Horror video games promise immersion and engagement through interaction. Unlike augmented reality, which adds digital elements to the empirical environment, video games take us into another, digitally rendered world. But immersion is still somewhat limited in so-called flat-screen media where one looks at a two-dimensional screen that takes up maybe a third or half of one’s visual field to play a horror video game, controlling the behavior of digital agents through an interface. A player of Amnesia presses the W on the keyboard to make the avatar move forward. The Until Dawn player pushes a stick on a wireless controller. That’s a far cry from walking in the real world (Gregersen 2014). So-called immersive virtual reality (VR) technology, in contrast, is bridging the gap between real-world first-person phenomenology and behavior in digital virtual environments. VR typically uses a head-mounted display fitted with two small screens, one for each eye, with slightly different outputs to produce an ecologically realistic stereoscopic view of a high-resolution computer-generated environment (Figure 13.5). The headset also blocks sensory information from the actual environment—all you see is the digital world in three-dimensional splendor. Moreover, the headset is equipped with motion sensors that track head movement. When the user moves his or her head, the scene changes—that is, the digital environment is updated to match the change in viewpoint. This visual technology is supported by technologies that provide sensory feedback in other modalities—auditory and haptic, for example, producing sensations of sound and touch—as well as body-mounted motion sensors that reproduce movement in the virtual world. In effect, the user’s body, and not a clunky controller or a keyboard, becomes the interface. It’s a lot of technology to be wearing, but paradoxically, when VR really works the technology becomes invisible (Fox, Arena, and Bailenson 2009). It really feels like the user is in the computer-generated world; immersion is near-perfect. Because the VR experience can be so realistic, the technology is used to investigate fear responses (Meehan et al. 2005, Slater et al. 2006), to train medical and military personnel, even to treat phobic individuals through gradual virtual exposure (Fox, Arena, and Bailenson 2009). Indeed, the VR-generated illusion can be so strong, and the emotions so intense, that some researchers have expressed concerns that the technology can be used as an especially effective instrument of torture that would leave no physical traces but do great psychological damage (Madary and Metzinger 2016).
Unsurprisingly, VR is also used to scare the living daylights out of gamers (Figure 13.5). The sense of presence generated through VR is so strong that even non-interactive simulations can be highly immersive. For example, a simple simulation for the consumer-grade VR headset Oculus Rift called “Death Simulator” (Germouty 2015) displays a night-time scene with a bonfire, some trees, and a masked figure in the distance. The user cannot interact with the virtual world, or even move around in it, but when he or she moves their head, the computer-generated viewpoint changes. They can look down and see a virtual torso tied to a chair. To users who are in reality sitting down in front of a computer while running this simulation, the sense of virtual embodiment is surprisingly strong because the expected sensory input matches the actual sensory input. You can look around by moving your head, but you can’t move your body. You can only observe. Delight turns to horror when the masked figure starts throwing knives at you. The first knife flies through the air, toward you, and bores into the surface to your immediate right with a whack. Several knives follow. Finally, the masked agent throws a knife straight at you. This knife hits you in the belly, releasing a torrent of blood. It is very difficult to disassociate oneself entirely from the avatar, to not flinch and squirm and feel a phantom echo of abdominal pain. Other simulations are more interactive, using the elements developed in survival horror games but increasing the level of immersion. It is almost unbearable even to jaded horror fans. Nonetheless, future developments will presumably improve the technology to the extent where digital environments are indistinguishable from real ones, where the courses of action are infinite, and where all senses, even the senses of taste and smell, are engaged—imagine coming across a horde of decomposing zombies in a VR zombie game with olfactory feedback. Imagine feeling a jab of pain in your shoulder—produced through a force-feedback mechanism built into your VR suit—as a zombie sinks its teeth into you. I predict that such ultra-faithful horror simulations will have very limited appeal. It becomes too real, too much like torture, and ceases to satisfy an adaptive appetite for vicarious experience. This kind of experience will be perceptually indistinguishable from real-world encounters with horror. It will probably be less painful—nobody would want to feel the full force of a zombie bite in a simulation—but still too frightening, too real, for most people. As I suggested in the beginning of the book, people generally don’t seek out fear-inducing experiences unless there is psychological or aesthetic distance between themselves and the fear-inducing stimuli.
Figure 13.5: Immersive virtual reality produces extremely faithful simulations of horror scenarios. Here, the consumer-grade virtual reality headset Oculus Rift sends stereoscopic images to the author while blocking out the empirical environment. There are no distractions, and the sense of immersion is so strong that the technology becomes invisible. Not for the faint of heart. Photo: Lars Kruse, Aarhus University.
Parallel to the rapid developments in digital horror video games and VR technology, an immersive horror phenomenon known as haunted attractions, or haunts, has become increasingly popular (Kerr 2015, Ndalianis 2012). Not to be confused with dwellings reputedly haunted by spirits, a haunt is a horror-themed venue that visitors walk through. The venue is designed to be creepy, often around a theme such as a zombie outbreak or an insane asylum, and populated with actors in spooky make-up and costume. Most haunts are open only around Halloween. The phenomenon has roots in dark rides such as ghost trains, spooky carnival attractions, and so-called “trails of terror,” which emerged in the United States in the 1930s as parents became “anxious to divert the attention of pranking boys” around Halloween (Morton 2012, 100). Trails of terror were mazes with creepy and disgusting elements created in people’s homes or yards. The decisive event in the history of haunts, however, was the 1969 opening of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, a dark ride with horror scenery and effects, including spectral visual illusions and animatronic ghosts (McKendry 2013, Ndalianis 2012). It was an instantaneous success. “In a single day shortly after its debut, more than 82,000 people passed through the Haunted Mansion” (Heller 2015). This horror attraction inspired countless others, including charity haunts, which blossomed in the 1970s, as well as the commercial haunted attractions industry. This industry really took off in the 1990s and continues to grow. According to one estimate, there were in 2015 about 2,700 active haunts in the United States (Heller 2015). Like horror video games and VR, haunts allow the consumer to become the protagonist in a horror story that unfolds in real-time. In haunts, however, the consumer is actually there, in the flesh, as are the spooky agents. The actual, empirical environment is threatening.
Dystopia Haunted House, established in 2014, is the biggest haunt in Denmark. As scientific advisor to the project, I am intimately familiar with its design and will use it to illustrate the phenomenon of haunts. Dystopia is open only on weekends in the month leading up to Halloween, but it attracts up to 5,000 customers per season—and each season, hundreds of paying customers have to abort their visit partway through because they’re overwhelmed by the experience. Customers have fainted in abject terror, they have wet themselves in distress, they have accidentally attacked actors in panic, and they have had to be carried out—not dead, but lifeless. Dystopia is built on the American model and uses effects identical to those employed in the American industry. Its creators regularly visit TransWorld, the premier American trade convention for professional haunters, and all actors speak English. Customers walk through in groups of four or five—but it is possible to pay extra and walk through alone or in pairs of two for an even more intense exp
erience. We conduct consumer research to maximally target visitors’ fears, for example through surveys on their experiences in the haunt and on their personal fears. Dystopia has a detailed backstory which is narrated to visitors by an actor as they’re waiting in line and disseminated via social media. We’re in the near future. Society is collapsing. An infectious fungal disease, “The SPORE,” is raging, turning the populace into flesh-eating monsters. The repressive, totalitarian regime—“The GOVERNMENT”—blames an underground movement, “The RESISTANCE,” for the outbreak. Another faction, “The CULT,” is convinced that cannibalism cures the disease. Visitors meet representatives of all three groups (as well as zombies and other monsters) in Dystopia, and they are encouraged to participate imaginatively in this elaborate universe. Visitors are told that their mission is to procure “The ESSENCE”—spinal fluid from patient zero of the outbreak. They meet several obstacles on the way, but by the end of the haunt, they extract a fluorescent fluid from a plastic tube attached to a very sick-looking young woman.
When visitors enter the haunt, which is located in an abandoned factory, actors dressed in brown robes—Cultists—approach and sniff visitors. They behave erratically, as if they’re barely managing to repress violent psychosis. Visitors are unsettled. They know it’s make-believe, but these actors get too close for comfort. They seem slightly unhinged. During their walk-through, visitors will be separated from their group, experience sensory deprivation in pitch-black rooms, encounter spiders and bugs, and be aggressively accosted by a muscular man in a butcher outfit with a very big machete (Le Chef, depicted in Figure 13.6). They will witness gruesome scenes of torture and open-body surgery, come across diseased-looking and apparently deranged children, and be chased by decomposing zombies. They will be forced into moral dilemmas, such as choosing whether to release a sick-looking girl from a cage. If they release her, she will give crucial information about an upcoming obstacle, but she will also end her days in a flaming oven. The big screamer is when a very big guy with a pig’s head—a latex mask—and an actual, roaring chainsaw comes running towards visitors. The crew fondly refers to this individual as Mr. Piggy.
These various elements are carefully calibrated to target common fears. There are sudden noises, confined spaces, heights, darkness, creepy-crawlies, deranged and hostile individuals, broken bodies, omnipresent cues of contagion and infection, and violations of personal space. At one point in the haunt, visitors are forced to crawl through a dark, narrow tunnel to get from one room to the next. Suddenly, a light comes on underneath the visitor and an animated, decomposing corpse slides into sight (behind a strong glass plate) and emits a jarring scream. This particular effect had visitors pass out from fear. One visitor froze in place, utterly terrified, and had to be carried out by several helpers. Another hurt her arm as she tumbled out of the tunnel in terror. These kinds of unfortunate incidents naturally encourage thrill-seekers to flock to Dystopia. Our surveys have shown that the vast majority of visitors are strongly affected during their walk-through—and that the vast majority of visitors are expecting to visit Dystopia again in the future. The negative affect engendered by the setting, the actors, and the effects are precisely what visitors are after. They pay good money to be scared witless for a good half hour, and according to customer satisfaction surveys, they love it.
Haunted attractions are real in a way that horror video games and VR simulations aren’t. There is no technological interface between the consumer and the scary environment, no problems with pixelated scenes, no limitations in sensory input. Of course, visitors know that it is make-believe, and they are instructed about the “safe word”—hands on your head—that will immediately summon helpers to escort them out, but the actors in haunts can get at people in ways that digitally rendered agents cannot. As a visitor, you can never be entirely sure that the big guy with the creepy makeup and the shiny knife isn’t on the brink of psychosis; he certainly acts that way. As the actor portraying Le Chef told me, “I just stare at them with dark eyes, saying nothing, just staring and breathing slowly and hoarsely. That gets them. Every single time.” Le Chef is physically formidable and exhibits visual and behavioral cues—the blood-spatter on his head and clothes, the eagerness with which he handles the machete—that suggest a violent disposition. The rude staring suggests a lack of restraint, a disregard for social norms. The heavy breathing suggests an unhealthy, perhaps sexual interest in the visitor; nobody likes to be stared at by a stranger for more than a few seconds. This character truly is well-suited for making visitors deeply uneasy—as depicted in Figure 13.6.
Figure 13.6: Haunted attractions let visitors become protagonists in horror stories that unfold around them in real-time. Scare actors can disturb visitors in ways that fictional monsters can’t. Here, Le Chef of Dystopia Haunted House gets too close to two paying visitors, staring threateningly at them. The visitors look distressed, but they are getting their money’s worth—thrill-seekers flock to haunted attractions for immersive horror experiences. Photo: Andrés Baldursson, Baldursson Photography.
Haunted attractions offer an experience that is akin, though not identical, to the experience offered in other horror media. In a haunt, the feeling of personal threat is stronger than when the horror is digitally rendered. According to one of Dystopia’s creators, Jonas Bøgh Pedersen (referred to by crew members as “The Architect of Fear”): “People know they’re paying to be scared in a safe setting, but our job is to make them forget that they are safe—if even just for a moment” (personal communication). In recent years, new variations on haunts have become widespread—horror camp-outs, for example, where visitors spend the night in a forest, chased by axe-murderers, and horror runs, where customers run through dark woods chased by zombies as in Figure 13.7. These outdoors horror experiences resemble extreme sports, or even regular sports with a twist, but they tend to have some narrative content, some backstory, and they invite participants to become protagonists in unfolding live-action horror narratives where it is surprisingly easy to forget that it is all just make-believe.
Figure 13.7: In recent years, live-action horror experiences such as horror camp-outs and horror runs have become increasingly popular. Here, a participant in Dystopia Horror Run 2016 tries to get away from a messed-up zombie. The run takes place at night in a forest outside of Vejle, Denmark. Photo: Klaus Dreyer/Headturn Images.
Interactive horror experiences—games, VR, haunts, and so on—offer immersive experiences for horror aficionados. We are likely to see more (and more effective) versions of such immersive and interactive horror experiences, but they will never replace traditional narrative horror in literature and cinema. Their pleasures overlap, but not perfectly; according to survey results, many visitors to Dystopia—but not all—are also horror fans. Interactive horror experiences are more effective at engendering strong emotional responses, but they don’t offer the psychological, social, and existential insight offered by the best horror in narrative media (Ndalianis 2012, 22). There is rarely any interpretative effort involved in such experiences, rarely much of a prompt for critical reflection, although some haunts do invite participants to respond to morally charged scenarios, such as the political vision embedded in the backstory and structure of Dystopia Haunted House. In the future, we will probably see more convergence between media, with various horror media merging and exchanging techniques to enhance the experience—stronger narratives in video games and haunts, interactive dimensions in cinema, and so on. And as horror evolves, horror research will have to follow suit.
Horror research has come a long way—but not nearly long enough to give us an adequate understanding of the genre in all its facets and with all its peculiar appeals. Researchers have made real progress, for example, in delineating the history of horror and its subgenres, and in charting horror’s formal characteristics, ideological subtexts, and cultural influences. But as I argued in Chapter 1, much humanistic horror research is marred by a reliance on obsolete psychological models
or a blinkered focus on cultural factors, and there are many burning questions still unanswered. Researchers in media psychology have broached some empirical questions about personality dimensions (such as thrill-seeking) and genre preference, and they have investigated gender and developmental stage as factors in responses to horror (Weaver and Tamborini 1996, Cantor 2002, Hoffner and Levine 2005). But we still don’t know much about the behavioral effects of horror, nor do we know enough about the psychological ones. We don’t have a clear picture of the personality profile and motivations of horror fans. We don’t know much about the genre’s neurobiological underpinnings, and we don’t know much about what happens in the minds of horror artists when they produce horror scenarios, nor about what kind of people they are. To begin to answer these questions, horror scholars need the aid of science.
In this book, I have proposed an evolutionary approach to horror—an approach built on findings about human nature from the evolutionary social and natural sciences. That’s one crucial way of integrating horror study with science: to use relevant scientific findings to construct models and, in the process, weed out obsolete theories and hypotheses. I think we need much more of this kind of research—more theory-building and more close-readings of horror works. We need more science-based investigations of subgenres, auteurs, and horror in various media. We need to use scientific findings to address correlations between life-history phases and horror content—such as systematic differences between horror for kids, horror for young adults, and horror for grown-ups. As social scientists and evolutionarily-minded scholars in the humanities come up with more refined models of human nature, evolutionary horror study will have to follow suit. That’s not all, though. Horror scholars need to engage with scientific methodology too. Traditionally, scholars in most humanities subjects have relied on qualitative, subjective methods; methods which are indispensable because they can yield important insight, but which are also inadequate for answering a set of crucial questions. Does horror make us more fearful or less fearful? You can’t answer that question without controlled psychological experiments. You can make educated guesses, guided and constrained by relevant evidence, as I have done in this book—but those guesses need to be subjected to scientific scrutiny. Do horror fans tend to have a specific personality profile? Are they, for example, mildly neurotic—that is, mildly sensitive to negative stimuli—rather than highly emotionally reactive or the opposite? You can’t tell without a psychometric study. Scholars in the humanities have been reluctant to incorporate experimental and quantitative methods in their studies, but there is no good reason for them not to add such methods to their toolkit (Carroll et al. 2012, Gottschall 2010 [2008]).
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