Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  I see my work on horror fiction as a response to E. O. Wilson’s call for consilience (Wilson 1998), the integration of all knowledge into a unified framework that is causally connected from the most basic levels of physics to the most complex levels of human culture. Adopting the biocultural approach or subscribing to consilience does not mean that one believes that the arts can be reduced to psychology, or physiology, or molecular biology, or particle physics. Each level of complexity has emergent properties; the arts have properties that are not reducible to psychology, and psychology operates with categories that are not reducible to brain chemistry (Boyd, Carroll, and Gottschall 2010). But the mind is a product of the brain, and the arts are products of minds (Carroll 2013). Thus, an accurate understanding of minds and brains, and of the evolutionary forces that shaped them, can only enrich horror study. An effort to ground academic horror study in unified causal explanation will bring that study into line with the other sciences and make it enlightening to those who want to understand the structure and function of horror fiction.

  CHAPTER 2

  How Horror Works, I

  The Evolution and Stimulation of Negative Emotion

  Humans are fearful creatures. We fear getting killed, being assaulted, contracting diseases, losing loved ones, going insane, losing status, being humiliated. We fear all-out nuclear war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters. We fear monsters and psychos. We even fear invisible agents such as angry deities or malevolent spirits. We humans may consider ourselves the masters of creation, top dogs in the food chain, the last alpha predator around. But in actuality we are weak, vulnerable creatures. We lack the deadly muzzle of feline predators, the poison of slithery snakes, the physical strength of other big mammals. We can’t even see very well in the dark. Humans do have big brains, of course, and pride ourselves on those brains—calling ourselves Homo sapiens, wise man. Yet a paradoxical aspect of our big brains and our uniquely developed imaginations is that we face not only real and plausible dangers, but also imaginary ones—dangers that exist in our minds only (Dozier 1998), but are no less terrifying for that. People in the industrialized world may have eradicated most natural dangers, at least those stemming from predators and poisonous animals, and driven back the darkness of the night with electrical lights, but our minds churn out horrors around the clock. As the philosopher Stephen T. Asma puts it: “Neocortical expansion creates space for reflective symbolic counterfactual thinking, and along with that great privilege comes relentless horror” (2015, 957). Why, then, in the face of such “relentless horror” did we evolve to become so fearful? And how is our horror entertainment designed to elicit negative emotions such as fear and anxiety?

  Like all other organisms on the planet, humans are the result of an evolutionary process of selection and adaptation. As Charles Darwin documented a century and a half ago, all organisms evolve in an adaptive relationship with their environments (Darwin 2003 [1859]). Because of random mutations—copying errors introduced into the genetic material—some organisms are born with traits that make them better adapted to their environments than their peers. Those fortunate organisms have better odds of surviving and reproducing, thus passing on their better-adapted genetic material to the next generation. Given sufficient time and sufficiently strong selection pressures, highly complex adaptations can arise and spread to an entire species. Take the human heart, for example, or stereoscopic vision; both are universal traits of Homo sapiens. Those traits are clearly adaptive and arose because of genetic mutations accumulating over time, eventually producing complex, functional mechanisms.

  Anatomically modern humans—Homo sapiens, our species—emerged around 200,000 years ago (Wade 2006). But the human story is much older than that. Our story takes its beginning with the advent of life on earth, about 3.5 billion years ago. Only some 200 million years ago did the first mammals emerge, and only about 2.5 million years ago did the genus Homo evolve. In the mind-numbing perspective of deep (geological) time, modern humans really have not been around for very long. Nonetheless, much of our anatomical rigging has been carried along over millions, even billions of years of evolution. The genus Homo evolved from other, earlier species that in turn evolved from earlier species. A line of evolutionary descent stretches from modern humans all the way back to the earliest life forms, and many of the evolved structures that we find in humans exist in identical or similar variants in other species. For example, many other species have hearts and stereoscopic vision like us. We still carry along ancient mammalian adaptations for mother-infant bonding, and we share basic fight-or-flight responses with reptiles and fishes (Shubin 2008). Indeed, the neurobiological hardware underlying human emotions—such quintessentially human traits—has deep roots in mammalian phylogeny.

  Fear—the “oldest and strongest emotion of mankind,” as Lovecraft pointed out (1973, 12)—originates in a mammalian defensive system, which evolved in response to threats in mammals’ environments (Öhman 2008). All animals are equipped with evolved mechanisms that enable them to deal with recurrent threats to their survival. In humans and other mammals, negative emotions serve such functions; they evolved to protect organisms from harm, to motivate organisms to steer clear of things that could harm them. People may consider fear and anxiety to be nuisances, unpleasant emotions that diminish their well-being and stand in the way of their ambitions, but if our lineage had not evolved negative emotions, we would not be here today. A fearless hominin in ancestral environments would soon be a dead hominin in ancestral environments, given that such environments teemed with danger.

  Across millions of years, humans and hominins (and earlier mammals before them) came into the world facing potentially lethal danger from predators, invisible pathogens and toxins, hostile conspecifics (members of their own species), social exclusion, and perilous features of the landscape such as cliffs and deep water (Dozier 1998, Pinker 1997). Theirs was a world shimmering with threat. We can reconstruct some of those threats from the archeological record, which occasionally throws up hominin fossils with clear marks of predation, such as skulls with puncture marks made by the huge fangs of saber-toothed cats (Hart and Sussman 2009). Such paleontological finds indicate that our ancestors—or more precisely, those of our ancestors’ peers who probably didn’t become ancestors—occasionally ended their days as meals for carnivorous predators. In the evocative phrasing of science writer David Quammen: “Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat” (2003, 3).

  Another line of evidence comes from studies of present-day hunter-gatherers. Anthropologists and paleoanthropologists often use hunter-gatherers as proxies for our evolutionary ancestors, given that our ancestors spent more than 99 percent of human evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies (Cosmides and Tooby 1997). In the perspective of human evolution, agriculture and modern technology are very recent inventions and thus have not been around long enough to profoundly shape our nature. Most human adaptation has occurred in response to the challenges posed by more “primitive” forms of existence (Pinker 1997, Wade 2006, but see also Cochran and Harpending 2009). What, then, can we learn by looking at modern-day hunter-gatherer societies? One of the most striking facts of modern hunter-gatherer societies is that very few individuals die from sheer old age. One study examined causes of death in seven groups of hunter-gatherers and forager-horticulturalists, comprising more than 3,000 individuals. Very few of those individuals died from old age; in fact, only 9.5 percent of deaths were attributed to senescence. The vast majority—72.4 percent—died from disease, with accidents accounting for another 5.2 percent and violence (including predation) making up 11 percent of deaths (Gurven 2012, 297). To the extent that present-day hunter-gatherer communities mirror ancestral human and hominin communities, these numbers corroborate the archeological evidence indicating that our ancestors led dangerous lives indeed.

  Such existence has left deep grooves in human psychology. We evolved to be ever on the lookout for dangers
around us. Psychologists Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka have carefully delineated what they call an evolved “fear module” (2001), an evolved defense system underpinned by dedicated brain structures such as the amygdala. The function of the system is to protect the organism from harm, and the system has a number of design characteristics that reveal its evolutionary pedigree (LeDoux 1996). One such feature is the domain-specificity or “selectivity” (Öhman and Mineka 2001, 485) of the system, the fact that we tend to react more fearfully to certain kinds of stimuli than others, and that the stimuli to which we react fearfully tend to be evolutionarily relevant stimuli, not necessarily those kinds of stimuli that are truly dangerous to us in the modern world. It is much easier for humans to learn to fear snakes, say, than to learn to fear lawnmowers, despite the fact that lawnmowers are much more dangerous to us in the industrialized world—but this is a topic for the next chapter.

  Most striking, perhaps, is that the human fear system evolved to be hypersensitive to cues of danger. That is why we humans scare so easily, why we tend to jump at shadows. The biological logic underlying this design characteristic is encapsulated in the aphorism “Better safe than sorry.” In a dangerous and unpredictable environment, a false negative—assuming there is no danger when in fact there is—is vastly more costly than a false positive—assuming there is danger when in fact there is none (Marks and Nesse 1994). In other words, in terms of survival it is much better to react fearfully toward an ambiguous cue that might indicate danger, such as a rustling in the leaves during a twilight stroll in the woods, than it is to disregard such a cue. As Shakespeare had Theseus exclaim in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” (1.5.22–23). The default setting of the fear system, then, is to jump at shadows. If we hear a strange sound in the dead of night, the fear system is designed to cause a series of physiological and cognitive changes that ready us for fight or flight and force us to pay close attention to the cue. The heart rate goes up and glucose is released into the bloodstream for an instant energy fix in anticipation of combat or evasion. Blood is diverted from the digestive system—irrelevant when you’re facing a predator or an oncoming boulder—to the large muscle groups, which may cause dry mouth and a butterfly sensation in the stomach. Pupils dilate to take in as much visual information as possible. Goose bumps erupt, which is an atavistic relic from a time when we were covered with fur and piloerection caused the fur to stand on end, defensively making us look bigger and more fearsome. Attention is sharply focused on the threat, all other concerns momentarily forgotten (Dozier 1998). All of these physiological and cognitive processes happen swiftly and automatically, outside of conscious control (Dozier 1998, Öhman and Mineka 2001).

  The hypersensitivity of the fear system may appear to generate irrational behavior. When we hear that weird noise in the dead of night, a careful weighing of the odds would tell us that some non-agentic, mechanical event—such as floorboards settling or the engine in the refrigerator kicking in—is likely to have caused the sound, not an intruding, malicious agent. But statistical probability is not the principle by which the fear system operates; its motto is “Better safe than sorry.” Better to proceed from the assumption that some dangerous agent has intruded on your home and to ramp up the fear response to make you ready for fight or flight, just in case. Moreover, such automaticity and hyperreactivity are not, in fact, irrational in a dangerous, unpredictable environment—quite the opposite. When we react with fear or anxiety to a cue that turns out to be harmless, we will have wasted a little energy and some time, that’s all. But if we fail to react to a cue that turns out to indicate the presence of some predatory agent, we may be meat, quite literally. Hence, when the stakes are high and time is of the essence, automatic, swift, defensive behavior initiated by the fear system is adaptive.

  Fear is the prototypical negative emotion and a true human universal, one that is found in all normally-developed members of the species Homo sapiens (Brown 1991, Ekman 2005). It is closely related to anxiety, also a negative emotion that evolved to protect us from harm. But where fear is the adaptive response to immediate threat, anxiety is the adaptive response to a distant, potential, or abstract threat (Öhman 2008). Fear and anxiety generate similar physiological changes but different behaviors. Fear gets us ready to fight or flee, whereas anxiety makes us carefully probe and investigate our surroundings. Dozier sees anxiety as a subtype of fear and argues that anxiety is a future-oriented emotion, an emotion that occurs in response to anticipations of danger or threat, whereas fear is generated in response to immediate danger or threat (1998, 16).

  Another striking feature of the human fear system is its encapsulation, its relative imperviousness to cognitive control (Öhman and Mineka 2001). When the fear response gets going, it is very hard to consciously extinguish. Imagine, for example, an arachnophobe spotting a moving object out of the corner of his eye. It appears to be a big spider scurrying across the floor. The arachnophobe reacts with acute fear—heightened pulse, sweaty palms, sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, possibly jumping away from the spider, and maybe emitting a high-pitched warning call in the process—only to realize that it is a fat dust bunny propelled across the floor by a draft wind. Even then, his heart keeps hammering away and his consciousness is cleared of all but the notion of the nasty spider. Something similar happens when people who are afraid of heights refuse to step onto the Grand Canyon Skywalk, a transparent platform that sits about 800 feet above the floor of the canyon, and a similar principle is at work when people refuse to eat chocolate that is shaped to resemble a dog turd (Bloom 2010, Rozin, Haidt, and McCauley 2005). We know that the glass enclosure is safe and lives up to a thousand regulations, and we know it’s just chocolate, not dog pooh . . . but try telling that to ancient defensive mechanisms deep within the brain, mechanisms that evolved to trust no one and nothing but the appearance of things.

  Knowing that something is safe while feeling that it is unsafe produces a peculiar frisson. We may rationally realize that airplane travel is the safest mode of transportation in the modern world and at the same time tremble with terror as we step onto a plane. Rush W. Dozier, Jr. outlines the neurobiological foundation of this paradox and explains the parallel processing taking place in the brain when we perceive something that looks dangerous but which we know to be safe. Deeply conserved, primitive circuits located primarily in the limbic system—an evolutionarily ancient structure that we share with other mammals—perceive a cue that might signal a threat and set into motion the fear response. Meanwhile, evolutionarily younger structures located in the prefrontal cortex—a part of the brain that, among other things, is responsible for controlling emotional responses and inhibiting impulses—carefully assess the cue and can modulate the response produced by the old fear system. We can rationally override an aversive impulse and decide to climb onto the diving board fifteen feet above the surface of the water and plunge to what the limbic system considers certain death, but which we know to be a thrilling few seconds of freefall to safety. But there is only so much the prefrontal cortex can do in terms of keeping the fear system on a leash. As Dozier says, “there is a constant struggle between our frontal lobes and limbic system to control our behavior” (1998, 68)—a constant struggle between primitive emotional prompts and rational decision-making.

  Darwin, in his book On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animal, describes a striking experiment that he conducted in the London Zoo: “I put my face close to the thick glass-plate in front of a puff-adder in the Zoological Gardens, with the firm determination of not starting back if the snake struck at me; but, as soon as the blow was struck, my resolution went for nothing, and I jumped a yard or two backwards with astonishing rapidity. My will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced” (1998 [1872], 43–44). Darwin’s anecdote illustrates the relative impotence of the prefrontal, rational mechanisms in the face of a full-blown
fear response orchestrated by the limbic mechanisms. He knew that the “thick glass-plate” would protect him, but his limbic system didn’t care. In its view, a rapidly approaching snake is a rapidly approaching snake, glass or no glass.

  Particularly accomplished fright scenes in a horror novel or film, or an especially hair-raising sequence in a horror computer game, work in a manner similar to Darwin’s puff adders. They successfully target ancient, evolved defense mechanisms and short-circuit prefrontal mechanisms. Horror fiction, in other words, works by throwing a live wire into ancient structures in the audience’s central nervous system. It captures and holds our attention by engaging the fear system, which, when we are immersed, does not really care that it’s fiction, make-believe, and illusory sleights-of-hand. We know that it’s fiction, which is why we don’t flee the cinema in abject terror or throw aside the Stephen King novel in self-defense. But occasionally, real effort is necessary in managing the primitive fear response engendered by a film, novel, or computer game. As the tagline for the 1972 rape-revenge horror film Last House on the Left (Craven) admonished: “To avoid fainting keep repeating, it’s only a movie . . . only a movie . . . only a movie.” And of course, movie history tells us that on some spectacular occasions, horror film audience members are overwhelmed by their fear systems and faint, attack the screen, or flee the movie theater in terror—as happened upon the theatrical release of The Exorcist in 1973 (Kermode 2003).