Nothing annoys me more than hearing people describe watching movies as a “brainless” activity—as if it involves somehow turning off your brain’s circuitry and relying solely on your eyeballs to coast through the movie’s run time. Plot twist: your brain is very much involved, engaged, and making the experience for you. Nothing makes this engagement more apparent than watching horror movies, where the filmmakers are crafting scares with your brain’s and body’s most likely reactions in mind.
Let’s start with a scene that appears in almost every horror flick ever made. Our protagonist is home alone at night, and the house is dark. They hear sounds they can’t explain, so they investigate. They go into a dark hallway and see a door at the end, slightly ajar. The room beyond is hidden by darkness. Is there something on the other side of the door? As the protagonist slowly makes their way forward, it’s so quiet that you can hear every breath and floorboard creak. The movie score is starting to creep up in volume. Your eyes scan every shadow and black corner of the hallway in case something might be hiding there, but it’s still too dark to be sure. We see something like apprehension on the protagonist’s face as they reach for the doorknob and jump back suddenly! to a musical sting as a cat streaks out of the room.
Of course! It was the cat making those strange sounds—because cats are nocturnal weirdos that get bored and race around the house at night, knocking things off of shelves and doing whatever it is that cats do. The protagonist is relieved, laughing off their paranoia as they bend down to scoop up their pet. But in the next shot, they stand up, cat in their arms, and we see that a monster has appeared right behind them.
There’s a lot to unpack in this scene. The elements of fear, horror, and shock are all there, and are definitely being experienced by the character on-screen. When it comes to you as a moviegoer, your mileage may vary in terms of how much you experience each while you watch the scene play out.
When we look at what gives any good horror movie its true horror vibe, we end up with two distinct elements: terror and horror. We often use these terms interchangeably, but they are very different. Terror is where tension lives. It’s that awful, creepy-crawly feeling, the anxiety and anticipation that builds toward a horrifying event or realization—basically, it’s the heebie-jeebies. Horror is how we react once that event actually occurs. We can thank Ann Radcliffe, mother of Gothic literature, for those definitions.
To tweak Radcliffe’s vocabulary a little bit, I’m going to roll terror and all of the other pre-horror emotions into one and call it fear. We know fear. We experience fear all of the time as a mechanism to protect us from a Bad Thing that might happen.
Horror is the result of the Bad Thing happening.
It’s not surprising to know that fear is a useful tool. It keeps us alive. If you’re feeling fear in a dangerous situation, you’re more likely to problem-solve, try to put space between yourself and that situation, or be more cautious and avoid getting into that dangerous situation in the first place.
Fear is such a useful tool that some fears stick around for generations. A great example of an evolved fear is a common one: fear of the dark. Tool use and technology have created a world where humans have no natural predators, but if we turn the clocks far enough back on our history, we quickly find that we weren’t always at the top of the food chain. A theory for why humans are afraid of the dark stems from this history: many predators, like large wild cats, prefer to attack at nighttime. This also happens to be when human eyesight is at its worst. Fundamentally, we lack a shiny layer of tissue at the back of our eyeballs called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light and allows for better night vision. It’s also why many animals have glowing eyes in photos taken with a flash, whereas humans are prone instead to “red eye,” thanks to light bouncing off our blood vessel–rich retinas. Humans who were more fearful of the dark were more likely to stay somewhere safe during the night to avoid predation; whereas fearless humans might have been more likely to do something reckless, like venturing out at night with limited vision.
This fear may not be especially useful today, with our lack of predators and abundance of light, but it seems to have been conserved over generations. A small 2012 study performed by Colleen Carney at Ryerson University in Toronto subjected a group of good and poor sleepers to random bursts of white noise while they were either in a well-lit room or in the dark. In general, greater startle responses were recorded in the dark than in full light, and poor sleepers reported much more discomfort than their peers who have few problems snoozing. Discomfort is an important, if subjective, descriptor here: while it’s pretty common to hear people say that they’re afraid of the dark, it’s not typically a screaming sort of fear. What’s most commonly reported is a sense of uneasiness and foreboding when surrounded by darkness.
Filmmakers use this uneasy feeling to their advantage, often using dark color palettes and even darker corners to mask all sorts of ghouls, killers, demons, and other threats at the edges of the frame. If you’ve ever found yourself scanning the blackest parts of the screen for even a hint of something nefarious, it’s this evolved fear, coupled expertly with your basic understanding of horror movie tropes, at work.
The first thing to remember is that fear lives in your brain. We can experience more than one type of fear, and there is evidence for more than one kind of fear pathway in the brain. Many of them (but not all!) are grouped together in what’s known as the limbic system. There isn’t perfect consensus on which brain parts get to be included in the limbic system, but in general these areas are thought to be where the bulk of our emotions are processed.
Let’s go back to our horror protagonist, who’s just heard a strange noise. The limbic structures that we’re concerned with in this scenario include the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus.
The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure buried deep in each of the temporal lobes of your brain. The amygdalae are key to decoding many emotional responses, including the famed fight-or-flight response. It’s also linked to storing and processing fear-related information and fear memories. In 1994, researcher Ralph Adolphs and his team investigated disorders that caused lesions that affected the amygdala. What they found was that these people tended to have a tougher time recognizing and interpreting fearful expressions on other people’s faces. Interestingly, this same study found that the recognition of other emotions, like happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, and disgust, wasn’t affected. The amygdala is generally accepted as the primary brain center for fear processing, but even the amygdala might send signals along different circuits depending on whether the input is related to fear of pain, versus fear of a predator, versus fear of an attack by another human, and so on.
The hippocampus also plays a role in storing and retrieving memories, not to mention providing context to content. It is named for its shape, which looks like a seahorse’s curled-up tail (or, as I prefer to think of it, a jellyroll). The hippocampus and amygdala are the parts that will, consciously or unconsciously, compare the strange noise to memory and help our protagonist decide whether it might belong to a threat.
The hypothalamus is the link between your brain and your body’s hormones. It controls functions like thirst, appetite, fatigue, and more by producing signaling hormones that trigger other parts of the brain and body to release whatever other hormones are needed to suit a task—kind of like a hormonal relay system. The amygdala may be responsible for the famed fight-or-flight response, but it’s the hypothalamus that sends the signal to the amygdala that activates that response.
These three limbic structures aren’t the only parts of the brain in play in our protagonist’s scenario. As they make their way down the hallway, our protagonist tries to keep their fear in check before it gets the better of them. The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is your brain’s go-to region for willpower or self-control. Trying to get a handle on curbing your feelings of fear or some other emotion? The VLPFC will help you out by inhibiting other regions like the amygdala. Meanwhile, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is actively taking stock of how much control you have over a situation and helps shape your stress response.
When the cat jumps out and startles our protagonist, this new input bypasses the limbic system completely and goes straight to reflex mode. The brainstem is responsible here; it skips a lot of the processing work that happens in the crinkly folds of the cerebral cortex. It’s responsible for a lot of automatic functions that you really shouldn’t have to think about, like breathing or keeping your heart beating or reflexively protecting yourself from something jumping out at you.
And then, of course, our protagonist has a monster to contend with.
Every horror film worth its salt has some sort of threat, whether real or imagined. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven) has Freddy Krueger. Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) has Jason Voorhees (well, technically Jason Voorhees’s mom). The Blair Witch Project (1999, dirs. Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick) has, well, the Blair Witch. Luckily, human brains have built-in systems for dealing with threats. If we take the same scenario from the opening of this chapter, here’s the gist of what’s happening: from the very start of that scene, your brain is telling you that a threat might be present. Even if you logically know that you’re just watching a movie, your body is preparing for that threat, you know, just in case it’s real. As a viewer with your butt safely in a seat and outside of the action on-screen, you can recognize a scary situation and build up your own anticipation, which is half the fun of watching horror.
If you were in the protagonist’s shoes, though, you might actually feel afraid, and that’s not unusual. It would actually be useful for you to feel fear! After all, fear is a tool your brain uses to prepare you and your body to deal with a threat. If you aren’t feeling afraid yet, you are at the very least in an enhanced sensory state—vigilant, even. Your “thinking” brain takes a back seat to your senses. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch becomes crucial to identifying if potential threats are nearby.
The good news is, we’re really good at picking up on potential threats. Oft-cited research such as that done by Sandra Soares at the University of Aveiro has found that threatening images—such as images of snakes—can trigger a threat response even when the images are flashed so quickly that the viewer might not be consciously aware that they saw the threat at all. This is in line with what’s known as the Snake Detection Theory, demonstrated in research where participants (even infants!) could more readily point out snakes in images than flowers. This particular theory goes on to suggest that humans have evolved to selectively fear threats like snakes, much in the same way that humans have evolved to fear the dark, as a way to avoid the risks associated with something that we might not see until it’s too late. Snakebites might not be a major threat these days, but the evolved adaptation—the ability to visually pick out potential threats—can still be useful.
It’s worth mentioning that threat detection isn’t limited to snakes. In general, threats like guns or spiders are also quickly spied and recognized by humans. People who can pick up on threats quickly are more likely to survive. In part, you can thank your amygdala for putting you on high alert. The amygdala is wickedly sensitive to anything novel.
Humans are also extra receptive to things appearing in our peripheral vision. In fact, we may even be faster at reacting to threats that appear in our peripheral vision than to threats that appear right front of our faces. In one study, researchers measured brain area activation to images of fearful and neutral faces presented either in the peripheral or central visual fields, and they found that participants showed responses in their frontal lobes and deep right temporal lobes (including the amygdala) as early as 80 milliseconds after the fearful faces were shown in the peripheral vision. Compare that to fearful faces presented centrally: in this case, activity was sparked along a more classical visual pathway instead of in areas more directly tied to interpreting fear. Not only that, but this interpretation took nearly twice as long, about 140 to 190 milliseconds. We are not only processing stuff appearing in our peripheral vision before we’re really conscious of what we’re seeing, but we’re also more readily processing it as a threat.
Once the threat we’re fearing makes its appearance, we have a few ways in which we’re programmed to respond. You’ve probably heard of the fight-or-flight response before, a response famous for taking over your brain and body and getting you out of sticky situations, but fighting and fleeing aren’t the only Fs that help us deal with stress—and they aren’t even necessarily the first go-tos.
A few other Fs are often cited as common responses to threat: freeze, à la deer-in-headlights; fright, a.k.a. “playing possum”; and friend (also sometimes flirt or fawn), as in trying your darndest to engage and de-escalate the threat. Taken together, the Fs are sometimes referred to as the defense cascade model (although friend is often dropped).
The Fs explain a lot of the reactions we see in horror film characters. Sometimes it seems like a character on-screen is doing something incredibly stupid that you’d never do if you were in their situation, but even real people behave in sometimes unexpected ways when their brains are hijacked by fear.
In the home invasion slasher You’re Next (2011, dir. Adam Wingard), Erin (Sharni Vinson) finds herself in a position where she can’t easily run away or fight. She is trapped at her boyfriend’s family’s isolated house with no cell service, no living neighbors, and an injured leg, and she’s facing more than one armed would-be assassin. She is a clear-headed and decisive woman, well prepared by her childhood on a survivalist compound, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t afraid. By finding places to hide, she is able to not only uncover information about her attackers’ identities and motives, but to take stock of her surroundings, keep track of the threat, and plan ways to defend herself.
Tackling threats head-on or running away aren’t always the best courses of action when you’re in danger. Sometimes your best bet is to freeze, as if you’re trying to escape the T. rex from Jurassic Park (but not as if you’re trying to escape a regular T. rex, since all evidence points to these extinct predators actually having had good binocular vision whether you’re standing still or running for dear life, on top of having a super-keen sense of smell).
Freezing on the spot is also known as attentive immobility, and it’s often an instinctual first phase in a fear response. It’s triggered by the periaqueductal gray area of the brain when the noticed threat is interpreted, usually subconsciously, as not immediately pressing. The periaqueductal gray is gray matter that surrounds the cerebral aqueduct, a passage containing cerebrospinal fluid that protects the brain. This area is strongly linked to processing pain, and works closely with the amygdala in situations involving triggering fear responses, especially freezing, and in encoding fear memories.
Standing stock-still out in plain sight of your threat can have unexpected advantages. The whole goal of attentive immobility is in the name: your focus is on paying attention and gathering information about the threat while it’s still far enough away that you’re not in immediate danger (and to keep it as far away as possible). You may not be moving, but you’re far from passive. You’re in a state where you can track the threat’s movements and switch to fight mode or run away if it comes too close. As evidenced by a slew of horror movie death scenes, immediately running away instead of gathering more information can be a terrible choice when the risk of being noticed, overtaken, and attacked from behind are high and likely.
Of course, it’s ideal if you can freeze in a hiding spot, given that this way you can observe a potential attacker without them observing you right back. Horror movies often show a character hiding, usually around a corner or in a closet, a hand clasped over their mouth, trying to be as quiet as possible and bracing for the moment when they might be found out. In You’re Next, Erin hides in a basement stairwell, where she can listen unseen to the masked attackers as they argue and reveal details about their motives and potential weaknesses. As horror tropes go, when hiding characters are found out, it’s usually because an unplanned sound signals their location. In Erin’s case, her cell phone briefly gets service at the worst possible moment and she gets an alert that an emergency text message she sent out earlier was received.
In nature, deer get a lot of flak for instinctively freezing in the threat of oncoming traffic, but when fawns freeze in the underbrush when they sense a predator, the benefit is clear. Darting out suddenly to flee might give them a small advantage while the predator responds to the suddenness of the flight, just as Erin emerging suddenly from her hiding spot gives her the advantage of a surprise attack.
If the fear that freezes you is overwhelming, though, this whole process can fall apart by tipping your brain over into hypervigilance. Hypervigilance is when the attention response is amplified to the point where you’re scanning your environment randomly and rapidly, and you can’t think clearly enough about your options for survival.
There is another reflex related to attentive immobility, known as the orienting reflex, which kicks in before you’ve even decided there is something to be afraid of. The response was first described in Reflexes of the Brain, by Russian psychologist Ivan Sechenov, way back in 1863, but the term for it was coined later by Ivan Pavlov (the very same Pavlov who conditioned dogs to salivate when a bell was rung). The orienting reflex is what makes you go What was that? when something changes in the world around you and immediately yanks your attention to whatever it was you heard or saw or otherwise sensed. Once your attention is focused, you can decide how to respond (and if the stimulus is intense enough, your defense responses will be activated). It sounds similar to the freeze response, but the main difference is that the orienting reflex is prone to habituation, where the freeze response is much more resistant. This is the reason you can get used to the creaks and groans that your house makes, but you wouldn’t easily stop getting freaked out by gunshots outside your window.
A lot of formal features in films—of any genre, not just horror—trigger our orienting reflex and grab our attention. Features as simple as cuts, zooms, edits, and sudden noises are enough to set off our What was that? detectors, even if we’re not aware that it’s happening. Of course, in other movies, these features are innocuous. In horror films, these techniques are often cleverly deployed not only to grab our attention, but to warn us of the possibility of threat.
Now your body is primed to either run really fast or get scrappy.
Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) tried running away from Michael Myers—now she’s forced to fight him to protect not only herself, but the kids she’s babysitting in Halloween (1978, dir. John Carpenter). Toward the end of the film, Laurie shuts herself in a close-to-empty closet in a desperate attempt to hide, but the killer soon finds her. You can pinpoint the moment when fear takes over and she reaches for anything that will help her fight back. Her hands find a coat hanger, which she unwinds and stabs into Michael’s eye the moment he breaks through the closet door. When he drops his knife, she snatches it up without hesitation and stabs him in the chest. Only once he hits the ground does the fight seem to drain away from her, as she stumbles over to the bedroom exit to catch her breath against the doorframe.
At this point, we’re beyond the feeling that there might be a threat; the threat is present and you have to deal with it. Your brain must make a quick choice between telling you to run away or to face the threat and fight. Unless your plan is to stay in a hiding spot (if that’s where you’re frozen), the shift between freeze and either fight or flight will take seconds, if not milliseconds. You’ve taken in as much information as you can, which the thalamus in your brain processes to send signals off to the necessary areas, including the amygdala. The amygdala triggers the hypothalamus, which directs a cascade of chemicals and hormones to flood through the brain and body. This wash of hormones signals another part of the brain, the pituitary gland, to produce a hormone called ACTH (adrenocorticotropic hormone), which in turn signals the adrenal glands on your kidneys to produce the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine (a.k.a. adrenaline and noradrenaline).
Epinephrine and norepinephrine get your heart racing, and direct blood flow away from less crucial parts of your body, like your skin, to prepare your muscles for action. It may seem redundant to have both epinephrine and norepinephrine do the same thing, but it’s better to have a backup plan (or hormone) than to not, right? Once that initial surge of epinephrine subsides, the hypothalamus initiates phase two of the stress response, which regroups the hypothalamus, the pituitary gland, and the adrenal glands—also referred to as the HPA axis—with the end goal of releasing cortisol, a stress hormone. Cortisol works to increase blood sugar levels and give you an extra boost of energy; it also curbs other functions that aren’t big contributors to your immediate survival, like digesting food.
This is your sympathetic nervous system in action. Your sympathetic nervous system is one part of your autonomic nervous system, which manages involuntary processes that keep you alive. The sympathetic nervous system’s main role is fight-or-flight arousal. The other part of the autonomic nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system, takes care of activity when the body is safe and at rest (“feed and breed” and “rest and digest” sound like ideal living compared with “fight or flight”). Cortisol is what keeps the gas pedal pressed down on the sympathetic nervous system during a threat response, keeping the body on high alert. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over once cortisol levels drop after the threat passes.
People in fight mode are capable of all sorts of blind violence once their conscious, “thinking” brain has given over control to the periaqueductal gray. They will use any weapon and inflict any injury they can. This is true across species: insects will bite, sting, and release toxic secretions; birds will peck and scratch; mammals will fight tooth and claw (and hoof and horn)—and humans will punch and kick and stab at eyeballs with coat hangers. This impulsive, purely reactive fighting can save your life, but it can also be mindless and difficult to control. It’s not unusual for the fight to go on long after the threat has ended.
Even in a state of pure terror, Sally Hardesty (Marilyn Burns) knows better than to try to square off against a chain saw in the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper), especially when said chain saw is wielded by someone much larger and physically stronger. After she sees her boyfriend get sawed through, her mind flips into escape mode. She may not be able to fight back effectively against Leatherface, or any of her other attackers in the film, and she’s too scared to plan a clever escape, but she can easily outrun her threats. In the end, running is what saves her.
In many cases, the best option is to run away. By putting as much distance as possible between you and a threat, you’re getting yourself out of range of a physical attack and, ideally, removing yourself to a safer spot where you won’t get killed by a man with a chain saw.
Your brain and body prepare you for flight in the same way that they prepare you to fight: the difference is mostly context. If you have a potential escape route, and if your threat is closing in, your brain yields control to the periaqueductal gray, and the adrenaline that’s flooding your body and prepping your muscles will send you running.
Researchers have been able to simulate flight brain activity in lab settings with a Pac-Man-like game (which is much easier and more ethical than, say, wielding a knife and chasing participants around a building). When the participants were caught by a predator in-game, they received mild electric shocks. The participants’ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans saw activity in the prefrontal cortex when the predator was a safe distance away, which means that the participants were taking stock of the situation. When the predator got nearer, metabolism shifted over to the periaqueductal gray, triggering flight.
It’s important to remember that adrenaline gives you a boost; it doesn’t give you superpowers. Despite the stories you hear of mothers getting adrenaline rushes that let them lift cars off their trapped children and demonstrate Incredible Hulk–like superstrength, this isn’t something we have empirical evidence for. What’s more likely is that something in the cocktail of hormones surging through your body is causing an analgesic effect, blunting the strain and screaming pain that you would usually feel when pushing your body to its limits. Another benefit of adrenaline is better eyesight, thanks to your pupils dilating to let in more light. In these moments, nothing is more important than trying to survive.
But how long can the fight-or-flight rush really carry you? We understand the pathways of the adrenaline rush, but research has done little in the way of quantifying it. In horror movies, victims seem like they might run forever until they’re done in by tripping over a stray branch. In real life, every person has a different capacity for intense physical activity—like running for your life—and there will also be slight variations in how fast each person’s body breaks down or metabolizes adrenaline. What we do know is that adrenaline recruits more muscle fibers and the nerves that control them than are normally used at once, and it is the rare extreme fight-or-flight situation where all of these motor units would be called into action. So, whatever your personal capacity, you can be confident that your body will try its darndest to get you out of a life-or-death situation until you reach the point of physical exhaustion.
Post-threat, this boost of hormones usually tapers off quickly enough, and that’s the ideal scenario. In cases where people experience chronic stress, these hormones (cortisol in particular) can take their toll on the body. In the crush of fight or flight, most of your body processes are disrupted in some way to divert your energy into survival mode. As you can imagine, a long-term disruption can be super damaging to all areas of your health. Long-term stress manifests symptoms ranging from sleep problems like insomnia and mental health disorders such as anxiety and depression, to digestive issues, heart conditions, and cognitive impairment.
In Martyrs (2008, dir. Pascal Laugier), we follow Anna (Morjana Alaoui) as she tries to help her childhood friend Lucie (Mylène Jampanoï), who escaped an abusive cult as a child and has made it her mission to find and murder her former abusers. Anna is captured by this very same cult, whose leader, known only as Mademoiselle, believes that trauma can make susceptible people see beyond the curtain of death. Anna endures extreme torture in the name of transcendence, which culminates in her skin being flayed. Despite the massive trauma inflicted upon her, Anna is alive at the end of the film, but she appears to be catatonic.
On the surface, fright might sound a lot like freeze, but it is a distinct fear response, a state also known as tonic immobility or quiescence or “playing possum” (although the colloquial use of the phrase “playing possum” implies that the victim is willfully faking death—tonic immobility is most certainly an involuntary fear response). Where freezing is an initial response that can help you stay unnoticed and plan an escape when a threat is detected, tonic immobility is more likely to occur once an attack is already under way and your senses are overwhelmed with fear.
We commonly see this response in animals. When a rabbit is clamped in a fox’s jaws, it might appear already dead, but really its parasympathetic nervous system has just kicked into overdrive in a last-ditch attempt to stave off further attack or injury. The body goes limp and lies still. Heart rate slows, and the eyes may remain open or closed, but the animal is unresponsive to its surroundings.
In Martyrs, the film seems to interpret Anna’s final state as one of enlightenment as sought by the cult; she is senseless to everything else. It’s suggested that, after so much torment, she is simply beyond fear. Before her flaying, Anna even hallucinates a conversation with now-dead Lucie, who marvels that Anna isn’t scared anymore. Another interpretation is that Anna’s body is making a last-ditch effort to protect against the torture that she knows she can’t escape.
For a human to experience tonic immobility, they would have to be subject to an overwhelmingly threatening and life-risking situation where escape is blocked. There is evidence for tonic immobility in humans, and it has been suggested as an underlying cause for “rape paralysis” reported by victims of sexual assault. The symptoms are undeniably similar: an inability to move, scream, or call out, numbness and insensitivity to pain, and feeling cold—all without a loss of consciousness.
In order to study tonic immobility in humans, researchers in Brazil attempted to trigger the response and measure it as objectively as possible. To do this, they assembled a small group of participants who had experienced a traumatic event in the past, some who now lived with symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and some who didn’t have these symptoms. All participants were then asked to describe their traumatic experience in meticulous detail. The research team recorded the script of their description and made a recording of the script using a professional speaker with a neutral tone. Finally, they were asked to listen to the recording. It’s worth mentioning that the participants knew that this was the plan and that there was a possibility that they would trigger symptoms of PTSD through this experiment; they also knew that they had the power to end their part in the experiment at any time.
What the researchers found was that listening to the recording was a pretty reliable tool for inducing a tonic immobility–like response, and that the response was higher in participants living with PTSD. One notable difference: reliving the events sped up the participants’ hearts, where tonic immobility in real circumstances tends to slow the heart rate down, but this study concluded that this was enough evidence for tonic immobility in humans.
There is an evolutionary basis for tonic immobility. Even though it might seem logical to prey on something that’s staying still (and therefore easier to catch), many predators will only strike to kill prey that is moving. In an extreme example, some hawks might actually starve to death if they aren’t fed moving prey, because they interpret unmoving prey as dead—and therefore inedible—meat. If prey isn’t moving, a predator might become distracted, relax its attention, or instead direct their attack to something else that is moving. In Martyrs, Anna’s immobility isn’t such an effective protective tool because what’s threatening her is a human who sees her as means to a philosophical, metaphysical end and not as a tasty treat.
Michelle (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) doesn’t remember how she got into the bunker in 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016, dir. Dan Trachtenberg). She remembers trying to leave town, another car sideswiping hers, and then … waking up in a hermetically sealed shelter underground. Howard (John Goodman) claims that he saved her, and that the world outside the bunker has become toxic and uninhabitable. Michelle senses that there’s more to Howard not letting her leave than just her safety, but he’s already shown himself to have a hair-trigger temper. Her only option for survival is to play her part in a simulacrum of friendship so that she can buy herself enough time to plan and execute an elaborate escape.
What’s sometimes referred to as the fawn response isn’t included in the defensive fear cascade model because it isn’t a typical automatic response to a threat. Rather, this is a learned behavior, and one that is super context-specific. Fawning works to stave off an attack by appealing to the attacker. Of course, that means the threat is something that can be appealed to or appeased. It wouldn’t make sense to try to appeal to a supernatural monster that, for all you know, doesn’t deal in human emotions, let alone compassion or bargaining. The threat in this case is almost always human, and the situation is almost always one where the victim is trapped—often for a long period of time, such as in an abusive relationship.
Michelle in 10 Cloverfield Lane and Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) in Split (2016, dir. M. Night Shyamalan) are both good examples of horror situations where their human, or human-ish, captors can be reasoned with. Michelle learns quickly that hostility gets her nowhere with her abductor, and that anything but playing house with Howard—eating meals together, playing board games, watching movies, and letting him infantilize her—will earn threats of death by shooting or by immersion in a barrel of perchloric acid. In Split, Casey is the only one of the three abducted girls who manages to engage in meaningful conversation with her captor(s) (James McAvoy). She quickly learns which of his personalities are willing to negotiate, which may demonstrate compassion, and at least one that can be tricked by feigning friendship.
Stockholm syndrome might be considered a cousin to this response, although there is enough mystery surrounding it that it might be more accurately described as a phenomenon than a syndrome. A syndrome describes a collection of symptoms, where Stockholm syndrome is typically characterized by one specific behavior: the victim forms a sympathetic alliance with their captor. There isn’t enough diagnostic information for Stockholm syndrome to qualify for a spot in the DSM-V, the officially recognized manual of psychological conditions and disorders. The phenomenon is named (by the media rather than medical experts, which might explain the inaccurate use of the word “syndrome”) for an incident in 1973 in which four hostages from a bank robbery in Stockholm, Sweden, refused to testify against their captors in court.
Neither Michelle’s nor Casey’s experiences would seem to qualify as Stockholm syndrome scenarios. While both can at times be sympathetic toward their captors, they never ally with them. Contrast their situations with that of Cheryl Dempsey (Stacy Chbosky) in The Poughkeepsie Tapes (2007, dir. John Erick Dowdle). Cheryl was the teenaged victim of serial killer Edward Carver (Ben Messmer) who was tortured and abused but ultimately kept alive by her captor as a slave. What probably started as a fawn response to keep herself alive transformed into a dependent relationship. Even after Cheryl was discovered and rescued, she would defend her kidnapper and insist that he loved her.
It’s amazing to think that humans have such varied built-in systems for dealing with threats and that this variety gets put to such good use in horror movies. Things get even more interesting when on-screen threats cross the liminal space between film and viewer to trigger these built-in threat responses in the audience.
If you’ve seen a horror movie, you’ve experienced the jump scare. For many of us, it doesn’t feel like a true horror movie experience if we haven’t jumped in our seat at least once, even if the scare itself feels cheap and predictable. And, not to put down the jump scare, but it is cheap. The technique bypasses logic completely and goes straight for your reflexes—that’s why your body jolts even when you know the scare is coming.
C. Robert Cargill, one of the screenwriters for Sinister (2012, dir. Scott Derrickson), once said, “A good jump scare is like a magic trick,” but if you’re the one jumping in your seat, it doesn’t feel too magical at all.
The reflex itself is known as the startle response, and it happens in two distinct phases that occur so fast they feel like one blended reaction: in the first phase, your heart rate spikes, you gasp, you blink, and your hands extend; in the second phase, your muscles tense, your hands clench, and your eyes are open again. Your body is bracing itself for an unexpected physical attack. In fact, it is the same physical response that most people would have if someone came up behind them and whacked them on the back.
Despite a solid understanding of what is happening in the body during a startle response, there’s some disagreement about how it might have evolved in mammals (humans included). The startle reflex is thought to have evolved to protect your body and limit damage from sudden predator attacks, especially attacks from behind—that much researchers agree on. But the full-body reaction is part of what leaves us scratching our heads a little: Is it meant to draw our limbs up to protect our soft and squishy organs from damage? Are we unconsciously going through the motions needed to jump out of the way if necessary? Is it just an all-systems interruption to force us to pay attention to a potential threat? The answer can be any of these ideas, or maybe some combination of all of them. It is also thought that the face-scrunching blink that happens when most people startle is a reflex to protect the eyes from damage. That is, it’s not just your closed eyelids being enlisted to protect: your grimace crinkles your nose and stretches muscles around your mouth and eyes to pull every reasonable part of your face, from your cheeks to your brow, toward your eyes to offer more cover.
Although it feels like a jump scare is bypassing your brain, researchers have been able to propose a likely neural path for the signal that triggers the startle response in mammals. A key cluster of neurons in this pathway is known as the caudal pontine reticular nucleus (PnC), part of the reticular formation in the brainstem. For context, the reticular formation is an intricate and complex collection of neurons and connective tracts throughout the brainstem that are major players when it comes to alertness and consciousness. The PnC is specifically thought to integrate information from afferent nerve cells bringing auditory (sudden loud noise!), balance (sudden head movements or unexpected falls), and tactile information (Aaah! Something touched me!) from outside the body, and then send out signals activating interneurons and motor neurons in the brainstem and spinal cord to contract muscle groups in the head, neck, and limbs into the signature startle pose.
In the movie theatre, the startle is a harmless reflex, but outside in the real world, it can have major consequences. Special attention has been paid to researching how people behave during a startle event to understand this response in pilots and to prevent incidents in flight. As you can imagine, the wrong response during an unexpected event can be catastrophic if you’re responsible for safely flying an aircraft. So much of flying may be automated now, but in situations when the pilot has to respond quickly to the unexpected, a clear head and quick judgment are crucial. Research here often differentiates between startle (like a lightning strike) and surprise (like a technical failure) situations. In this context, startle situations are just like jump scares: a sudden and unexpected stimulus, like an explosive bang or a bright flash of light. Surprise situations are situations where something happens that doesn’t match up with what was expected.
That said, surprise and startle are not mutually exclusive. In a 2016 simulator study by Wayne Martin and his team, pilots were asked to fly a missed approach. A missed approach is a maneuver undertaken by a pilot anytime it is judged that a successful landing cannot be made. Many factors can qualify for an approach to be discontinued, from the runway being obstructed, to landing clearance not being received, to the aircraft not being in the right position to touch down safely in the designated zone on the runway. In some cases, an unexpected fire alarm and loud explosion noise was sounded while the pilots were flying. The sounds shouldn’t have changed how the pilots flew their task, but the study found that more than a third of the pilots were delayed in initiating the missed approach when the sounds were played.
Outside of a simulation, a startle can translate to a bad snap decision even in seasoned pilots. The biggest issue is that the startle gets processed along a divided pathway—the speedier one speeds right through the thalamus to the amygdala and sends that familiar cascade of stress hormones flowing; the slower one gets processed in the cortex, or the “thinking” part of the brain. Stress conditions affect our working memory, making our brains feel fuzzy and dumb so that anything beyond a simple choice might feel impossible. Stress also makes our fine motors less finely tuned—like we see in films when someone is being chased and suddenly can’t seem to do the simple task of putting a key into a lock without fumbling and dropping the keys on the ground. That, combined with startle information reaching your cortex at a delay, means that these situations can turn hairy fast, whether you’re flying a plane or trying to start your car for a quick getaway from a murderer.
For horror movie audiences, jump scares serve double duty by releasing some of the tension that’s been building throughout the film while also signaling to your body to release some adrenaline into your bloodstream. Tension is a credit to film technique and should be built up and released more than once as a horror plot unravels. It’s also key to a good jump scare, also known as a fear-potentiated startle. Basically, the more anxious you are feeling, the bigger the startle you’re likely to experience (and yes, people with anxiety do tend to have a more sensitive startle with a bigger response).
A great example of tension-building, even when you can actively predict that a jump scare is coming, is the initial scare sequence from Lights Out (2016, dir. David F. Sandberg). The sequence is recycled from the 2013 short film that inspired the feature: a light is turned off over a seemingly empty space to reveal a threatening figure silhouetted in the dim light. The lights are turned back on, and the figure is gone. The character who witnesses this phenomenon investigates it by turning the lights on and off repeatedly. The lights go out: the figure is there, in the exact same position; the lights come on: they’re gone. Tension ramps because we recognize the threat and know that a Bad Thing must surely happen soon.
The lights are flipped off, then on, then off, then on, and the figure is suddenly close enough to touch, having somehow crossed twenty feet in a fraction a second. And even though you know it’s coming—actually, because you know it’s coming—it is super effective. According to psychologist Dr. Glenn D. Walters, when it comes to horror films, the allure of the genre can be boiled down to three main ingredients, and the first two ingredients are tension and unrealness (the third ingredient is relevance). When you are anticipating the startle, through a combination of the film’s buildup and your complicity as a moviegoer aware that you are watching a horror movie, that’s tension and unrealness in action.
Are there exceptions to the rule that the best jump scares are of the fear-potentiated startle flavor? Absolutely. You can have a jump scare that comes out of nowhere, while the audience is relaxed and unsuspecting, but it’s a lot harder to pull off in a way that’s effective and scary. I can think of one movie that pulls off an amazing cold jump scare, and that, of course, is The Exorcist III (1990, dir. William Peter Blatty).
Often referred to as the Nurse Station Scene, it features an extended take down a long hospital hallway. Most of the action happens in the extreme background of the scene and out of focus, and to call it “action” is a stretch. A man stands at a nurse’s station while the nurse looks over charts. There is a smaller jump scare setup, wherein the nurse investigates strange sounds emerging from a patient’s room. The investigation is cut like the setup for a classic jump scare, with a close-up of the nurse’s hand slowly opening the door to find that the strange crackling sound is nothing other than the sound of ice melting in a glass of water, eerily amplified in the hospital’s quiet. As the nurse relaxes into this realization, a patient sits up and yells at her, causing her to scream and us, the audience, to jump.
This scare cleverly releases tension and tricks us into thinking that we’ve had our scare for the scene. The sequence doesn’t build anticipation in the same way that the Lights Out sequence does, cueing us with repetition. Instead, this scene slowly builds tension with a long stretch of mundane moments. In a way, The Exorcist III’s jump scare is like waiting for a bus at a bus stop, where the longer you wait, the more you expect that something is going to arrive soon. The challenge with The Exorcist III is that there’s no clue as to what that something will be.
After the initial jump scare with the yelling patient, we return to the long hallway shot and the nurse returns to her station. Security guards mill around, in and out of view. When the nurse decides to check on a strange sound from another room, we break completely from the pattern established by her first investigation. There are no tension-building close-ups revealing the contents of the room. Instead, we stay at the far end of the hallway and we watch her disappear into the room and return, apparently having found nothing of note. She locks up and turns her back on the room. Just as she walks away, a demon impossibly walks straight through the just-closed, just-locked door and marches behind the nurse ready to cut into the back of her neck with a giant pair of shears. The demon’s appearance is also coupled with the only non-diegetic sound of the entire scene—a loud musical sting—which signals that this is the big scare that we’ve been building toward. And boy, is it scary.
Of course, not all people have the same startle sensitivity. We know that anxiety can be a factor, but a combination of genetics, culture, and nurture can also influence whether you’re the sort of person who jumps and screams when startled, or who just gives a little jolt and gasp. Ever feel like you jump out of your skin more readily than your friends? I can’t say that I’m a confirmed hyper-startler, but I am known to startle and scream in my own home if my wife is standing somewhere I’m not expecting … and at work my coworkers tend to loudly announce themselves when they approach my office so I don’t jump (which somehow makes it worse). The sensitivity of your startle reflex doesn’t directly dictate whether you will like scares more or less. That said, if you’re good at reappraising the arousal that comes from a good startle as enjoyment, then there could be a correlation. I know that I definitely appreciate a jump scare that sets my heart racing a lot more when I’m actually looking to be scared.
Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany once identified gene variants that might be responsible for some people being hyper-startlers. Their study involved testing ninety-six women for a variant form of the COMT gene (COMT stands for a catabolic enzyme named catechol-O-methyltransferase—an enzyme that breaks down dopamine in the brain and weakens its signal). The COMT gene has been linked to the ability to keep emotions in check. COMT’s two forms, called alleles, are Val158 and Met158. More or less half of the population carries one copy of each allele. So, they would have one copy each of Val158 and Met158. Everyone else is divided between carrying either two copies of Val158 or two copies of Met158. Met158 is considered the variant form of the COMT gene.
The researchers showed these women images that were pleasant (like cute puppies or babies), neutral (like hair dryers), and frightening (like weapons or injured people at crime scenes), and a loud, white noise–like sound called a startle probe was randomly played. The intensity of their startle responses was measured via electrodes attached to their eye muscles. The idea is that when you’re startled, these muscles contract to make you blink. They found that women who had two copies of the Met158 variant of the COMT gene tended to show a more sensitive startle when scary images were showing, whereas women who had only one copy of the variant were able to keep their startle more in check.
Other people can have such a sensitive startle response that it becomes a pathology, known as hyperekplexia—a term that translates to “excess surprise.” This is an extremely rare genetic condition linked to mutations on the glycine receptor gene (GLRA1). The mutation affects the brainstem and spinal cord, lowering the threshold of what might trigger a startle, but also immediately following the startle “jump” with body stiffness, sometimes so severe that the affected person will fall to the floor. If this reminds you of those videos of “fainting goats” that tend to make the rounds on the internet every so often, it’s because the condition is very similar. (The fainting goats’ condition, called congenital myotonia, is actually a separate disorder that can also be found in humans.) The difference between a person with hyperekplexia and a person with a standard startle response is that while most people will startle once and then experience a diminished response with each subsequent startle, especially if they happen close together, a hyperekplexic person will have just as big a startle every single time.
In real scenarios, your brain might get the chance to sift through the sensory information you’ve taken in and bring logic back into the mix:
But you don’t feel very relaxed, do you?
False alarms can backfire. If your senses are tipping you off to a potential threat but no threat appears, a few things can happen: one, your threat alarms are less likely to go off the next time the same thing happens (this is specifically referred to as the False Alarm Effect or habituation); two, the next time the same warning occurs, you ignore it; and three, you might have a completely counterproductive response, where you end up responding in a way that is less useful and protective than you would have if you had received no warning at all.
But horror films don’t give you much of a chance to reason. Everything is a setup. And we know that everything is a setup. The rules in horror movie worlds usually don’t follow the same rules as the real world. Bogeymen can and do exist—and they’re out to get you. False alarms are a great device in horror films for granting a temporary break in tension and make for a more interesting viewing experience if executed well (at least physiologically; the plot might still suck). But these reprieves never last long before we get ramped back up into horror mode.
SCARE SPOTLIGHT: CAT PEOPLE (1942, DIR. JACQUES TOURNEUR)
Alice (played by Jane Randolph) has good reason to be nervous—she’s been flirting with her married coworker Oliver (Kent Smith), and Oliver’s wife, Irena (Simone Simon), has taken notice. This would be a tricky situation for the average person, but Irena may or may not be able to transform into a panther. After a dinner date with Oliver, Alice chooses to walk home alone in the dark, refusing Oliver’s company because “[she’s] not afraid,” but the audience knows that Irena is following close behind. After a few blocks of walking through silent, empty streets, Alice gets the sense that someone is stalking her. She picks up her pace, straining to hear if the only sounds are her footsteps and not the echoes of someone else’s following behind. Finally she stops, clutching a lamppost and looking around to see if she can spy who (or what) is making her feel watched.
We hear the low growl and hiss of what could be a threatening wildcat about to pounce. We, along with Alice, brace for Irena to attack in full panther mode. Instead, the sound turns out to be a bus’s air brakes as it pulls up to a stop.
Not all jump scare culprits are real threats, but when it comes to sudden startles, your body is doing its best to keep you alive. It will always respond first and evaluate the threat later. When the scare turns out to be harmless, the technique is known as a Lewton Bus, referring to producer Val Lewton’s hand in this scene from Cat People. It is characterized specifically by a slow buildup of tension that feels like it will definitely lead to the reveal of a threat, only to catch the audience totally off guard by something completely nonthreatening.
Val Lewton was hired by RKO Pictures while it was in a slump: Citizen Kane, these days often referred to as the best film of all time, was actually a flop when it was first released in 1941. RKO needed to make money fast and, taking inspiration from competitor Universal Studios’ successful monster movies, they hired Lewton to lead a unit dedicated to horror. B-horror, that is. Since Lewton wasn’t granted much of a budget, he had to find clever ways to get moviegoers onto the edge of their seats that didn’t demand elaborate effects. If you ever find yourself tired of scares that lean too hard on CG and special effects, then Val Lewton films might be just the breath of fresh air you need.
Lewton may not have had much money to develop his films, but he had plenty of imagination, and firmly believed that he could disturb audiences through the unseen. Cat People features his most famous jump scare, but Lewton included (and continued to refine) startle effects in all nine of his horror films with RKO Pictures.
So if jump scares are such a reliable way to activate our startle reflex and get our hearts racing, why do they feel so cheap?
The issue might be that recent horror films are simply relying too much on jump scares because they are a reflex and can be achieved so easily. Interestingly, Where’s the Jump?, an internet archive of jump scares in film and television series, keeps a list of the films with the highest tally of jump scare moments. Of the seventy or so “High Jump Scare Movies” on their list, only about six are films released before the year 2000 (and none is from earlier than 1981). I love a good startle as much as the next fan, but the sharp uptick in their use makes me wonder what more creative scares we might be missing.
While jump scares have been having their (very long) moment for the past few decades, there’s one more emotional horror staple that had its heyday when practical effects were favored that I personally think is due for a proper resurgence: the gross-out.
Disgust is a distinct emotion from fear but no less a horror staple, whether it’s in the form of blood-and-gore splatterpunk or moral disgust at a specific situation or person’s behavior.
Once something gross has been brought to your attention, instead of triggering a fast sympathetic nervous system response like a threat would—assuming there’s no obvious threat present—a different response is processed. A main function of disgust is thought to have evolved to help us avoid disease, so it tracks that the reasonable responses to something disgusting are aversion, avoidance, and, well, wanting to vomit. A lot of universal disgusts, like human feces or pus-filled open sores, have clear ties to disease prevention. Others are less obvious, like body disfigurement or stepping on a juicy slug with your bare foot.
Like other emotions, including fear, the insula seems to be heavily implicated in processing disgust and recognizing when others are grossed out. The insula is a brain region that seems to be deeply involved in pathways that describe our experiences with emotional and bodily self-awareness. More than one lesion study has looked at cases where there was injury to the insula and has noted that these injuries affected the ability to recognize expressions of disgust on others’ faces. This is important: the ability to recognize disgust in others is a protective strategy. If you see that someone else is disgusted, it might mean they have come into contact with something that increases their risk of developing sickness or disease. If you have come into contact with that same something, you might be at risk too.
Wanting to hurl could very well protect you; if the threat is potentially inside you, then feeling sick is a smart response—like a behavioral extension of your immune system. When you see something disgusting, like moldy food, our brain sends a signal to urge you to vomit (or at least make us feel queasy) just in case you ate that moldy food and need to purge your body of dangerous spores. The same goes for when you see someone else vomiting. Were you exposed to what is making this person barf? It’s hard to tell, so you might as well barf too, just in case. The brain has a dedicated vomit center, the area postrema, that is primarily in charge of monitoring your blood for substances that might be toxic (like too much alcohol) and signaling to your body that it needs to vomit when toxins cross into dangerous levels. Anything that can be interpreted as potential poisoning symptoms might trigger the vomit response, even the dizziness you feel when you’re experiencing motion sickness.
Of course, not all disgust is born of disease prevention. A lot of what people find disgusting is learned, either culturally or by learned association. The Exploratorium in San Francisco has a great exhibit where a drinking fountain is mounted inside a toilet. The drinking water is perfectly safe and clean, but many visitors have a hard time bringing themselves to drink from it because they can’t get past the association of toilets with urine and feces. Similarly, many people balk at the idea of eating insects, while in many parts of the world insects are part of a normal diet. Cultural disgust can be malleable and change over time; over recent years, Western countries have become more tolerant of the idea of insects as dietary protein (and you may even be able to find cricket flour at your local grocery store!).
These negative associations can serve up some memorable imagery in horror films. Take this gross-out moment from Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento): ballet dancer Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) is in her boarding room, brushing her hair before dinner. Something catches in her comb. It’s a maggot. She notices more maggots. Then the screams begin: maggots are dripping from the ceiling across the entire dormitory. You don’t need me to tell you what makes this scene disgusting: maggots are associated with rot and dead bodies. Their presence means that there’s something putrefying somewhere unseen. In context, this is not only gross and unhygienic, it’s threatening.
Confession time: I am personally super susceptible to gross-outs in horror films, especially when it comes to gore and body horror. Any reference to cannibalism will make me hesitate to watch a movie, even though some of my favorites end up being movies centered around people eating other people—here’s looking at you, Raw (2016, dir. Julia Ducournau). I find it particularly funny because in real life, it’s quite the opposite: I’ve grown molds and bacterial colonies on petri dishes, which smell really bad. I have done all sorts of animal organ dissections, replete with nasty sights, sounds, and smells, and these don’t faze me at all. But give me a gross moment in a horror movie, where I know that I’m watching a movie and that it’s not real, and my stomach starts to churn.
While I was working on this book, I did a mini-marathon of David Cronenberg films, which are infamous for their body horror and seem to be constructed specifically to inspire disgust. His films Shivers (1975), Rabid (1977), The Brood (1979), Videodrome (1983), and The Fly (1986) all feature some form of oozing sores, pulsing nodules, or new body orifices that have no business bursting through human flesh. Skin, hair, and fingernails are prone to sloughing away, and when it comes to effluvia, there are buckets of every goop and fluid the body can produce, and some the body definitely shouldn’t be producing. None of this bothered me while I was watching the movies. But a day after my marathon, I was eating a lunch coated in a sauce that was just the right amount of viscous. My brain conjured a memory of the Brundlefly (as played by Jeff Goldblum) vomiting strange corrosive juices onto his food. And I had to put my fork down.
There’s no reason for me to make a connection between the gross image of a fictional man-fly hybrid to the food I was eating and the potential that I might be eating something harmful, but my brain did the work forming those connections and making me feel disgust, just in case. It was probably helped by memories of my university student years, when I had the unfortunate tendency to boil and eat hot dogs that were kinda gray, or to strain the lumps out of spoiled milk for my coffee. When I ate these questionable (and undeniably gross) foods, I did tend to get sick, so in a sort of backward way my brain was trying to protect me by conjuring feelings of disgust—just in case my association between a slimy sauce and a slimy Cronenberg monster meant that my food might make me feel sick. For what it’s worth, I did eat my lunch and I was fine.
Research has also suggested that pairing disgusting images with a fear message (in the case of most horror movies, the message is: “This will kill you!”) will actually enhance the effectiveness of that fear message. So, if you see something that you know is scary and it also looks gross, you’ll feel more aversion and want to avoid it even more than if it was just scary and not also gross. This is the reason why a lot of countries, including Canada and the U.K., include large graphic images along with the health warnings on cigarette packages. A warning that smoking might cause oral cancers is much more persuasive when you have to look at a giant, full-color image of a tumor-riddled human tongue every time you reach for a pack of cigarettes.
Okay, so I’ve walked you through the reactions that the human brain and body can have when it encounters something scary, threatening, or just plain gross and just how powerful those reactions can be. Some are pretty common reactions to have in everyday life, and the less-common ones can be found easily on-screen. How does all of this translate to the experience of watching horror films?
When you’re in a movie theatre, or sitting at home on a couch watching a horror film, you’re not going to run away or start kicking and punching your friend next to you. You may be glued to your seat, but you’re not paralyzed with fear. It’s not like you actually believe that you’re in a threatening situation. So what’s really going on in the brain? While we understand how our brain and body respond to fear and threats, our reactions to what we see on film seem to be a bit different.
Maybe we’re not experiencing true fear at all.
In 2009, researcher Thomas Straube and his team at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena watched brains watching horror movies. They observed forty test subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to see which areas of their brain showed increased activity while watching threatening scenes from Aliens (1986), The Shining (1980), The Silence of the Lambs (1991), and The Others (2001) versus neutral scenes from the same movies where nothing scary happens.
Instead of seeing the amygdalae getting fired up during the scariest scenes, the fMRI scans instead revealed activity in:
What this study suggests is that, despite the clear threats on-screen, we might not be activating real fear experiences.
Based on the lack of amygdala action observed in this study, Straube also reasoned that the amygdala might be more implicated in sudden, unexpected threats, and not so much the sustained tension that is built in (and expected from!) horror movies. In terms of the areas of the brain that were being activated, though, it seems less like the participants were responding to a threat with fear and more like they were paying attention to the victims’ predicaments and trying to find a way out of danger with them (remember: empathy and sympathy have just as big a role to play in horror as identification does). It could be that horror movies are actually providing mental training for when we might be in danger in the real world. This is all speculative, of course, and sounds a heck of a lot like the plot to a movie like Scream, where characters survive based on their understanding of horror movie tropes and the rules of engaging horror movie threats.
It might be more accurate to say that when you’re watching horror, your body doesn’t go specifically into a state of fear but instead goes into a state of arousal. A lot of emotions can throw you into a high arousal state: fear, of course, but also excitement, anger, and more (and yes, sexual arousal counts too). These states get the sympathetic nervous system fired up in the same way, so it comes down to the brain to interpret the arousal and output how you’re feeling about it. When your body is in any state of arousal, you are primed for a strong physical reaction.
Ever get really spooked during a movie and then start laughing? That’s your limbic system and prefrontal cortex reinterpreting the situation and deciding that you’re still safely in a movie theatre watching a movie. If we revisit the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s ending, we get a great example of what’s called excitation-transfer theory in action. Sally is in the back of a pickup truck driving away from her attacker, who is still in the middle of the road, brandishing his chain saw. She is crusted with blood and her eyes are wide. She has spent the night in an intense state of fear arousal and has barely stopped screaming the entire time. But you can see the moment where she recognizes she’s finally safe, even though her body is still on high alert; her screams transform into terrified laughter.
Excitation-transfer theory is also implicated in why it’s so satisfying to see a monster or villain get defeated at the end of a movie. We’re already aroused by the horror that we watched for the bulk of the film, but in the moments when the good guys win, we’re not scared anymore—so that arousal can get funneled into the experience of another emotion (in this case, the “Heck yeah!” emotion).
SCARE SPOTLIGHT: HEREDITARY (2018, DIR. ARI ASTER)
To describe the relationship between Annie Graham (Toni Collette) and her mother as “fraught” would be a bit of an understatement. Following her mother’s death, Annie starts to uncover secrets about her mother’s hold on her family that spiral into one nightmarish situation after another. The movie is relentlessly dark and rattling.
A24, the studio that distributed Hereditary, had twenty moviegoers wear Apple Watches during a promotional viewing to record their heart rates over the course of the movie. What they found was that heart rates rarely fell below 100 beats per minute (bpm) beyond the opening sequence and end credits, and that there were significant spikes, to 130 bpm around the half-hour mark, 140 bpm an hour in, and a startling 164 bpm in the final act. For comparison’s sake, an average resting heart rate for an adult falls within the 60 to 80 bpm range.
Headlines blared that Hereditary was scientifically proven to be an incredibly scary, if not the scariest, horror movie.
It’s a cool experiment, but this is hardly rigorous science. Twenty people does not a good research sample size make, and although heart rate is not a terrible way to infer stress and fear, especially given that the highest peaks do coincide with specific (and effective!) scares in the film, you can’t say that fear is the only factor for the increased heart rates—just being at the movie theatre and excited to see a movie would be enough to pitch your heart rate above its resting state.
That said, this study should be repeated with fancier tools (like fMRI scans paired with heart rate and other arousal measures)‚ a larger number of participants, and a range of horror movies. Inquiring minds want to see brains in action during slashers versus creature features and more, not to mention how Hereditary stacks up against other films.
Another popular theory for why we get so immersed in horror scenarios involves what are known as mirror neurons. Mirror neurons were first described in the ’90s by a research team at the University of Parma in Italy. Their experiment involved inserting electrodes into the brains of macaque monkeys so that they could record cellular activity as the monkeys either performed specific tasks with their hands, such as gripping and holding objects, or watched the experimenters performing these same tasks. What they observed was that some areas of the brain related to specific movement would light up with activity in the monkeys’ scans regardless of whether they were watching someone else perform a task or if they were performing it themselves.
It was suggested that these neurons, which were firing in a way that mirrored observed actions as if the observer were executing them, might not only fire for motor functions, but for sensory functions, too. These firing neurons could be the basis not only for imitative learning (literally monkey see, monkey do), but for empathy.
Cue massive hype in the world of neuroscience.
By blurring the lines between seeing and doing, mirror neurons opened the door to a plausible explanation for how we can glean intentions and feel empathy for others. So, it was decided that mirror neurons must be behind many human experiences. Mirror neurons are why spectators feel like they’re part of the action when watching sports! Mirror neurons are why we feel our bodies want to move when we’re watching dancers perform! Mirror neurons are why we feel fear when we see someone screaming on a movie screen! Mirror neurons are why some people cringe and even experience pain when they see someone being attacked and stabbed in a slasher flick!
One neuroscientist, Vilyanur Ramachandran, has gone so far as to describe mirror neurons as the basis for human culture. It’s a cool theory, but before we put all of our eggs into the mirror neurons basket, we have to consider that the experimental research data so far has turned up mixed results, especially when it comes to human mirror neurons. Most of the data that we have has come from monkeys, like the macaques in the first mirror neuron study, because it’s more than a little invasive to stick electrodes into people’s brains in the name of science. What data we do have for human subjects have, for the most part, been measured using fMRI scans, and at least one study instead recorded participants’ motor-evoked potentials, tiny muscle twitches that signal a muscle is ready to move, while they watched the experimenters pick up and hold objects. These experiments are enough to provide evidence in support of mirror neurons in humans, but they aren’t as specific as the macaque studies to identify individual cells.
Mirror neurons might have a role to play in how we identify with horror movie victims who are running for their lives in terror—or, in rare cases, identify with the killer—but until we have more evidence, we have to take this theory with a grain of salt.
Speaking of grains of salt: an interesting thing to note about fear studies in general is that a lot of them take place in lab or research settings, and—if the study is ethical—the participants are aware that part of their experiment will include an induction of fear. Furthermore, a lot of different emotions are processed by neurons in similar locations of the brain, so it can be hard to differentiate images for positive versus negative emotions on an fMRI scan, let alone emotions that are decidedly more similar, such as disgust versus fear. Finally, when you know you’re in a lab, you’re pretty confident that nothing bad is really going to happen to you (despite the library of scary flicks that feature human experimentation as nightmare fuel). After all, the researchers have limits to how much they can simulate a threat. With that knowledge in place, some of the responses that we measure might be merely approximations of fear responses that we’d experience in real situations, and in some cases might be altogether different responses. At the very least, we have a starting point to build from. We understand what stimuli might make people jump and what might make their hearts race; they’re no more in a true threat situation in a movie theatre than they are when they’re in a research lab. The context makes everything unreal.
Where movie-watching is concerned, this is where our complicity as viewers comes back into frame to push back against these unreal situations. We’ve spent this chapter exploring how the brain can respond to horror and different kinds of threats. Those responses come into play while we watch movies as part of our immersion in the viewing experience. Scripted scenarios and editing tricks work because we prime ourselves to expect them.
Thinking back to Glenn Walters’s recipe for horror, we’ve dissected tension and teased apart unrealness. That leaves us with the final ingredient. To get to the guts of relevance, we’ll have to dig into some history.
IN CONVERSATION WITH JAMIE KIRKPATRICK
Jamie Kirkpatrick is a film editor whose genre credits include We Summon the Darkness (2019, dir. Marc Meyers) and My Friend Dahmer (2017, dir. Marc Meyers).
How many horror features would you say that you have to edit to call yourself a “horror editor”?
While I don’t think of myself as a horror editor—I work on lots of different stuff—it just so happens that I grew up kind of really immersed in that world. I’ve always been fascinated by it. It’s funny, I rarely go see horror films in the theatre. Mostly it’s because I’m a wuss. I don’t enjoy being scared in a movie theatre. I just find it too stressful. I drop my popcorn. I’m embarrassed that I’m putting my hands up to my face when there are people, strangers, sitting next to me.
As someone who has edited many different genres, is there anything unique to editing for horror?
I don’t think there’s any other genre where the genre itself kind of dictates a certain style of editing.
Maybe the one exception is physical action, like fight scenes. Horror comes with, for a lack of a better word, a lot of baggage. And another way to say that would be: there are tropes. There are expectations that anybody who is a fan of horror has going in. They’re not necessarily all active expectations. You’re predisposed to expect certain things when you go to a horror film, and that’s because those things have become tropes over years, if not decades, of movies. Here’s a simple example: a character is walking through a dark location, so we expect something or someone to jump out at them at some point. Sometimes the filmmakers will embrace that expectation, and we will receive that expected moment, or sometimes they will subvert it, and the moment will never happen, but you are nonetheless left all scrunched up and freaked out.
So, when I’m editing horror, that’s when the question becomes: What’s scarier? Is it scarier to see how freaked out the character is in the close-up? Or is it scarier to be in her shoes, looking through her eyes?
One of the fun things about horror editing, specifically, is that discovery. Every scene is different, and every film is different based on, you know, whatever has come before in that particular movie or, in some cases, what you know is going to come after in that movie.
What’s come before can be a complicated question when it comes to horror.
Right? The term “horror” encompasses so many different things for so many different people. One of the things I’m fascinated about in the genre is how many subgenres of horror there are. Like, very distinct, super-distinct, subgenres. I think it’s fascinating that people, creators, who were drawn to horror, you could ask every single one of them about the initial impulse that led them to write their scripts, and I guarantee you, they will go, well, I wanted to do a haunted house movie. Or, I wanted to do a possessed kid movie. Or, I wanted to do a slasher film.
And you’re like: those are all horror. Those are all different kinds of horror movies, but they’re also, horror aside, completely different kinds of movies.
How much of the process, then, is plugging into a horror trope recipe and how much of it is really understanding what’s going to happen to the audience when they watch the final scene?
I am often asked “What makes a good editor?” As I’ve gotten a little bit older and done more projects, I’ve realized it literally comes down to one thing and it’s empathy. They are able to put themselves into the minds of their characters. When you can do that, you can be secure in the knowledge that when you’re working on something and feeling a certain way while watching the scene, the audience will also feel that way. With a horror movie, it’s watching a whole audience of people jump at the exact moment you were hoping they’d jump.
I think it’s so rare that people realize how manufactured those moments are. Like truly manufactured.
I hope you’ll forgive my metaphors and similes, but jump scares are the well liquor of a bar. It’s just there to get you drunk and it will work every time. If that’s all you care about and you just want vodka and soda, that’s fine! But there’s no subtlety to them. Jump scares can be done in slightly different ways; you can dress them up. But when you boil them down they’re all the same. Whereas, what I think of as quiet scares or tension scares, that’s top-shelf whiskey. Where it takes a lot to get to that place. It’s not about the end result so much; it’s about how you come away from the film like, oh my god, that one scene just like got to me.
What would you say is a good example of “quiet horror”?
I would say that The Shining is a great example. Kubrick was a master of his craft in terms of knowing specifically how to use the visual medium to make something scary.
The best example in the whole movie is Danny on the tricycle. That’s an example of a constructed moment built from something not inherently scary.
It’s that pattern of POV hallway shot: empty hallway.
Reverse on the kid’s expression: happy.
Back to the hallway shot. Over the shoulder of the kid going down the hallway: empty hallway.
Turning the corner: empty hallway.
It’s two or three repetitions of this pattern, and the sequence is just long enough that you drop your guard. You start to remember when you were a kid on a bike. The freedom of that! To roam around a hotel—how awesome is that! And then of course at that moment Danny rounds the corner one last time and you get the over-the-shoulder shot of the twins just standing there. Again, there’s nothing inherently scary about two girls standing in a hallway. They’re not bloody (yet). But it’s so unexpected and there’s a cognitive dissonance with seeing people who should not be in that place.
It’s one of the scariest moments in the movie and it’s all editing. It’s 100 percent editing.