to command attention and evoke a strong emotional response in audiences.

  Figure 3.2: Evil clowns, such as Pennywise from It (Wallace 1990), probably didn’t systematically hunt down and eat our evolutionary ancestors. Nonetheless, they exhibit features that target the evolved human fear system, such as Pennywise’s predatory attributes. Moreover, the evil clown tends to mask its intentions through face paint or a mask, thus becoming unpredictable and unsettling.