Sometimes horror movies stay with you after you leave the theatre. Even if the movie didn’t seem scary when you were watching it, your brain might tell you to be on the alert, that the dark shadows in the corners of your room might be housing something insidious, that maybe you should sleep with the lights on.
The feeling might wear off after the sun comes up and you wake up whole and unharmed by the movie monsters, but sometimes the scares are deeper and stay with you for much, much longer.
You might have a movie that haunts you. If not, there’s probably someone in your life who does, even if they aren’t fully conscious of it. The movie that scares my wife more than any other isn’t even a horror movie. It’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg), a family movie about a peaceful alien that gets stranded on Earth and befriends children in an effort to contact his ship and make his way back home. E.T. scares her so much that, as an adult, she didn’t have any memory of having seen it. When she told me that she’d never seen E.T., I immediately pulled up a movie trailer. About fifteen seconds in, as soon as the lovable alien’s face appears for the first time and tiny Gertie (Drew Barrymore) screams, my wife panicked.
“Turn it off!” she shouted. She was now sure that she must have seen it before, and been so scared that she’d suppressed the memory. Seeing a movie clip two decades later had unburied that fear.
Relatedly, my wife is also generally afraid of aliens, but this may be a sort of chicken-and-egg scenario: Did a fear of aliens make her automatically afraid of a pacifist extraterrestrial from a film made for children, or did childhood exposure to E.T. inform her fear of aliens?
Most evidence of long-term effects of scary movies is anecdotal: your uncle has been nervous about clowns ever since seeing Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper); your friend can’t take a shower without thinking about Psycho (1960, dir. Alfred Hitchcock) or, for that matter, can’t use one of those mirrored bathroom cabinets without thinking about so many other horror villains who might appear standing behind their reflection as soon as they close its door. (Honestly, how come bathrooms serve us so many scares? You’d rather not have to worry about monsters while you poop.)
My long-term scare is Gremlins (1984, dir. Joe Dante). My brain understands that it’s a horror-comedy, and I think the actual movies are a good laugh, but that doesn’t stop me from having an Annual Gremlins Nightmare or my general unease around plots that revolve around creatures that multiply in grotesque ways.
It’s almost alarming how easy it can be to learn a new fear from a horror movie, especially if you are exposed to that horror when you are young. As part of a series of experiments exploring children’s fright reactions to media, researchers Barbara Wilson and Joanne Cantor showed schoolchildren the snake pit scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981, dir. Steven Spielberg). They found that children exposed to that scene tended to avoid handling a live snake afterward.
Luckily for me, it’s not especially likely that I’m ever going to come across a gremlin in real life, and my wife will probably never have to worry about meeting E.T. But some horror film residual scares might be tougher to avoid. Scary clowns do make appearances from time to time in real life, especially around Halloween. Most houses are equipped with showers, and personal hygiene demands that you should use them regularly. It’s easy to see how these fears might spiral into something that affects how you go about your day-to-day living.
Long-term fears can be frustrating because as an adult you know that they are irrational and that they have a basis in a scary movie you saw years ago, but that knowledge doesn’t stop you from feeling scared anyway.
This phenomenon can be explained in part by Joseph LeDoux’s two-system model of fear memories. We know that emotional memories, including fear memories, are processed in the amygdala. This also includes physiological responses tied to those fear memories, such as tensed-up muscles, spiked blood pressure and heart rate, and release of adrenaline. We also know that these memories are highly resistant to change. Cognitive memories, on the other hand, are processed and stored in the hippocampus; these memories are squishier and easier to update.
LeDoux’s idea is to consider the same event, such as seeing a clown in real life, as it is processed through these two areas. The amygdala is always geared to protect you from harm. It will react before you’re necessarily aware of a potential threat, and it will certainly react faster than the hippocampus. While your amygdala is leaping to action, your hippocampus is more methodical and takes time to process the supposed threat. It appraises the clown in the context of the circus that you chose to attend, holds this clown up against scary clowns you’ve seen before, and relays the information to you that this clown is probably not a threat. This information can work as a tool to help you calm down and handle your situation. The amygdala’s response is powerful, though, as its goal is to keep you alive. In cases where the amygdala and the hippocampus are at odds, the amygdala will often win.
The amygdala’s knee-jerk response to fear memories is crucial in situations where a split second can mean the difference between death and survival, but it can be detrimental in cases where the fear that’s been stored is a non-threat that’s been mislabeled. Even in the moment, it’s clear that the experience of seeing something unfold on-screen is different from experiencing that same event in the real world. But when something that scares you in a horror film becomes a lasting fear, it appears that the amygdala is storing the experience that you had watching the movie as if your survival depends on it. So even if your hippocampus has decided the circus clown is not a threat, if you’re afraid of clowns, your amygdala might cause you to react inappropriately.
It’s worth mentioning that not everyone is a fan of this two-system model: the major critique is that fear is best understood as an integration of autonomic, behavioral, and cognitive-emotional responses to danger (that we have evolved to protect ourselves) and that by reducing fear to two non-integrated systems, fear as an experience becomes subjective and unmeasurable. We’ll circle back to LeDoux’s model again in this chapter, but this is a humbling reminder that, despite so much effort and research going into understanding how the brain fires signals in response to fear, there’s still so much about the actual mechanism of fear in the human body that even researchers still don’t understand or agree upon.
In LeDoux’s view, fear learnings established through the amygdala are indelibly burned into the brain and will possibly be with you for life, no matter how well you can reason that there’s nothing to be afraid of. Thankfully, a growing body of research has suggested that these learnings can be erased.
The fear memories that the amygdala stores focus more on the emotional and sensory information of the memory than any nitty-gritty details. The term “flashbulb memory” was coined back in 1977 by researchers Roger Brown and James Kulik to describe an atypical sort of memory that is created for some people when they are faced with a surprising emotional event. Their research involved surveying participants in the wake of shocking events such as President Kennedy’s assassination and asking them to provide detailed accounts of the moment in which they learned of the event. They would then be re-surveyed at a later date to recount the same event again. The idea of a flashbulb going off seems to suggest a moment captured forever, like a Polaroid that you can stick into an album and revisit and pore over. Brown and Kulik proposed that important traumatic events might be stored in vivid detail because in the moment we don’t have time to analyze what’s happening, but later we can review the details of the context and our emotional reactions to the event so that we can avoid similar trauma in the future.
The reality of flashbulb memories seems to suggest the opposite: in moments of intense, surprising emotion we are certainly forming emotional memory of what’s going down, but that emotion, often with arbitrary accents of sensory information, is what gets sharpest focus. The flashbulb memory isn’t the Polaroid at all; it’s the flashbulb itself, which intensely focuses light onto a moment (and only for a moment) before popping out again. It’s the feelings evoked in that moment, rather than the facts, that have staying power. In fact, other studies have found that you can easily introduce errors into the factual details of a person’s memory, and that those errors tend to be recalled in future retellings of the memory. But unlike factual details, which get blurry over time, people tend to remember how they felt. One participant in Brown and Kulik’s study recalled how stairs felt beneath his feet when he heard that Kennedy had been shot, even though the event had passed thirteen years prior; Kulik himself remembered that his teacher had been crying. These details seem trivial, and aren’t necessarily helpful for facing a future threat, but they definitely resonate emotionally.
The same could be said about horror movie–inspired fears.
SCARE SPOTLIGHT: JAWS (1975, DIR. STEVEN SPIELBERG)
It’s dusk when Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) runs off from the beach bonfire, peeling off layers of clothes as a boy follows her down to the beach. She plunges into the ocean naked and swims out. Suddenly, something grabs her below the surface. Chrissie screams and thrashes as she’s yanked violently through the water. She tries to cling to a buoy and call out for help before she’s finally dragged under. The boy who followed her to the beach is passed out drunk on the shore. We don’t see what got Chrissie.
Jaws is based on the 1974 novel by Peter Benchley, which in turn was partly inspired by shark attacks in resort towns on the New Jersey coastline in the summer of 1916. Four people were killed and one other was injured by the attacks between July 1 and July 12. Theories abounded as to what species was responsible and whether there were multiple sharks or just one rogue one—who became known in the media as the “Jersey man-eater.” A summer heat wave drove people to these seaside resort towns, but people were afraid to swim. Some of the resorts dropped steel nets into the water to protect swimmers, but the damage was already done and a little steel mesh wasn’t enough to dampen public fear. If those real events inspired panic, Jaws launched a fear of sharks into the stratosphere.
It’s been suggested that Jaws is a huge factor behind prejudice against sharks, not only painting sharks as man-killing machines, but also warping public perception of shark attacks for the worst and boosting feelings that sharks should be killed. Conservationists have had their work cut out for them to try to educate the public about the true nature of sharks and a more accurate measure of shark attack risks. Even Shark Week, a Discovery Channel staple since 1988, was originally pitched as a way to celebrate sharks and to dispel misconceptions. That said, Shark Week has misfired more than a few times over the years because viewers appear to be more interested in seeing sensational programming than being educated.
As much as we can rationalize the actual risk of getting attacked by a Great White—statistically, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning—it’s a tough sell to your amygdala and fear circuits.
Jaws captured audiences’ imaginations in the ’70s, but how much lasting power can a movie have on public fear?
In the 1990s, Joanne Cantor asked undergraduate students to write about lasting frights that they experienced (or that they witnessed in others). Over three years (1997 to 2000), she collected over 530 essays. Overwhelmingly, these essays detailed the students’ own fright experiences caused by fictional sources like horror movies. Jaws was one of leading causes. Of students who saw the film before they were thirteen years old, 43 percent reported that it made them uneasy about swimming in oceans or in swimming pools, even years later, writing such statements as “Sharks have become a terrifying creature to me to the point that I am not able to watch Discovery Channel documentaries or National Geographic presentations” and “This paranoia is still with me today. I know that sharks are not found in lakes and pools, yet, whenever I am in the deep end at a pool, I swim really fast to get to the edge (always looking behind me).” Remember, at the time of this study, Jaws would have been out for at least twenty years. It wasn’t a brand-new film, and it probably wasn’t a new film when first viewed by the students.
If you’re curious, the other most-reported films that inspired lasting fear effects were Poltergeist (fear of clowns, trees, and television sets), The Blair Witch Project (fear of camping and forests), and Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven) (fear of being home alone). My wife might feel validated that eleven participants also reported a fright reaction to E.T., which for roughly one-third of them persisted into adulthood. For students who specifically reported persisting fear after a movie or show that they watched before they were thirteen, Jaws lost out only to the 1990 made-for-TV version of It. Between Tim Curry’s turn as Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Bruce the mechanical shark, a generation of kiddos were scarred for life.
Scares that stick around seem to work with mechanisms similar to those we see in people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The classic signs of PTSD include reexperiencing a traumatic event through vivid flashbacks, nightmares, or intrusive thoughts, being hypervigilant and being startled easily, having trouble sleeping, and avoidance. It’s normal for people to experience some or all of these symptoms after a traumatic experience, but when they persist, become generalized, and disrupt your life, they become signs of disorder. As a diagnosis, PTSD has a long history under many guises, with its symptoms being described in old texts, like Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, and in even older texts, like Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey.
For the longest time, it was thought that PTSD only occurred as a result of the traumas of warfare, and that developing PTSD signaled a soldier’s cowardice or weakness of character. Evidence for PTSD as a soldier’s disease is shown through the many names it has had over centuries, such as “soldier’s heart,” “irritable heart,” “combat stress,” and “shell shock.” It was only after the Vietnam War and around the start of the Women’s Movement of the 1970s that other forms of trauma were recognized as causing similar long-term symptoms. In 1974, researchers Ann Burgess and Lynda Holmstrom conducted one of the first studies on rape and identified the flashbacks and nightmares experienced by rape victims as parallel to shell shock symptoms. They called this condition rape trauma syndrome. The term post-traumatic stress disorder appeared for the first time as its own diagnosis in the DSM-III in 1980.
Understanding PTSD helps us understand how fear can get out of control and disrupt a person’s life, but it’s hard to draw a true parallel between long-term fear caused by traumatic experiences such as war or abuse, and irrational but persistent fears and phobias from watching fictional narratives play out on a TV screen. Fear, whether mildly uncomfortable or life-affecting, is a natural outcome of emotional learning, but how does that learning kick in?
Fear isn’t spontaneously generated. It has a purpose: to help you avoid what can harm you. Sometimes fears are irrational and get amplified to the point that they are more harmful than helpful to healthy living, but fear has to start somewhere.
How we experience fear isn’t a debate of nature versus nurture—as with most things, it’s a combination of both. Scientists acknowledge that there might be genetic factors that can affect how predisposed we are to having big fear reactions and how well we can get over those fearful experiences (something that we’ll look at more closely in a later chapter), and that some of the most common fears seemed to have evolved in humans as adaptations toward threats. But otherwise, social learning plays a big role in terms of how we grow into our fears.
It might help to understand how we learn fears by understanding how we learn, period. Learning fears often happens without you realizing that you are learning anything. The strong emotion attached to fear learning makes the memory that much more powerful and likely to stand the test of time.
One useful learning theory to consider is Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, because it breaks learning into clear developmental stages based on how we build our understanding of the world around us and then learn how to apply reasoning and think about abstract and concrete concepts. Piaget’s theory outlines four basic stages:
So does how old you were when you saw the Scary Thing affect how long that scare lingers? Not necessarily, but it might affect what scares you. When you’re under seven years old or so (pre-operational), you are more likely to be scared by something that isn’t necessarily a realistic threat; you’re scared because something was loud or big or in your face. On the same tack, this age group might be afraid of something that isn’t threatening at all, just because it looks scary. Eight- to twelve-year-olds (operational) are more likely be scared by more realistic threats like disease or death or war.
In a variation on their own experiment, the Indiana Jones snake avoidance study, Cantor and Wilson tested whether providing students with reassuring information about snakes, such as telling them that most snakes were not poisonous, affected their response to the snake pit scene. Older children tended to find this information reassuring, but kindergarteners tended to cling to the word “poisonous” and miss the “not” part of the statement completely. They ended up demonstrating more fear than if no statement had been provided at all. As you might imagine, telling preschoolers that what they’re seeing on-screen is not real isn’t a super-effective strategy either (and Cantor and Wilson have done other research that supports this!).
One famous—and famously unethical—experiment in fear conditioning in the 1920s involved a baby dubbed “Little Albert.” Psychologist John B. Watson and his grad student Rosalie Rayner wanted to cook up a phobia in an infant. They knew that loud and unexpected noises, like a hammer striking a steel beam hanging behind your head, produce fear responses in babies, so they decided to pair that noise with something that shouldn’t be automatically scary to a baby. Albert was allowed to play with a harmless white rat (that he wasn’t afraid of) and they would bang the steel beam to scare him while he was playing. As we know from Pavlov’s dog experiments, classical conditioning works: Little Albert started to show fear when his little rat friend was brought to him, even when there was no scary noise. Not only that, but he was afraid of other furry objects, like a rabbit or a dog, or a man in a Santa mask. This phenomenon, where a response can be triggered by a group of similar objects, instead of just being tied to one specific culprit, is known as stimulus generalization.
When it comes to inspiring fear, horror films use a combination of stimuli that give unconditioned fear responses (we naturally fear an attacking animal and its snapping jaws), and stimuli that we’ve come to associate with fear (like a white hockey mask). What’s more, horror movies have a great skill for conditioning us to make new fear associations. If you manage to experience stimulus generalization, you might experience a less-intense version of the fear when you run into a real-life version of what the movie made scary, like if you watched It (1990, dir. Tommy Lee Wallace or 2017, dir. Andrés Muschietti) and suddenly felt nervous around all sewer grates and sink drains. Or if you watched The Mangler (1995, dir. Tobe Hooper) and developed an uneasiness around all sorts of laundry machines. The flip side of this model is that because the threats that we see in horror films are often similar enough to something threatening that we might encounter in real life, we will experience something approaching a fear response while we watch the film. Stimulus generalization doesn’t have to apply to just fear responses, either; it can be used to elicit pretty much any sort of emotion, from disgust (useful for the horror film experience) to joy (probably less useful).
It’s also possible to think of learned emotional responses as being “primed.” Spreading activation theory dictates that we retrieve specific information through associated ideas. Like, if you were playing a word association game and were given the word “red,” I probably couldn’t predict what word you’d say in response. But if I’d primed you earlier in the game with a word like “fluid,” you might be much more likely to respond with the word “blood.”
In terms of predicting someone’s response to a horror movie, we can look to how that person has been primed, either in the context immediately before watching the movie or in terms of their individual memories. Imagine that someone decides to watch Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), but they’ve never seen a scary movie before in their life, let alone a slasher or splatter film of any kind. Friday the 13th is full of blood and people being stabbed to death. Unless this person has never been introduced to the idea that knives are dangerous and can stab you, knives as a threat, and blood as something potentially upsetting, should already be represented in this person’s memory. Seeing Jason Voorhees[’s mom] stabbing a bunch of teens will not only activate those memories, but they will likely be reinforced with the new negative associations picked up while watching. In the same vein, they will pick up new cues and associations from the film (e.g., summer camps = creepy). So, the next time that person watches a movie with similar cues (assuming they don’t decide that one horror film was enough for them), they might retrieve those negative memory associations anew.
It’s easy to learn fears, to condition ourselves and make negative associations that we can carry forward into future experiences. Is it just as easy to unlearn fear? Is it even possible?
SCARE SPOTLIGHT: THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972, DIR. WES CRAVEN)
Mari Collingwood (Sandra Peabody) and Phyllis Stone (Lucy Grantham) are teen BFFs driving into the city to see a concert. On their way they hear a report on the radio that criminals have escaped a nearby prison. They make a pit stop to buy pot and meet Junior, who just so happens to be one of these criminals. Mari and Phyllis follow him back to an apartment, where they are trapped by the rest of the fugitives and subjected to horrible tortures. There isn’t a happy ending for anyone.
The Last House on the Left was Wes Craven’s debut film. It was timely, released into the world in the aftermath of the Vietnam War and the Manson murders, and was an unrelenting tale of realistic violence. There were no supernatural monsters or ghosts or aliens or pod people. There was just violence inflicted on humans by other humans.
The story goes that The Last House on the Left couldn’t score an R rating (being assigned instead an X rating), even after extensive edits. The movie had been revised to the point that it had lost its narrative and didn’t make sense anymore. Frustrated, producer Sean S. Cunningham walked down the hall to someone who had just made an R-rated film and got their “This film is rated R” banner. They spliced the unearned banner onto the original version of the film and sent it out that way, MPAA none the wiser.
Upon its release, of course, the film’s marketing leaned heavily into advertising its violence. It’s most remembered for its tagline: “TO AVOID FAINTING, JUST KEEP REPEATING: IT’S ONLY A MOVIE … ONLY A MOVIE … ONLY A MOVIE.” This marketing move was brilliant, and has been repeated in new forms time and again. The message itself also inspires a great question: Does telling yourself that it’s only a movie actually help?
Telling yourself that what you’re seeing on-screen is “only a movie,” even if you already reasonably know that you’re watching a movie, is a conscious act of distancing yourself from the threatening or upsetting information that you see. This lets you reappraise the information from a bird’s-eye view and better shape your perception of its emotional significance. In turn, this might dampen your amygdala’s response to the material. Not every person has the same capacity for distancing and reappraising, though. People with anxiety disorders, conditions that are already marked by a bias for interpreting information as high-risk or high-threat more often than in other individuals, tend to have a tougher time stepping back and reappraising information as nonthreatening after their brains have decided that a threat is there.
Allegedly, the tagline for The Last House on the Left came about when a marketing specialist was watching a cut of the film with his wife. She kept covering her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the on-screen violence against Mari and Phyllis, which prompted him to remind her that “it’s only a movie.”
I wonder if the strategy worked for her.
Just because you like watching scary movies doesn’t mean that you want to keep feeling scared after the credits finish rolling. So, how do you shake those heebie-jeebies? Here’s what science has to say about your favorite anti-scare strategies.
You’re lying in bed, trying to fall asleep, but you keep thinking about a particularly scary moment from a movie you watched that day. You weren’t scared when you were actually watching the movie, but now that you’re alone in the dark with nothing else to distract you, your thoughts are running away with it. The scary image keeps popping up uninvited. You’ll just have to stop thinking about what’s scary and think about something else to fall asleep.
Easier said than done, right?
Intrusive thoughts, or thoughts that you think without trying to, are a hallmark of the PTSD experience. They come without warning, they’re hard to dispel, and they can be incredibly disruptive to people who experience them. While a lingering scare from a horror movie is in no way on the same scale as experiencing PTSD, understanding the mechanism of intrusive thoughts can give us clues as to what’s happening in our brains when we get a case of the heebie-jeebies.
These intrusive thoughts have the potential to tip into another dangerous form of thinking called rumination, or the repetitive focus on something distressing—not to mention fixation on its causes or possible consequences. Rumination is the same mechanism that leads to negative thought spirals typical of depression. When you’re in a deadlock of your own thoughts, you can’t problem-solve, and so you end up amplifying whatever negative feelings you’re granting focus. Like a cow chewing its cud (cows belong to a suborder of animals called ruminants), your brain keeps working over the same idea again and again instead of moving forward.
Rather than dwell on these thoughts, you can just not think about them. You can actively suppress them instead. To borrow a line from Ginger Snaps (2000, dir. John Fawcett), “If you don’t like your ideas, stop having them.” Suppression is a choice you make as part of an emotion regulation process. (This is distinct from repression, which is understood as a defense mechanism in which traumatic memories are detached from the events that created them and pushed into the subconscious, effectively causing a sort of amnesia around the trauma to protect the person who experienced it. It’s one of the basic elements of psychoanalytic theory, but, to be honest, current psychological theory doesn’t really support the repression model for dealing with trauma. If true repression happens, it’s a rare occurrence, despite what movie narratives would like us to believe.)
To lift a situational example of suppression from Ginger Snaps, let’s say you’re Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins) and you’re dealing with the fact that your older sister Ginger (Katharine Isabelle) has been infected by a werewolf. The attack has torn a physiological and emotional rift between you both. It’s one thing to deal with your sister turning into a literal monster, but it’s another to deal with the distance forming between the two of you when you were, up until the attack, inseparable. You try your best to suppress your fear and stay close to your sister; you try to help her while mostly staying out of her way. You find out that your sister has killed a guidance counselor and could clearly be a danger to you, but you help her hide the body.
During emotion regulation for this situation, we see the brain’s limbic system in action, with a few additional players:
When Brigitte sees the guidance counselor’s body on the floor, her VLPFC, SMA, angular gyrus, and STG receive emotional information from the amygdala. Appraisal of the situation then starts in the VLPFC, which examines whether or not there is a need for emotional regulation. And in this case, there is a need: Brigitte needs to suppress her fear to help Ginger hide the dead body and clean up the mess. The information from this decision is then projected to the DLPFC, where the actual regulation occurs. Finally, the DLPFC sends signals via the ACC back to the amygdala, SMA, angular gyrus, and STG, leading Brigitte’s behavioral and physiological reactions to the situation.
It goes without saying that the trouble with suppression is that, while it may get you through a situation in the short term, it’s really not a sustainable solution. Suppression might reduce your outward behavioral response, but it doesn’t actually do anything to stop the emotional experience. It involves avoiding distressing thoughts or behaviors without actually dealing with what’s causing them in the first place. Beyond that, suppression can impair your memory and actually increase your physiological responses to stressors. In Brigitte’s case, she may have been able to suppress her fear well enough to help hide a body, but she’s still undoubtedly scared of her werewolf sister.
Maybe you like to immediately follow up your horror movie with a fluffy, familiar comedy, or maybe you prefer to curl up with a neutral book—anything that’s lighter fare and a far cry from horror, so that you can forget the scary images you saw. There may be something to this method.
In 2009, researcher Emily Holmes and her team proposed playing Tetris as an early-intervention “cognitive vaccine” approach to preventing trauma flashbacks in people who had experienced traumatic events. Her idea was that memory consolidation—the process by which your brain converts short-term memories into long-term, stored memories—is particularly sensitive to being destabilized in the first few hours following an event. What’s more, she suggested that the brain has only a limited capacity for memory consolidation at any given time, and that you can elbow the sensory memories of a traumatic event out of the running for consolidation if you can introduce other sensory information that can compete with it. She identified Tetris as a prime candidate because it requires mental rotations. It’s so visuospatially disruptive that if you’ve ever stared at a Tetris game for too long, you might have noticed weird Tetris-like distortions when you finally turned your focus to something else. For example, if you tried to read a book, you might feel like the words were rotating on the page.
Participants in Holmes’s study completed baseline assessments, including mood assessments, and then watched a twelve-minute video of graphic footage. The footage included stuff such as human surgeries, and real footage of accidents and drownings. The participants then reassessed their moods, did some filler activities for a half hour, and then were shown another film with neutral images that were recognizably from the traumatic film they had watched earlier. They were then randomly assigned to either play Tetris, or to sit quietly. The Tetris players reported fewer flashbacks both during initial testing and one week later; they also scored lower on the Impact of Events scale, a tool used to clinically diagnose symptoms of PTSD.
In the same vein as playing Tetris, putting on an episode of your favorite comedy show right after you watch a scary movie might help to prevent horror images from intruding on your thoughts when you’re trying to fall asleep later. But unless the sensory information from the show is disruptive enough to compete with the scary stuff, it isn’t surefire. Compare how busy your brain gets trying to rotate Tetris pieces to how busy it gets focusing on a comedy show. Your brain has to get distracted enough to essentially “forget” to encode the fear memory, so choose your distraction wisely.
Humans are constantly bombarded with information. Some of it has emotional content, some of it has risk content, but by and large, most of what we see, smell, hear, taste, and touch every day is neutral and innocuous. You are less likely to remember something like what you had for breakfast last Tuesday, unless it was a special breakfast or you eat exactly the same things every day, because that information doesn’t have the emotional glue to stick in your memory.
As for moments that pack an emotional or threatening punch, they can be neutralized too—if you are exposed to them often enough in a way that has neither a positive nor a negative association. This neutralization process is known as habituation.
Thinking back to the Little Albert experiment, if he had been deconditioned (like he ethically should have), he would have gone through a process that looked like his fear experiment in reverse. The researchers would have provided him a safe, neutral space to be exposed to fluffy white stimuli in small doses, crucially without any accompanying incident or noise, until he could engage with something fluffy and white, like a lab rat, without a fear response.
Once the trained response is gone, it’s said to be extinct. Extinction and habituation are very similar concepts. Extinction deals specifically with the disappearance of trained responses, like Little Albert’s fear, whereas habituation deals with the disappearance of natural responses—like when you jump at a single balloon being popped, but would have a smaller or no startle response if you were in a room where a lot of balloons were being popped over and over. The sound of popping balloons would stop being surprising and startling, and the effects on your reactions would quickly taper to no response at all. Extinction can take a long time. Fear at its root is meant to help protect us from harm—it can take a long time to unlearn it. But at least it isn’t an impossible endeavor.
As a quick refresher: LeDoux’s two-system model of perma-fear states that learned emotional memories that are stored in the amygdala are accessed almost reflexively and are resistant to change, while cognitive “information” memories that are stored in the hippocampus are easier to update. Newer research challenges that model and suggests that the brain is naturally equipped to revise or even erase specific learned behaviors, even if they are complex emotional learnings. The process for doing this is known as memory reconsolidation. You may have heard it said before that every time you recall a memory, you are not remembering the original event, but rather, you are remembering the last time you recalled the memory. This gets the gist of the process, but a more accurate way to describe memory reconsolidation would be to say that memory is an ongoing process. All of the facts, details, emotions, and sensations that were originally experienced get consolidated as a memory and stored until you retrieve them. Then they get re-consolidated, encoded, and stored again, like hitting “Save As” in your brain and deleting the original copy. In this way, a single memory goes through edits and revisions every time it’s recalled and re-created. Sociologist and fear researcher Margee Kerr uses another awesome analogy for memory reconsolidation: it’s like cooking your favorite meal. You use the same ingredients and follow the same recipe, but each time you make it, it tastes a little different.
This is good news if you have a memory that you’d like to forget, or at least dull. Every time you retrieve and reconsolidate a memory is an opportunity to revise the memory or interfere with the process in a way that stores the memory in a less emotionally triggering form. This can be done with a distraction method, such as playing Tetris per Holmes’s research, by neutrally revisiting the memory until the emotional wallop (referred to in research circles as salience) has faded, or by a slew of other therapeutic tools, whatever works best for your individual needs.
There has also been research done into chemically interfering with reconsolidation. Studies have shown that beta-blockers, medications typically used to reduce blood pressure, might work to separate memories from the strong emotions associated with them. For folks with PTSD, this is done by taking a dose whenever they feel symptoms. The idea is that when you are experiencing a PTSD flashback, the memory you’re recalling is returning to a squishy, alterable state; introducing a drug at this stage will interfere with how that memory gets filed away again. The link between recalling the memory and feeling fear should be broken. This effort has been super effective in animal studies, but has been hit or miss in human trials using veterans with PTSD.
Despite its potential as a treatment, not everyone thinks that interfering with memories in this way is ethical. These medications don’t select specific memories and delete them—this isn’t like the Lacuna procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, dir. Michel Gondry), where you can selectively erase memories you don’t want. Instead, the treatment dulls the emotions that you’ve attached to those memories. Some have argued that those emotions are an important part of memory and shouldn’t be lost; rather, other therapies should be used to develop coping strategies that better manage those emotions. Others cite studies that show the use of drugs in this way not only interferes with emotional recall, but muddies details of the event in the memory. While this can help the memory to not be so intrusive, it can still spell out personal and legal consequences, such as if a treated person were asked to recall details of the event for a trial. Still others point out the potential for abuse of this treatment, such as military personnel administering it to soldiers to desensitize them to terrible acts.
We should all be grateful that our brains are capable of habituation and extinction because the world is a very scary place, and everything can technically be interpreted as a risk. Without habituation, we’d be on high alert 24/7.
Another way to avoid bad effects from a horror film is to take preventative measures. Prevention can take many shapes: you could watch with the lights on, during daytime, with a friend, or maybe read the synopsis in detail so you know exactly what’s going to happen.
But does any of this help?
Measures like watching horror movies with the lights on come down to controlling your environment. If you’re dealing with unknown, potentially threatening images on-screen, the least you can do is make sure that the environment around you is as unthreatening as possible. We’ve learned by association that if we watch a movie in the dark, we’re more likely to experience a fright. If you’re scared, the last thing you need is to be sitting in a dark room, or worse, in a dark house at night, where you cannot see if something is lurking in the shadows. If your room is bright, you can see that everything is safe when your brain is on high alert to search for a threat.
A good amount of research has been done on the impact of screen size on the movie-watching experience. Movies are generally designed for the big screen and are meant to have the best impact in the cinema. Where horror movies are involved, research has predicted that bigger screens might mean bigger fright responses, because you are confronted with a larger-than-life and more detailed visual experience, coupled with theatrical audio. So, if you’re nervous about horrific imagery, consider watching the movie on a smaller screen, like a television, laptop, or phone screen, where the details are diminished and tiny, and, if you’re sitting a distance away, can be a lot less immersive. A word of caution, though: be careful about wearing headphones while you’re watching. With the sound being funneled directly into your ears, you might end up feeling like the film’s soundscape is unfolding around you.
Having a friend nearby also ties into this theory in a very literal safety-in-numbers way. You’re more protected against a threat if you’re not facing it alone. Also, it’s more fun to share a scary movie with someone else. This is another effect that can be helped or hurt by sitting in a cinema rather than at home. Exposure to the reactions of a crowd of people can heighten the scary moments, sure, but as many can attest, the shared experience of watching a horror movie in a packed theatre can also help to break up tension, as screams are often followed by laughter.
Spoilers are a measure for controlling against the actual scary content of the film. Although, to be honest, you don’t need to hunt down an entire play-by-play of a film to be sufficiently spoiled. In most cases, you need to look no further than the movie’s trailer.
These days, a good movie trailer is hard to find. As the main promotional tool for a movie, the trailer is an art form unto itself. And like many art forms, there is a level of mastery required to make trailers effective. Horror movie trailers are not the only culprits, but they are among the worst for lacking the necessary artful touch. More and more often, in their attempts to get butts in seats at cinemas, horror trailers will reveal the monsters or the biggest scares. It’s frustrating, especially when you do sit down in the movie theatre and realize that the actual movie is just a drawn-out version of the trailer, and that you’ve already watched all the tentpole moments. How many times have you watched a movie trailer and thought to yourself, Well, now I know exactly what’s going to happen?
The 2018 trailer for Suspiria (dir. Luca Guadagnino) opens with a student divulging her experiences at her dance academy to her psychotherapist. Over the course of two and a half minutes, we establish the premise and location, we meet the major players of the film, and we are told exactly who the villain is and that they are tied to something demonic. We are shown repeatedly that the dancers are at risk, through beautifully shot sequences and voice-overs, and that the instructors have secrets hidden in the dance academy’s walls—we are even shown a secret passage. Compare this to the U.S. trailer for the original Suspiria (1977, dir. Dario Argento), which opens with a view of a woman having her hair brushed and decorated with a flower. When she turns, it’s revealed that the woman is in fact a skull with a wig, which, incidentally, has zero ties to the film. The rest of the trailer is composed of context-free sequences of Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) running scared through some hallways, interposed with the film’s title, while a voice-over warns about how scary the final twelve minutes of the film will be. Otherwise, there is no indication that this film is about a witches’ coven fronting as a dance company.
Is one trailer inherently scarier than the other? Not necessarily, but one clearly gives away key elements of the film. It makes you wonder, does it actually matter if you know what’s coming? What about reading spoilers, reviews, or plot synopses before you actually see the movie—does knowing make it less scary?
One study conducted by Kimberly Neuendorf and Glenn Sparks had groups of college students watch the classic horror films The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974, dir. Tobe Hooper) and Night of the Living Dead (1968, dir. George A. Romero). Groups would receive either a low, moderate, or high amount of forewarning about the film. For example, a “low” forewarning for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre stated: “The film you are about to see was rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America. Entitled Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it was produced in 1974 by Tobe Hooper.” A “moderate” forewarning added: “This contemporary horror film contains scenes of violence, including murder and dismemberment.” And a “high” forewarning further added: “One key scene in the film shows a paraplegic being sawed in half by a chain saw–wielding masked maniac.”
This study didn’t find that any of their forewarnings affected their audience’s reported feelings of fright or enjoyment while watching the movies. What did have an influence in their audience were prior fears, especially for Night of the Living Dead, where the prior fear was usually a fear of dead bodies. This influence existed even when viewers had seen the movies before. This supports the idea that when we’ve attached fear to a specific cue, we tend to experience that fear to a degree when we see it in film form. It also helps that these things we already fear are being presented in a horror film: it’s being presented in a context that is frightening, and it’s absolutely reasonable, if not downright expected, for us to be frightened by its presence in the film.
But before we can assume that spoilers have no effect, note that Joanne Cantor did a similar study using shorter clips (instead of the full movies), her forewarnings were auditory instead of written, and the forewarnings themselves were more different from each other than in the Neuendorf and Sparks study (even Neuendorf and Sparks acknowledge this in their own work). Maybe these differences in how the spoilers were delivered was crucial, because Cantor found that, in her study, forewarning actually intensified reported feelings of fright.
Despite mixed experimental results when it comes to the impacts of spoilers, we can say that scary movies aren’t exempt from habituation. That’s why many movie scares will make you jump the first time you watch, but not during repeated viewings, unless you are really, truly scared of what you are watching. Subsequent viewings of horror films can be (and often are) fun, but they usually aren’t scary. In the same vein, seeing a scare play out in a movie trailer gives you that first exposure to the scare. You may still jump in your seat when you see the scare again in the actual movie, because other techniques in tension-building are at play, but the odds are that you’ll recognize the moment and it will lack the novelty that your amygdala is so keyed to respond to.
There is a small risk for backfire, though. If you spoil yourself for the major scares, you might set yourself up to spend the movie trying to anticipate when they’ll show up, unintentionally ramping up tension and priming yourself to be startled. And, of course, whatever fear memory baggage you’re carrying with you into a movie will influence you more than spoilers will. If you’ve had a bad experience with a chain saw, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre will heck you up more than it will your buddy who has never seen a chain saw before, even if you know everything that’s going to happen.
There is always a risk that scares will linger, and that they might linger for a long time, even if you enjoy watching horror films. Watching with the lights on and playing a round of Tetris afterward may go a long way to making sure the scares don’t stick, but doesn’t it seem like a lot of effort for the reward of sitting down for an hour or two to watch a horror narrative? Obviously, as horror fans, we love the genre and take enjoyment in having our pants scared off. But if you imagine the behaviors applied to another hobby—your friend tells you that they will only cross-stitch during the day, with a friend, so they won’t get nightmares—it sounds ridiculous. What makes horror so appealing that we’ll knowingly and willingly face the prospects of lost sleep to enjoy it?
IN CONVERSATION WITH MARY BETH MCANDREWS AND TERRY MESNARD
Mary Beth is a horror journalist and editor in chief at Dread Central with a focus on found footage, rape-revenge films, and gender representation in the genre; Terry is the creator and editor in chief of Gayly Dreadful, a horror site that takes on genre film and television from a queer perspective.
Together, Mary Beth and Terry co-host a podcast called Scarred for Life, which features creators from all facets of the horror film community to discuss the films that left major marks on them as children, from writers (I was invited to dissect my lifelong fear of Audrey II and Little Shop of Horrors [1986, dir. Frank Oz]) to film directors such as Brandon Cronenberg, who delved deep into Poltergeist (1982, dir. Tobe Hooper), and Natalie Erika James, whose choice was A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, dir. Kim Jee-woon). The podcast is also a space where these guests explore their passion for the genre and what served as their entry points. As Mary Beth described it to me, it’s “an abridged version of someone’s personal journey within the horror genre.”
Can you tell me a little bit about what inspired you to start this project?
Mary Beth: Well, funnily enough, Terry tweeted about it. He was like “Hey, this would be a really good podcast idea” and then I messaged him and said “I literally had an idea for this podcast years ago and never did it because I was by myself and didn’t know how to do it.” And he was like: “So, we should do the podcast, right?” and I said yes.
Terry: Yeah, it was—someone was talking about Arachnophobia [1990, dir. Frank Marshall] and I was, like “Oh. Yeah, this movie terrified me and legitimately has scarred me for life.” When I tweeted that, a lot of people were like “Oh yeah, this movie and this movie…” and I was like “This would be a good podcast.”
From my perspective, it all started because everyone started responding to this idea of movies that “scarred” them. Because I think that’s what unifies us as horror fans is that scare as a kid that, like, a lot of people are either trying to re-create or trying to find over and over again because of the way that it made them feel at that age. I think it kind of gives everyone a sense of community because you can see what scared people as a kid. And I think that creates this shared idea of “Oh yeah, that movie really scared me” or “Oh … well, that movie didn’t scare me but it made me start thinking about this movie,” and I think that kind of shows that there is a connection between most horror fans.
It’s interesting that you say “re-create.” Can you elaborate on that a little bit?
Terry: Well it’s like, you know, once you’re thirty-nine years old and you’ve seen every horror movie that’s pretty much come out, it seems like … you get kind of desensitized over time, and it’s like, for me, I remember the very first time that I saw a movie that, like, challenged my thought process on, like, what was safe, because it was the first movie that I actually turned off. And it was at that point that I realized that things outside were dangerous.
There never seems to be a shortage of people who have baggage attached to some film or other. What sort of patterns have you noticed in your work so far?
Mary Beth: Well, I mean, I think something that has been surprising to me is how unified a lot of us are in things that scared us as kids. I think also—I think there’s also a bit of a generational—well, not generational, but a bit of a gap between Terry and I because I’m younger and I grew up with a different set of movies. So sometimes our guests align more with what Terry saw when he was younger, and then what I saw when I was younger. But a lot of us—Ali Gonzalez talked about The Ring [2002, dir. Gore Verbinski] and I was terrified of The Ring. And then, just recently Dax Ebaben talked to us about The Blair Witch Project and I’m wearing a shirt that is printed with the introduction to The Blair Witch Project … it’s interesting to see how many people had these related experiences because I felt very alone, I think, when I was younger, because I watched a lot of horror, but not a lot of people I knew watched horror. So, I was having these, you know, traumatic, I guess traumatic, scarring experiences, but didn’t have anyone to share them with. And then this podcast has actually been really … vindicating is not really the right word, but it’s been really validating, I think, in terms of what I found terrifying as a child a lot of other people found terrifying as children. And it’s really validating as someone who felt very alone in her love of horror as a kid to find those people that, you know, experienced the same thing as you. It’s just been really cool with Twitter, you know, and like this podcast bringing a lot of us together and unifying us even more than I expected. I think one more thing that has been really interesting that we talked about a lot recently on the podcast is the way that all of us have gravitated towards cover art in movie stores. Like that has been talked about so much and, again, I guess I never talked about it with my in-real-life friends or anything, but that experience so many of us had about gravitating towards this box art, and the visuals of that that terrify you and the narratives you built around those images? And so the other thing is, there’s a movie I watched called Carved [2007, dir. Kōji Shiraishi] from a while ago. It’s a Japanese movie and I was terrified of the cover forever. And then I watched it and it wasn’t that scary. But it is really interesting, I think, how many of us loved box art and how that defined what was scary to us as kids even if we hadn’t even watched the movie.
Terry: Yeah. What it reminded me of … I was thinking about that too because it’s come up an awful lot recently. And I think it has to do a lot with the idea that—we just recently talked to B. J. Colangelo and she was talking about how her parents, when they would sit down and watch horror movies with her, and they would do what my parents did not do, and if it got scary, they would sit through it and talk with her because they knew that once whatever that person was going to create in their mind after the movie was over was going to be far, far worse than whatever was on-screen. And I think that that kind of ties into the box art, too, because I would see these pictures and it wouldn’t have any context to it. And so, like, for me and Deep Star Six [1989, dir. Sean S. Cunningham], there was a man cut in half floating in the water. He was in an old-timey diving suit and it was just half of him. So, in my mind I had created this whole story about what happened to this guy and it terrified me. And I know that that seems to be a lot with people who see this art and have this visual image of it, and they might flip over and see a couple stills on the back. Like, I remember someone talking about the back of, like, Chucky—the Child’s Play [1988, dir. Tom Holland] movie, with the knife and stuff. And they would see these images and they would create their own in their head and these stories without knowing the context and it would terrify them more. And so I kind of think that might be part of why there’s that common thread.
Mary Beth: I agree with that 100 percent. It’s like … the visuals that we’re able to make ourselves. And as children, the imagination … as crazy as our imaginations go as kids. We make our own horror movies in our heads, basically, I think. Especially just looking at those pictures. Some people it terrifies, and some people, like us, are attracted to that. We’re terrified but we want to know more and we want to dig into those images. That’s where a lot of us are now.
Terry: It also just reminds me of the quote that Wes Craven used to say about how horror movies don’t create fear, they release it. And it always seems to be that … I’ve always considered that it helps us contextualize what’s going on in the world.
Which movies would you choose if you were guests on your own podcast?
Terry: I would say that it is a toss between Alien [1979, dir. Ridley Scott] and Psycho. I had grown up on, like, the 1950s horror and like the 1930s horror. So, like, Universal monsters and alien movies from the 1950s. My dad loved them. And the Vincent Price stuff. And, like, one day my dad was like, “Hey, you want to watch this movie called Alien? It has aliens in it.” And I was like “Sure!” and I’m thinking like flying saucers and thinking, like, you know, fucking The Day the Earth Stood Still [1951, dir. Robert Wise] or that kind of thing. So I go into this and I … and the moment that it bursts out of his chest at dinner is the moment that stuck in my head for my life. My parents turned it off and I was like … they were staring at me with this excited look on their faces, so excited to terrify me. And I’m just, like, “Do you want us to turn it off?” And so we did, but at that moment it was like this realization that movies could be unsafe and that the world outside was unsafe. Because if an alien can burst outside of your stomach at any moment, then what the fuck?! Psycho scared me. And there’s the same thing. I stopped halfway through because I couldn’t handle it anymore. But, like, what I would end up doing, and I’ve talked about this in the podcast: I would end up going to seek out the sequel, because for some reason I could handle the sequel better. And then once I mastered this second movie, I could always go back to the first and I’d be fine. Psycho 2 [1983, dir. Richard Franklin] and Aliens [1986, dir. James Cameron] weren’t as scary, I guess? And then part of me knew what was coming. Whereas before it was this whole new experience for me. So, like, by the time the lady in Aliens is saying “Kill me” because there’s an alien that’s about to burst out of her stomach, it wasn’t as terrifying as it was going into the first one.
Mary Beth: It would be Jaws. Jaws is the one I talked about on our first episode. Jaws was the one, it was the first movie I ever remember watching, and it’s the first horror movie I ever saw. And it kept me from going into the ocean for years. That movie I think is one of them, and Poltergeist. So those two films shaped me, because Jaws was the first film I saw and then Poltergeist, I think just the imagery of Poltergeist stuck in my head, and I’ve always been really terrified of ghosts, and Poltergeist put images to my fears of haunted houses. And so that definitely got into my head. So those two are the ones that scarred me for life, I think.