Horror monsters are almost always conceptually as well as perceptually disturbing. Monsters are frightening to behold, whether on screen or in the mind’s eye, and they are disturbing to consider, to entertain mentally as concepts. We may have become habituated to the notion of a zombie this far into the zombie craze of the 21st century, but still . . . not only do zombies look creepy and gross, the very idea of a reanimated, decomposing, contagious, and predatory corpse is disturbing. It’s an impossible concept, being alive and dead at the same time. This is what Noël Carroll means when he writes that horror monsters are “categorically interstitial” (1990, 32), and what the anthropologist David D. Gilmore has in mind when he observes that monsters around the world, in folktales and legends, are “hybrids” (2003, 6): monsters combine traits from normally distinct ontological categories, which makes them unnatural and counterintuitive. A monster can combine animal and human traits, as some vampires do, and as the werewolf does. A monster may have shape-shifting capacities, which is not what we intuitively expect of organisms in the real world, and it can have other such supernatural capacities. Why would so many horror monsters have counterintuitive traits? Recent research in the cognitive science of religion offers some answers (Grodal 2009).
Successful supernatural concepts—those supernatural concepts that are repeatedly and faithfully transmitted—tend to be minimally counterintuitive agents, or MCI agents. MCI agents “largely match intuitive assumptions about their own group of things but have a small number of tweaks that make them particularly interesting and memorable,” in the words of psychologist Justin Barrett who coined the term (2004, 23). An example would be a statue that weeps blood, a tree that thinks and speaks, or a person with no physical presence—a ghost. Those are all striking, salient concepts. Experimental research has documented, in fact, that minimally counterintuitive objects are much easier to remember and transmit than are very bizarre concepts or humdrum ones (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, Boyer 2001, Norenzayan et al. 2006). They pop out from a background of mundane, ontologically obedient objects. Take Stephen King’s haunted car in Christine (1983). The car, Christine, is an inanimate object—a mechanical vehicle—that has been infused with malicious intent and agency. It actively desires to kill people. Now that’s a striking idea. Or consider the vampire. It’s a living dead organism that infects living organisms with its weird mode of being, an ontological bastard, an impossibility—and one that has been marvelously successful in terms of cultural transmission (Bahna 2015, Clasen 2012a). Everybody knows what a vampire is, even though it doesn’t actually exist. Making a monster minimally counterintuitive, then, is an effective way of making it salient and attention-demanding, a way of exploiting evolved cognitive architecture.
Belief in supernatural agents is a predictable and natural byproduct of ordinary human cognition. As I mentioned earlier, we are tripwired for agency detection, prone to seeing intentional agents behind nonintentional phenomena such as unexpected noises and inexplicable events. A weird sound from the basement? Somebody must be down there. You escaped a terrible accident unscathed? Somebody must be watching over you. We project agency into our surroundings, including invisible agency such as ghosts, demons, angels, and gods. Disembodied human spirits are particularly easy and compelling to imagine because people are natural-born metaphysical dualists (Bloom 2004). We intuitively assume that people consist not just of matter, but also contain an immaterial soul (or spirit, or self). It is no great leap of faith to assume that once the body dies, the soul may stick around—still perceiving, thinking, and moralizing. Researchers in the cognitive science of religion have demonstrated that when we make sense of, and relate to, such supernatural agents, we use ordinary mental machinery that evolved for social interaction—we use our folk psychology (Boyer 2001). We negotiate and haggle with gods, offering sacrifice or prayer; we intuitively assume that they want things, that they pass judgment on us, that they can be bargained with—that they have mental processes and motives much like our own, in other words. Supernatural agents can be angry or happy, they can be good or evil, they can be all-knowing or startlingly stupid. Except for one or a few salient violations of the ontological category to which they belong—which makes them minimally counterintuitive—they tend to live up to most of our intuitive expectations for people (Boyer 2001). This applies to supernatural agents in horror too. When we imagine those agents, we use mental mechanisms that evolved for social interaction. That is why it is so easy to imagine those agents despite their lack of referents in empirical reality. Most of us don’t believe that we have had firsthand experience with demons or ghosts, yet we can easily mentally simulate such experience and entertain as rich concepts such agents. We assume that supernatural agents, including the ones in horror, have intelligible (if evil) motives and, frequently, the ability to interact with physical reality even if they are themselves immaterial. The evil spirits in The Shining (King 2011 [1977]), for example, have human-like mental states: They want to recruit Danny and believe they can get to him through Jack Torrance. They are able to animate the topiary animals and to make the elevator run in the middle of the night. Satan in Rosemary’s Baby (Levin 1997 [1967]) wants a son and strikes a deal—quid pro quo, standard social contract—with the Satanists. We’re talking counterintuitive, supernatural agents here, but still they behave pretty much like ordinary folk with ordinary minds—with some striking exceptions that make them salient and particularly frightening.
Counterintuitive monsters can target the fear system more effectively than ontologically mundane agents, but they can also evoke a broader set of emotions and thoughts. C. S. Lewis, in his 1940 book The Problem of Pain, proposed an intriguing thought experiment:
Suppose you were told there was a tiger in the next room: you would know that you were in danger and would probably feel fear. But if you were told ‘There is a ghost in the next room,’ and believed it, you would feel, indeed, what is often called fear, but of a different kind. It would not be based on the knowledge of danger, for no one is primarily afraid of what a ghost may do to him, but of the mere fact that it is a ghost. It is ‘uncanny’ rather than dangerous, and the special kind of fear it excites may be called Dread. (Lewis 2001 [1940], 5–6)
Lewis has a good point. Ghosts are more cerebrally frightening than they are viscerally frightening. They are, presumably, a uniquely human phenomenon. While macaques dislike looking at photoshopped images of zombie macaques (Steckenfinger and Ghazanfar 2009), they don’t have stories and beliefs about spooky macaque revenants. Macaques are not metaphysical dualists, and the notion of a disembodied agent probably does not make a lot of sense to them—or to dogs, frogs, or jellyfish. To humans, though, ghosts are counterintuitive and violate basic premises of materialistic science, even as they confirm a deep-seated intuition about the autonomy of the soul. They can make us doubt our beliefs and even sanity. That is the horror of a story such as Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (2006 [1959]). The weird happenings in Hill House are profoundly ambiguous. We are drawn into a fictional world where there may be malicious disembodied agents targeting the characters . . . or a psychotic protagonist, Eleanor, who has disturbing delusions. But we, the readers, are inside her head, so it is very difficult to know. The putative ghosts in Jackson’s novel are cognitively threatening first and foremost; the protagonist’s possible insanity evokes the dread of mistrusting the information relayed to one by one’s senses; and the difficulty of choosing between a supernatural and a psychopathological interpretation of the novel’s events creates further uncertainty and dread. The dread aroused by Jackson’s story encompasses Lovecraft’s fear of the unknown, a cognitive fear that arises when we receive ambiguous signals that may indicate some kind of danger (Carleton 2016), whether it is the danger of insanity or counterintuitive agents with ill will. Some fictional ghosts, of course, are also physically dangerous, such as the many aggressively hostile ghosts in the television series Supernatural (Kripke 2005–). But perhaps the most
horrifying thing about ghosts, apart from the fact that they should not exist, is that there is no way to escape them. There is no way to have a fair fight with a ghost (Clasen 2016).
Supernatural horror monsters, then, are typically minimally counterintuitive reflections of ancestral threats which makes them peculiarly fascinating to a vulnerable prey species such as ourselves, even though such monsters by definition don’t exist outside of fiction, delusion, and dream. They are also often “impure,” in Noël Carroll’s word (1990, 27), or outright disgusting. One would hesitate to share a toothbrush with Stoker’s Dracula or one of the zombies from The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010–). This is yet another way in which monsters target evolved defensive mechanisms. Disgust evolved to protect the organism from harm, specifically the harm incurred by the ingestion of pathogenic substances—so-called micropredators, the sort of infectious microorganisms that are themselves invisible to the naked eye but extremely dangerous to us (Tybur et al. 2013). Val Curtis, a scientist specializing in hygiene, epidemiology, and disgust, has collected data on disgust responses around the world. She finds that people, no matter what their cultural background, tend to find the same objects and situations disgusting. Among those universal disgust triggers are “faeces, vomit, sweat, spit, blood, pus, sexual fluids, wounds, corpses, toenail clippings, rotting meat, slime, maggots, lice, worms, rats, and people who are ill” (Curtis, Aunger, and Rabie 2004, 131). Yummy. The common denominator here is substances that signal, suggest, or are associated with the threat of contagion. Feces, for example, are “the source of over twenty known bacterial, viral, and protozoan causes of intestinal tract infection” (Curtis and Biran 2001, 23). No wonder natural selection designed us to find the smell and sight aversive. It is not that feces are inherently disgusting in any meaningful way; for flies, a nice pile of freshly steaming stool is just about the most savory thing you can come across. We humans, however, are differently constructed. We also don’t like putrefying meat—another potent source of disease—which is one reason why we bury or burn our dead, and one reason why the modern zombie is such a powerful monster (Clasen 2010). It is bad meat that wants to eat and infect you.
Some horror monsters elicit disgust without being physically gross. They don’t drip slime or ooze pus, but they still make people squirm in revulsion. Most viewers will be intensely disgusted by the callous rapists in Wes Craven’s rape-revenge film Last House on the Left (1972) as they brutally molest two teenage girls. Depictions like that powerfully tap into evolved moral psychology. Antagonists, in their flagrant violation of moral norms, elicit our visceral condemnation (Kjeldgaard-Christiansen 2016). Likewise, the psychic “vampires” in Dan Simmons’s horror/sci-fi novel Carrion Comfort (2009 [1989]) are not gross, but they evoke moral disgust as they exert psychic control over innocents and force them to perform degrading acts and drain them of life force. We’re disgusted by Carrie’s tormentors as they set her up for the ultimate humiliation (King 1999 [1974]). We’re disgusted by handsome Guy Woodhouse in Rosemary’s Baby, and we’re disgusted by the cowardly politicians of Amity in Jaws (Spielberg 1975). Researchers have identified three evolved disgust systems—pathogen disgust (described above), moral disgust, and sexual disgust (Tybur et al. 2013). Disgust originally evolved to protect us from pathogenic microorganisms, but was coopted by other cognitive systems to mobilize our condemnation of norm violations (moral disgust) and to protect us from genetically harmful reproductive activities (sexual disgust) such as incest. Sexual disgust is relatively rarely evoked by mainstream horror, whereas pathogen and moral disgust are frequently evoked in the depiction of repulsive antagonists. And some monsters, of course, aren’t disgusting at all—the shark in Jaws is a case in point. But all disgusting monsters exploit psychological machinery that evolved to keep us safe from infection, from inbreeding and other deleterious reproductive activities, and to keep our groups functioning by mobilizing visceral repulsion in response to antisocial behavior.
In sum, then, horror fiction is designed to elicit negative emotions in its audience, and it does so prototypically by featuring human characters (or in video games, the “avatar,” the in-game entity controlled by the player) in dangerous situations involving horrible monsters. Such monsters tend to reflect evolved, prepared fears, notably the fear of predators. In horror film and horror literature, directors and writers usually go to great lengths to show the audience not just the horrible monsters, but the fearful reactions of protagonists, as well. Dwelling on characters’ emotional expressions allows for emotional contagion, meaning that the audience’s reaction to the monsters and aversive situations on screen or page is scaffolded by the negative emotion that they adopt from characters (Coplan 2006). In The Exorcist, for example, director William Friedkin repeatedly shows us Chris McNeil’s reaction to the sight of her possessed, diseased-looking daughter before he shows us little Regan herself—as in Figure 3.3. Such reaction shots are extremely common in horror films, and have an analogue in horror literature where characters’ reactions to the nasty elements are frequently described in evocative detail.
Figure 3.3: Chris McNeil in The Exorcist (Friedkin 1973) looking horrified. Reaction shots like this one are frequent in horror film and have an analogue in horror literature, where authors frequently depict characters’ reactions to the horrors in great detail. Such depiction strengthens the viewer’s or reader’s response to the horrors depicted because it taps into an evolved disposition to mirror other people’s emotional states.
Noël Carroll rightly emphasizes the crucial role of audience instruction in horror fiction (1990, 88–96): the reader or viewer needs a character through whose eyes and mind the horrors are experienced, and with whom to empathize, and the reactions of this character toward the horrors depicted in the story or film become emotional cues for the reader. Such a transfer of emotion from character to reader is possible because humans have an adaptive capacity to mirror the emotional states of other humans, including fictional ones. This phenomenon is known as “emotional contagion” (de Gelder et al. 2004). For example, the emotion of disgust is processed by a brain region called the anterior insula. Whether we ingest something disgusting, watch somebody else do it, or even imagine taking a bite out of a maggot-infested lump of meat causes activation in the anterior insula (Jabbi, Bastiaansen, and Keysers 2008). This capacity for emotional contagion is obviously adaptive: if we mirror the disgust of somebody else eating bad meat, we don’t have to sample it ourselves. And if we react to a sudden expression of wide-eyed fear on the face of a conspecific, perhaps we react in time to evade the pouncing predator. Emotional contagion allows for swift response to a threat that one has not personally observed, and it accounts for the way that we mirror the emotional responses of even fictional characters. We use the same psychological mechanisms to understand and make sense of fictional characters as we use to understand and make sense of actual people in the real world (Carroll et al. 2012). Our relations to fictional characters—so-called parasocial relations (De Backer 2012)—can be as real and as strong as relations to real people (Dibble and Rosaen 2011). We can feel powerfully for, and with, characters in horror stories. Horror writers and directors know this, intuitively at least, and capitalize on our evolved capacity for emotional contagion by providing representations of characters’ reactions to monsters and horrible events: reaction shots in films, descriptions of reactions in literature. Elaborate reaction depictions are generally eschewed in horror video games because the player is the protagonist—such depictions are unnecessary, and impractical given the widespread use of first-person point-of-view in horror video games. Occasionally, however, a horror video game will use feedback devices such as a graphic indication of the avatar’s “sanity” or “health,” or provide sounds of an avatar’s frightened breathing, to reinforce the player’s emotional response.
What, then, does watching such films, reading such stories, and playing such video games do for us, and to us? I have explained why we pay attention, why we ar
e emotionally and cognitively engaged by even outlandish stories about highly implausible monsters and scenarios, but what psychological effects does our proclivity for horror have? And might our appetite for danger scenarios serve a biological—adaptive—function? Those are the topics of the next chapter.
CHAPTER 4
Fear for Your Life
The Appeals, Functions, and Effects of Horror
Why are so many people attracted to horror in literature, film, and video games? The horror writer Peter Straub rightly says that there are many answers to the question. “One would be that people desire extremity of circumstance in perfect safety, so that they can feel all sorts of dangerous and despairing and frightening moments without in the least being in danger.” But that can be only part of the answer, according to Straub—and, I’d add, it just begs the question of why people would want to feel “dangerous and despairing and frightening moments” while in perfect safety. Straub thinks that a more adequate answer to the question is this: “Horror stories are about engagement. About actual experience, instead of simulated, false experience . . . it’s about discovering one’s ability to feel in certain ways, and deepening and widening one’s emotional experience by that means” (Clasen 2009, 40). I think that is true, and I will argue that an evolutionary analysis can help us understand how the genre works to widen one’s emotional experience and why many of us are attracted to such mediated experience—and to the elicitation of negative emotion in safe contexts generally.
Straub’s “extremity of circumstance in perfect safety” brings to mind the activities offered by rollercoasters and extreme sports, and such activities surely share some appeal with horror in different media. The pleasures afforded by rollercoasters and skydiving are primarily the elicitation of strong emotions and physiological arousal within a safe context (Kerr 2015). As Rush W. Dozier, Jr. argues, people manipulate fear to produce pleasure. When we step on a rollercoaster, we “increase our fears artificially and then enjoy the sensation of our body pushing the fear back down to normal levels through the secretion of natural opiates and other fear-suppressing chemicals” (1998, 165). We artificially provoke—and enjoy—a release of endogenous morphine-like substances produced in the brain. Such an explanation cannot exhaustively account for the appeal of horror, though. If all we wanted from horror stories was the relief of the film, the novel, or the game to be over, we’d be better off not seeking it out in the first place. And if all we wanted was a kick of adrenaline and a jolt to the nervous system, there are quicker and easier ways to get such stimulation than to wade through 1,095 pages of It (King 1981), sit through two hours of Alien (Scott 1979), or spend eight or nine hours completing Amnesia: The Dark Descent (Grip and Nilsson 2010). A thirty-second Internet screamer gets the job done admirably. But the experience of being absorbed in a fictional universe and made to feel afraid as a result of this mediated experience has value and appeal in and of itself. There’s bound to be a neurochemical payoff—what we call “pleasure”—but it is not the pleasure of the termination of the experience, it is the pleasure of experiencing strong and rich emotions in a safe context. That is a primary and irreducible appeal of horror.
Why Horror Seduces Page 7