Why Horror Seduces

by Mathias Clasen

  Horror, then, can help us get better at negotiating real dangers in the real world. But most horror probably does not have such functions. I would argue that most commercial horror stories and games function as forgettable and adaptively useless pleasure-via-displeasure technologies—“junk food of the mind”—that leave behind no more than an ephemeral buzz and perhaps a vague sense of dread. However, some works—the best ones—allow for emotional simulation and prompt us to reflect on important themes; they offer insight into the mechanics of social interactions and psychological processes and give us valuable vicarious experience with the terrifying. The second part of the book provides in-depth discussions of such works.

  I have focused so far on the positive functions of horror, arguing that horror can serve adaptive functions via its stimulation of evolved psychological danger-management adaptations. But of course such stimulation can come at a cost, and sometimes the genre’s effects are more deleterious than benevolent. Horror by definition aims at making us fearful and paranoid. As the horror critic Kim Newman has wryly pointed out, “the central thesis of horror in film and literature is that the world is a more frightening place than is generally assumed” (2011, 5). That is not necessarily a bad lesson, nor a wrong one, but it may come with psychological costs. Who hasn’t spent an uneasy night with the bedside lamp on because of a stupid horror film? Who hasn’t double-checked under the bed because of stupid Stephen King? Horror may teach us coping skills and make us better adapted to a dangerous world in the long term, but it can also cripple us with anxiety and traumatize us. The negative psychological effects of horror are much better documented in the research literature than are the positive effects.

  The communications scientist Joanne Cantor has spent decades investigating the “lingering effects of frightening media” (2004, 283). In a recent study, she collected and quantified 530 reports from individuals whom she had asked to write about fright reactions to media presentations. Strikingly, 91 percent of respondents described negative reactions to fictional media, rather than to news or documentary presentations. One respondent describes how he watched the horror film Poltergeist (Hooper 1982) at a young age and refused to sleep with an open closet door in the room for several months (Cantor 2004, 289). Many other respondents reported suffering from nightmares and other sleep disturbances for months after seeing the film (290). Another respondent, after watching The Blair Witch Project, described how she felt compelled to leave all the lights on in her apartment for several days after seeing the film. Several respondents say they refused to go camping or be in the woods after seeing that film, which depicts a group of young people lost and preyed upon in dark and strange woods (293).

  In another study, Cantor and her colleague Becky Omdahl (1991) exposed children (kindergarten through sixth grade) to “scary media presentations” to see whether fictional presentations of realistic life-threatening events would influence the children’s risk-assessment. They found that children who had been exposed to a “dramatized depiction of a deadly house fire from Little House on the Prairie increased their self-reports of worry about similar events in their own lives.” Moreover, the children “were also less interested in learning to build a fire in a fireplace” than were children who had not seen the scene, or who had seen a nondramatic scene involving fire (Cantor 2002, 289)—they were more sensitized to this particular source of danger.

  Most of the negative psychological consequences identified by Cantor and her colleagues are the result of premature exposure—that is, kids watching or reading stuff they shouldn’t be watching or reading. Children find it much harder to disassociate frightening fictional agents from real-world dangers (Cantor and Oliver 1996) and to distinguish fiction from reality; moreover, in terms of neurobiology, they lack the prefrontal maturation necessary for keeping the primitive fear system on a leash. The prefrontal cortex reaches maturation only in a person’s early twenties and is one of the last brain structures to mature (Choudhury, Blakemore, and Charman 2006). That is why we have to remind children that “It’s just ketchup” or “It’s just acting”—to support prefrontal control of the primitive fear system. All the same, even grown-ups can experience sleep disruptions, hypervigilance, and increased anxiety as a result of exposure to horror fiction. As we get older, we find it more difficult to handle stress. This explains why the typical horror audience is composed of fairly young people (Weaver and Tamborini 1996)—not children, who are overwhelmed by the terrifying presence and apparent actuality of fear-inducing depictions, not the elderly, who are easily distressed, but the fairly young who are eager to test and push their own limits, and eager to achieve and exhibit mastery over their own reactions.

  We know, then, that horror fiction can have short-term effects of making us more fearful and vigilant. But we know very little about the long-term psychological consequences of horror consumption. As I argued above, it is likely that sustained horror consumption can give audiences tools with which to handle negative emotions and threat situations. Horror fiction can be much more than escapist entertainment—like all fiction, horror can function as an instrument of psychological calibration, as a means of understanding and making sense of the world. In the next part of the book, I look more closely at selected, canonical works of modern American horror to investigate how those works are structured to fulfill such functions, in particular how the works are structured to target evolved psychological mechanisms. I analyze what the works mean and what they attempt to do; how they are designed to make audiences feel and think in certain ways; and how an evolutionary perspective gives us access to a deeper understanding of why these works are appealing and effective in engaging readers and viewers. First, however, I give a brief historical overview of American horror.

  PART 2

  Evolutionary Perspectives on American Horror

  CHAPTER 5

  Monsters Everywhere

  A Very Brief Overview of American Horror

  The elements of horror can be found in all American cultural domains and across media—not just because of successful marketing or some peculiar resonance with a modern Zeitgeist, but because the elements of horror reflect and resonate profoundly with deep-seated evolved dispositions. They captivate people. People tell each other horror stories to delight and terrify, to instruct and to control: There are horror jokes and horror urban legends, sermons with horror content and imaginary monsters in kids’ tales. People read horror literature and horror graphic novels, watch horror films and television shows, and play horror video games. They attend horror theater and visit haunted houses, and find pleasure in horror paintings, photography, and sculpture. The American artist Joshua Hoffine, for example, has built a career on producing elaborately staged horror photographs featuring such scenes as semihuman monsters lurking in basements and clawed hands reaching out from under children’s beds, as in Figure 5.1. There’s even horror music. Death-metal bands with such evocative names as Slayer, Death, and Cannibal Corpse appropriate the themes and iconography of horror. “Viral contagion unleashed upon the earth / Billions of infected dead soon rise / Stalking the living to feast upon the flesh,” begins Cannibal Corpse’s apocalyptic “Kill Or Become” (2014).

  Figure 5.1: The elements of horror occur across media, from films and novels to music and photography. This photograph, “BED” by Joshua Hoffine, depicts a potent horror scenario. Somebody really ought to have checked under the bed before sending the girl off to sleep. Copyright Joshua Hoffine (2004).

  Even advertising agencies occasionally use horror tropes humorously to catch consumers’ attention. Audi’s 2012 Superbowl ad depicted a group of partying vampires bursting into flame when they were accidentally hit by the glare of the LED headlights of an approaching car. “Daylight, now in the headlight,” boasted the ad. Nike’s 2000 television ad “Horror” depicted a scantily-clad young woman chased through woods by a masked, chainsaw-wielding maniac. The woman, wearing Nike running shoes, easily outran the killer, who had to stop and
catch his breath. “Why sport?” asked the ad, and replied: “You’ll live longer.” The ad caused some controversy over alleged misogyny and otherwise disturbing content and was pulled from NBC, but the fact remains that nowadays, advertising agencies can safely assume universal familiarity with horror tropes such as vampires and slasher killers. Horror, the many-tentacled beast, reaches into all cultural domains. How did we get here, and when did it all begin? In the following, I provide a brief outline of the history of American horror.

  The history of North American horror has to begin with the arrival of humans on that continent. So-called Paleoamericans surely told each other horrifying stories and shared terrifying imaginative scenarios tens of thousands of years ago. Elements of those stories and scenarios became absorbed in Native American tales and folklore, which in turn continue to inspire American horror fiction today. The Wendigo, for example—the beastly, cannibalistic monster of Algonquian legend—occurs in Stephen King’s 1983 novel Pet Sematary, in a 2005 episode of the television series Supernatural (Nutter), and in the 2015 horror video game Until Dawn (Bowen, Reznick, and Fessenden). Yet a specifically American literary horror tradition doesn’t begin to crystallize until the middle of the nineteenth century, with the emergence of dark American Romanticism—a branch of Romanticism concerned with evil, insanity, and the irrational, dominated by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville (Docherty 1990, Jancovich 1994, Lloyd Smith 2004).

  The Gothic novels produced by British writers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were hugely popular with American readers, but few American writers embraced the form. Charles Brockden Brown is an exception. He published a string of Gothic novels around the turn of the century, most famously Wieland (1798) which depicted a religious fanatic turned axe-murderer, apparently under the sway of malign supernatural forces. Brockden Brown, like many of his British colleagues, invoked supernatural elements only to explain them away in the end. A few decades later, Washington Irving emerged as America’s “first supernaturalist,” according to the literary historian S. T. Joshi (2007, xi), and published such classics as the lighthearted horror story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (1820). Edgar Allan Poe, however, was identified by H. P. Lovecraft as the first important horror writer in the American tradition, a truly original and widely influential fear artist. Few would dispute that assessment. Lovecraft praised Poe’s “vision of the terror that stalks about and within us,” as well as the capacity of that artistic vision to penetrate to “every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings” (1973, 54). Colorful, but not inaccurate. Many of Poe’s writings, published in the 1830s and 1840s, adopt a pessimistic worldview and offer disturbing depictions of pathological mental and physical states, thus tapping into an evolved fear of death, disease, and insanity. Hawthorne likewise kept returning in his writings to negative emotions and sick minds, and found in New England’s Puritan past a rich repository of guilt and human evil for Gothic stories such as The House of the Seven Gables (1982 [1851]), about a family haunted by their ancestors’ wrongdoings. Poe’s influence in particular continues to shape horror fiction. Poe was joined, according to Joshi, in the “triumvirate of towering American supernaturalists” by Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft. Bierce penned a range of horror short stories such as “The Damned Thing” (1898), about a man killed by an invisible monster. H. P. Lovecraft, active primarily in the 1920s and 1930s, is universally recognized as the most accomplished practitioner and critic of a peculiar brand of literary horror that he called “weird fiction.”

  The weird, in Lovecraft’s conception, is distinct from “the literature of mere physical fear and the mundanely gruesome.” The weird

  has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain—a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. (1973, 15)

  Lovecraft met with little public enthusiasm for his stories but secured a circle of devoted and dedicated readers and fellow writers, including such accomplished horror writers as August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber. He found a publication outlet in Weird Tales, established in 1923 and the first literary magazine dedicated to horror. He also greatly influenced subsequent horror writers such as Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, T. E. D. Klein, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Kelly Link, and Stephen King. Lovecraft’s influence is clearly registered in John Carpenter’s 1995 horror film In the Mouth of Madness, about cosmic forces of evil unraveling the fabric of reality. Likewise, the acclaimed TV show True Detective (Pizzolatto 2014–) is inspired by Lovecraft’s imaginary universe. Even video game designers have found inspiration in Lovecraft’s so-called Cthulhu Mythos, an elaborate, disturbing mythology involving ancient gods and terrible forces. The first-ever 3D survival horror game, Alone in the Dark (Raynal and Bonnel 1992), drew inspiration from Lovecraft, as do such critically praised games as Alan Wake (Ranki and Kasurinen 2010) and Bloodborne (Miyazaki 2015). Lovecraft evidently hit on an imaginatively and emotionally potent recipe with his weird fiction and his evocation of vast cosmic forces that prey on humans and dwarf them to insignificance. Little wonder that his creations continue to resonate with people. From a cosmic perspective, we truly are vulnerable and weird little apes with vastly inflated self-perceptions—perceptions inversely matched by our biased and blinkered understanding of the universe and its forces.

  The twentieth century saw the proliferation of horror across media as technological innovations gave rise to new platforms. Broadcasting technology made possible the wireless transmission of radio horror plays (Hand 2006), and decreasing costs of printing gave rise to pulp and paperback novels, magazines, and comic books. The film medium, however, came to be the dominant platform for American horror for much of the century. This medium has advantages over the literary medium in that it capitalizes on the power of sound to evoke emotion (Hayward 2009); it requires a more modest time investment—an hour and a half or so; and it can be a social experience, more so than typical story reading, which is almost always a solitary pleasure. The collective enjoyment of a horror film is a particular pleasure of that medium. Emotions get amplified as their vocal expressions ripple over audiences in a dark theater (Shteynberg et al. 2014), audience screams reverberate inside and outside the skull, and audiences can share meta-emotions such as embarrassed mirth following a collective startle or vocal dread in anticipation of a scare.

  Universal Studios’ monster films from the 1930s ushered in a golden age of American horror cinema. Such films as Dracula (Browning 1931) and Frankenstein (Whale 1931) brought to life well-known and beloved literary monsters, yet Universal’s brand of Gothic monster-horror—with a fondness for melodrama, romantic settings, and exotic monsters—began to lose steam by the middle of the century, but only temporarily. During the 1950s and 1960s, the old horror films reached a new generation of audiences as the films were picked up by broadcasting companies and shown on the now-ubiquitous television sets in homes across America. The magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland, established in 1958, fueled a growing interest in horror by providing readers with publicity stills from horror films and feature articles on horror actors and monsters.

  The 1950s are often seen as a particularly fertile decade for American horror. The decade saw horror comics rise to controversial prominence in American popular culture. EC Comics, for example, produced the iconic and often quite gory series Tales from the Crypt from 1950 until 1955, when public backlash against allegedly immoral and subversive comics resulted in self-imposed censorship and the death of many comics series (Hajdu 2008). These comics were mar
keted to and primarily read by adolescents, and some feared that the violent and disturbing content of the comics had a destructive effect on impressionable minds. At the same time, writers such as Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and Jack Finney—author of the 1955 sci-fi/horror novel The Body Snatchers—reinvigorated literary horror with stories set in the contemporary, recognizable United States and featuring home-bred monsters, such as Finney’s doppelgänger pod-people, to replace the exotic terrors popular in earlier horror (Jancovich 1996, King 1983a). These and other writers engaged intelligently with horror’s legacy, developing or subverting well-established genre conventions and tropes in an attempt to make them relevant to a new generation of horror fans, thus paving the way for the groundbreaking horror/sci-fi television series The Twilight Zone (Serling 1959–1964). Matheson, for instance, fused the ancient figure of the vampire with a culture-specific anxiety over apocalyptic war and used those elements as a springboard for a profoundly existentialist story in I Am Legend (1954). Shirley Jackson appropriated the old Gothic trope of the haunted house in The Haunting of Hill House (2006 [1959]), poking a little fun at Gothic conventions while using them to delve deeply into dark pockets of human psychology in her depiction of a young, insecure woman’s descent into suicidal madness, possibly fueled by a malign supernatural force. And Robert Bloch provided the eponymous literary source (1959) for Alfred Hitchcock’s watershed Psycho (1960), which challenged Hollywood conventions by killing off its heroine in a fairly graphic and disturbing manner only thirty minutes or so into the movie. Moreover, Psycho offered audiences a monster—Norman Bates—that emerged from the depths of the human mind, not Transylvania or some crumbling Italian castle (Hutchings 2004, Jancovich 1994).