Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  Horror, of course, is a many-headed beast, difficult to pin down and to make stay down. Different works of horror may offer somewhat different pleasures: The epic scope and postapocalyptic grandeur of Stephen King’s The Stand (1980) is different from the creeping terror provided by a short story such as King’s “The Raft” (1986), a story about teenagers caught on a raft on a lake, preyed upon by a weird monster. Both works, however, engage our attention and encourage emotional involvement by inviting us to share the perspective of plausible and sympathetic protagonists in highly dangerous situations, faced with hostile monsters and adverse supernatural forces. Both works stimulate negative emotion such as anxiety and dread. They both target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms. More pointedly, the pleasure afforded by a simple survival horror computer game, such as Slender: The Eight Pages (Hadley 2012), is much less rich than the pleasure afforded by an accomplished and complex horror novel such as Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979)—simple survival horror games have almost no narrative content, hardly anything in the way of symbolic figuration, no profound character depiction, and very little in the way of meaning, though both target evolved cognitive and emotional mechanisms. Narrative horror—stories and films—offer the same appeals as do simple survival horror games, but they offer much more than that. They offer the appeals of story generally: the opportunity to see the world through another person’s eyes, to see different worlds, to peer inside fictional people’s heads, to engage with interesting characters, to model hypothetical scenarios in imaginatively engaging and emotionally compelling ways.

  Fiction is a human universal, found in all documented cultures (Brown 1991, Carroll 2006). Normally developing children spontaneously and with delight construct imaginary worlds, and adults spend vast amounts of time in lands of make-believe (Gottschall 2012). We seem to be hardwired with a penchant for fiction. Is this because fiction is biologically adaptive, that our appetite for fiction helps us survive and reproduce, or is our love-affair with fiction an evolutionary byproduct? This is a live debate in evolutionary literary study (Carroll 2012a). Some evolutionary social scientists claim that our appetite for fiction is an evolutionary byproduct, a functionless biological accident—that our appetite for fiction serves no adaptive purpose, but that we cook up and consume stories as a means of artificially stimulating evolved pleasure circuits (Carroll 2012b, Pinker 2007). As the psychologists Eric Youngstrom and Carroll E. Izard claim, “Horror films, sad songs, elegiac poetry—all of these serve no obvious biological function in terms of survival or sexual selection. Instead, these are ‘junk food of the mind’—things that achieve their popularity by pandering to evolved preferences for approach and avoidance” (2008, 376).

  Other scholars and scientists, however, have argued that our appetite for fiction is biologically adaptive (Carroll 2011, Dutton 2009, Gottschall 2012, Tooby and Cosmides 2001). According to these theorists, our involvement in fictional worlds is not a frivolous waste of time; it’s a crucial way in which we make sense of the world, ourselves, and each other. Imagine a new species of Homo that because of a genetic mutation has absolutely no appetite for fiction (Gottschall 2012). In contrast to Homo sapiens, who spends vast amounts of time in made-up worlds—we daydream, night-dream, read and listen to stories, attend plays and movies, watch television, listen to jokes and tall tales—our story-less cousins care only about the factual world. They have no time for the Crusoes or the Simpsons. Would they be better adapted than us, undistracted by “junk food of the mind” as they are; would they survive and reproduce at greater rates than us and eventually outcompete us? Probably not. Fiction is not just “junk food of the mind.” Fiction helps us make sense of the world, including our inner, mental world; it helps us assign value to behavioral alternatives and intelligently choose between such alternatives; it helps us gain a better understanding of what makes people, groups, and societies tick (Gottschall 2012). Fiction is condensed and engaging simulation of social and psychological interactions (Mar and Oatley 2008). Fiction allows us to vicariously lead countless lives, it frees us from the phenomenological present and throws us into possible and impossible futures, pasts, and parallel universes. Horror fiction can do all of those things and is particularly well-equipped to allow readers and viewers to vicariously live through the worst, to model threatening scenarios, and to get imaginatively compelling experience with extreme situations and intense negative emotion. In video games, players get experience with their own reactions to extreme situations; in literature and film, readers and viewers get experience with their own reactions as well as characters’ reactions to extreme situations. This is all part of what Straub calls “deepening and widening one’s emotional experience.”

  Stephen King says that “fiction is the truth inside the lie” (1981, 7). That observation works on several levels. A story about fictional characters engaged in fictional events may contain profound moral or existential or psychological truths. Also, on a literal level, made-up stories can contain true factual information; readers learn about chaos theory and paleoarchaeology from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990), and about working-class conditions in nineteenth-century England from Dickens’s Hard Times (2003 [1854]). Stories engage our emotions, and emotional engagement enhances recall—when an event is drenched in emotion, it is more effectively stored in our memory (Gottschall 2012). Historically, narratives such as those found in myth and folklore have served the function of transmitting information about adaptively crucial issues such as hazards in the physical and social environment in an emotionally compelling way (Scalise Sugiyama 2001, Scalise Sugiyama and Scalise Sugiyama 2011)—information about dangerous animals, information about risky social interactions, information about local norms, information about features of the landscape that may present opportunities or dangers, and so on. Learning about danger in one’s environment via narrative is preferable to learning about danger by personal experience and direct observation, because such direct learning can be extremely risky. As Arne Öhman and Susan Mineka observe, “if effortful trial-and-error learning was the only learning mechanism available, most animals would be dead before they knew which predators and circumstances to avoid” (2001, 487). Thus, if a child grows up in an environment in which wolves pose a threat, it is better to tell the child an engaging and memorable story about a dangerous wolf and a careless girl in a red hood than it is to let the child wander off and figure out on its own what happens when you stray from the path. The biologist Hans Kruuk makes a similar argument, saying about the overrepresentation of deadly carnivores in imaginative culture—there are more dangerous monsters and predators in our art than there are in our actual surroundings—that “there may be a survival value in this aspect of our culture. We are teaching others what is lethal in the environment, how its deadly forces work, and one might call it a cultural alarm system” (2002, 179). People evolved to be curious about danger, and fictional stories about danger prime, satisfy, and even exploit that curiosity.

  If fictional horror stories can teach us about real-world danger, what kinds of lessons do we draw from such stories? Do modern-day horror stories transmit adaptively useful information? Surely there is no great need for us to be educated on the perils of demonic possession, furious poltergeists, or chainsaw-wielding rednecks. Nonetheless, the writer Joe Hill suggests in an essay on the usefulness of horror that “while the vast catalog of horrific fantasies may not be able to offer us simple answers to our biggest questions, it does occasionally remind us of small yet undeniably useful truisms: always look in the back seat before you get in the car; don’t insult hillbillies with more power tools than teeth; whatever was making that awful noise out in the woods, you can check it out in the morning” (2014). That may sound like a stretch. Very few people get disemboweled by murderers hiding in the backseat of their cars, and let’s be honest, how many hillbillies with power tools are actually out to get us? Yet as Hill also says in the essay: “I suggest to you that the compulsion to peer int
o the darkness, and wonder about what’s there, is a distinctly useful and adaptive trait. And as it happens, the fiction of the horrific is unusually well tuned to address the most frightening and fascinating unknowns”—such as the meaning of life and death and of being human. This statement rings true. Yes, horror can offer practical advice that could, conceivably, be useful in the real world. Don’t go alone to investigate a strange sound in the basement when it’s dark. Stay away from psychos with knives. Avoid clowns in the moonlight, sure. Horror reinforces our intuitions that such situations and individuals are to be avoided, horror makes those intuitions ring true with vivid emotional force. But the truths of horror, the genre’s truly valuable lessons, tend to be psychological and existential ones. As Stephen King writes in an afterword to a short-story collection, “I have tried my best [in these stories] to record what people might do, and how they might behave, under certain dire circumstances” (2011, 366–367). King, in other words, aims at psychological realism even as he employs supernatural elements. Horror fiction, particularly supernatural horror fiction, can be outrageously outlandish and implausible in terms of the monsters or monstrous events depicted—corpses rising from graves because of space radiation? A haunted car? Really?—but good horror fiction is psychologically realistic, and it engages with substantial issues that are relevant to people. It depicts in plausible and careful detail the responses of characters to monsters and monstrous events. Only thus can horror fiction become “one of the vital ways in which we try to make sense of our lives, and the often terrible world we see around us,” as King puts it in that same afterword (365). Only thus can horror become “a lamp that can guide you through your own eventual nighttime journeys” (Hill 2014).

  The appetite for horror, I argue, is an adaptation that functions to give us experience with negative emotion at levels of intensity not safely come by in real life, and to allow us to incorporate danger into our total imaginative universe. As philosophers like to point out, we may never know what it feels like to be a bat, and we might not even care. But if we seek out horror entertainment, we can learn what it feels like to be genuinely afraid, what it feels like to be hunted prey, what it feels like to face and maybe overcome great danger, what it feels like when the world breaks into pieces—and that, surely, is valuable to know. As the psychologist Paul Bloom has pointed out, even unrealistic stories about the zombie apocalypse can serve as “useful practice for bad times, exercising our psyches for when life goes to hell” (2010, 193–194). If we follow The Walking Dead (Darabont 2010–) on television, we’ll be reassured that perseverance in the face of adversity often pays off, we’ll learn to cultivate some caution toward strangers in case of disaster or massive upheaval, we’ll be reminded of the value of meaningful, dependable social relations when times are tough. More specifically, we will learn what it feels like to be in the midst of such disaster, to combat hostile conspecifics and survive and thrive, to find meaning, in a hostile environment. That kind of vicarious experience, or experiential expansion, is generalizable to real life, even if the zombies aren’t. The zombies become catalysts for social and psychological dramas, and they work well as catalysts because they are inherently fascinating and salient. Moreover, the series prompts us to reflect on the meaning of life in an environment that is stripped of many of the structures that sustain meaningful activities in the modern world. Most people find such imaginative, vicarious experience stimulating and rewarding.

  When we read a novel, watch a film, or play a video game, we are engaged in “structured experience,” in David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s phrase (2013, 51). We are prompted to imaginatively entertain hypothetical scenarios and are (ideally) emotionally invested in, and cognitively stimulated by, those scenarios. Such involvement and stimulation can be regarded as a form of mental play behavior (Boyd 2009, Steen and Owens 2001, Vorderer, Steen, and Chan 2006), and the biological study of the functions of play can help us pinpoint possible biological functions for the structured experience offered by fiction across media. Play behavior—inherently rewarding but apparently nonfunctional behavior—has been observed in many species, especially among mammals and birds, but also among reptiles and fish, for example (Burghardt 2014). Play behavior has been somewhat of an evolutionary puzzle. Given the harsh realities of existence for all species, the often vicious struggle to survive and the fierce competition for mates, why would organisms expend time and energy on less-than-crucial activities such as playfighting? The answer is that such activities are, in fact, crucial. Play researchers have suggested that mammalian play functions as “training for the unexpected” (Špinka, Newberry, and Bekoff 2001). When kittens playfight, they gain skills and capacities at low cost and relatively little risk, skills and capacities that may become critically useful later in life when they face a hostile opponent. If one meets a hungry predator for the first time in one’s life, it is desirable to have a store of surrogate experience with predator evasion to draw from rather than proceed by trial and error. Francis Steen and Stephanie Owens (2001) argue that human chase play simulates predator-prey interactions; children evolved to find great pleasure in chase play because such play gives them experience with strategies for predator avoidance and lets them build muscle tone and locomotor dexterity. Play behavior lets children explore and push the limits of their abilities—it allows them to practice hunting behavior, evasion strategies, hiding maneuvers, and simple as well as complex social exchanges. There is a functional parallel in the way that the Air Force trains fighter pilots, as Peter Vorderer and his colleagues point out: “An F16 flight simulator . . . allows a novice to acquire experience and practical skills in manipulating a single-seat airplane without risking the loss of life and a multi-million-dollar fighter jet” (2006, 18). In a similar manner, fiction provides a framework for emotionally and cognitively engaging simulation, at little cost and almost no risk.

  Horror fiction can help us build coping skills, both by giving us personal experience with negative emotion, and with our reactions to negative emotion, as well as by letting us witness the coping behavior of fictional characters—whether such behavior is efficient or not; theater audiences invariably cry out in frustration when the heroine faces certain death in deciding to check out the weird sound coming from the basement. In narrative media we can observe fictional characters’ behavior and the consequences of their behavior; in interactive media such as video games, we can let our avatar try out such behaviors in the game world. All of this works toward the kind of experiential expansion that I mentioned above. When we cognitively model the experience of being in great danger, most of us probably draw on imagery provided to us by horror stories, and on remembered emotions induced in us by horror stories.

  The hypothesis that horror stories can function as simulation of and rehearsal for the nastier sides of life is corroborated by research on the biological function of nightmares. The neuroscientist Antti Revonsuo (2000) has suggested that the biological function of dreaming is to provide offline simulations of adaptively critical scenarios. Nightmares, according to Revonsuo’s “Threat Simulation Theory,” serve the function of providing opportunities for “rehearsal of the neurocognitive mechanisms that are essential for threat recognition and avoidance behavior while awake” (Valli and Revonsuo 2009, 17). To back this idea, Katja Valli and Revonsuo (2009) provide evidence that mental training or within-mind simulation improves real-world task performance in several domains, and that nightmares are extremely common across cultures. In fact, the “most typical dream theme around the world is that of the dream self being chased or attacked” (Valli and Revonsuo 2009, 31). Valli and Revonsuo conservatively estimate that young adults have dreams featuring “threat simulations” on average 5.1 times per week (2009, 26). The threats of such dreams need not be realistic representations of actual, ecologically valid threats; fantasy-based threats play a substantial role in nightmares because “in the modern world, the input concerning extremely threatening agents comes largely from horr
or movies and similar fictitious sources.” But as Valli and Revonsuo note, “rehearsing how to escape from the jaws of a werewolf or a vampire might be just as efficient as running away from a human character or a wild animal” (2009, 35).