Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Rotten rails, Pre sakes, drag your fish to the screen.
Welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name, every cut, every shadow you dissect.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the final girl on 6th Avenue podcast. My name is Carolyn Smith Hillmer. I am 6th Avenue's very own final girl. And today I want to talk to you about fear.
Not in the obvious way and not just like in the why do we like scary movies way, but in a bit of a deeper way.
Why is it that we seek out fear on purpose?
Because if you really slow down and think about it, it's bizarre.
Truly, fear is not decorative or cute or even like a personality aesthetic. It's the thing that kept humans from walking directly into the dark and getting eaten, right?
Fear is an ancient survival circuitry.
And now we create that feeling and that sensation recreationally, right? We dim the lights, we turn on the movie and press play, and we walk into haunted houses and we put ourselves onto roller coasters and we binge watch true crime and apocalyptic shows before bed at night. And then we say, oh, I'm so overwhelmed.
There's something really psychologically interesting about that contradiction because.
Because we want peace, like, that's what we say. But we voluntarily activate the most primitive alarm system in our bodies.
So what are we doing?
Like, what are we regulating? What are we rehearsing?
What is it that our bodies are metabolizing?
And I just keep coming back to the idea that fear is not just something that we experience and it's something that we actually use.
So let's start with the body, right?
Before fear becomes culture or a metaphor or a personality, it is biology.
When something scares you, even if it's fictitious, your brain does not politely ask you whether or not the threat is real.
It reacts.
The amygdala, it's this small almond shaped structure deep in your temporal lobe. It's essentially your threat radar.
And it scans constantly. It doesn't wait for context or logic. And it really doesn't give a fuck that you're in your own living room.
If something resembles danger, your amygdala fires. And when it fires, it activates the sympathetic nervous system.
So adrenaline releases, your cortisol rises, your heart rate increases, your blood pressure climbs, your pupils dilate, and blood shifts away from digestion towards your large muscle groups. Because your body mobilizes. And this is this happens whether you're face to face with a predator or watching Hereditary alone at night.
The nervous system doesn't distinguish cleanly between real and imagined threat. And there are studies Measuring heart rate variability during horror films.
During horror films that show significant sympathetic activation, even when participants are fully aware that what they're watching is fictional.
And there's this thing that you may not be familiar with it or you might called the Science of Scare project.
And what this project aimed to do was strap heart rate monitors to 250 test subjects and measured which horror films impacted their heart rate in two important ways. The first is the overall beats per minute.
Spikes in heart rate could indicate a movie has maybe effective jump scares that get the blood pumping and also the heart rate variability, which is the time between each heartbeat. So they used this measurement to assess how stressed audience members might become while they're watching the film.
So it's kind of a good indicator of slow burn, you know, fear and dread versus a jump scare.
So they combine the two metrics and determine which scary movies had the biggest impact. And the highest possible score is 100.
So you might be wondering, well, Carolyn, what is the scariest movie then, according to the study?
Well, I.
Looking at the results of this study, I would switch personally, number three and number one.
But I'm going to tell you from 10 to one, 10 being the least scary and one being the most.
The films. Number 10.
Talk to me using the average, you know, BPM of your heart and heart rate variability.
The Scare score was a 75.
Number nine, Hell House LLC.
Number eight, the Exorcism of Emily Rose.
Smile at number seven. Six, Hereditary at 81. The Conjuring number five at 88. Number four, Insidious at 93. Skinamarink at 91. Two, Host at 95. And Sinister at 96.
And man, I.
Skinamarink is maybe one of the, like, I watched it on a plane.
Which I know is not the ideal way to watch a film, especially like Skinamarink. If you're not familiar with the film Skinamarink, I would highly recommend giving it a watch. It's not for everybody. Like most things on this. This podcast are not for everybody. But Skinamarink is a 2022 release from Canada written and directed by Kyle Edward Ball.
And it's, you know, experimental horror. It's extremely divisive.
The film essentially is. You are watching a very young brother and sister who wake up in the middle of the night and they find out that they can't find their dad.
And throughout the film, the windows and the doors and other items within their house are, like, just disappearing. And there's no rhyme or reason for is so scary.
There's, you know monsters, but you don't really see them.
There's this whole, you know, feeling of dread as, you know, every time you pan over, like, the door is gone or the window is gone, right. There's a sense of like, wow, I can't escape this.
And what I like about Skinamarink is that my heart rate throughout the film was so high that my aura ring was sending me alerts asking me if I was okay versus when I watched Sinister.
I.
Obviously, the jump scares got me, like, they're extraordinarily effective, but it didn't keep me engaged in the same way throughout the film as Skinamarink did, because there's very, very little dialogue in Skinamarink. So the whole thing is really just the atmosphere and how you are, you know, experiencing this atmosphere through the eyes of these two children.
So I don't know, for me, I would skip.
I would switch. Right? I would switch Sinister and Skinamarink as number one and number three. But regardless, what this study proves is that the body believes this. The body believes this, you know, this fear.
And even though these things are fictional and. And that's what's so important, because when we talk about fear as entertainment, we're not talking about pretend fear. We're talking about real physiological arousal triggered by a simulated threat.
So the question then becomes, why would we voluntarily activate a survival system?
And so this is where regulation comes in. We. Right. There's a theory in media psychology called excitation transfer theory.
And, you know, it's proposed originally by Dolph Zilman. And this theory suggests that physical arousal, physiological arousal from fear, doesn't just disappear after the threat resolves. And that's one thing that I really kind of wish that the Science of Scare project had monitored was, I would love to know what the quality of the participants in the study, what the quality of their sleep was that night, and what their heart rate looked like throughout that night right. After watching the film.
Because that would then show how even after you turn the film off, it doesn't just dissipate. Right. It continues to stay with you.
But other than that, I think it's an incredible.
It's an incredible science project. Right? This is something that we've all wondered about for so long. Right? How do you really determine objectively what is the scariest movie?
And I think using a scientific measurement like heart rate beats per minute and variability is pretty powerful.
So this physiological arousal from fear doesn't disappear after the threat is removed. It actually gets reinterpreted. So your heart is racing, your muscles are tense, and your alertness is heightened. But when the scare passes and you realize that you're safe, the same arousal transforms into relief, thrill, even pleasure sometimes. And the body goes from a state of activation to a state of safety.
And that contrast is so powerful because relief is actually rewarding, right? I mean, your dopamine increases, your endorphins release and your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in and says, okay, we're okay, we survived.
And that survival itself becomes pleasurable.
So horror isn't just about fear.
It's about controlled activation followed by controlled resolution.
It's about stressing the nervous system and then proving it can come back down.
And that cycle is the foundation of resilience. Resilience is not the absence of stress. It's the ability to move through activation and return to baseline.
And horror films in a contained environment let you practice that.
Right?
There was actually a study published in 22020 during the, you know, the pandemic, the COVID pandemic, suggesting that people who regularly consumed horrors reported greater physiological preparedness and resilience during this lockdown. Which is fascinating when you think about it, because what is horror really other than a catastrophic simulation?
Horror can look like pandemics, monsters, societal collapse, home invasions, possession, isolation.
And films like Contagion suddenly didn't seem like fiction anymore.
And I happen to think that Contagion is a very effective horror film.
I found myself frightened watching it for certain, and it's definitely something that I've not forgotten.
And, you know, much like I talk about or have talked before about how 28 days later is extremely effective.
You know, even though it's, it's a bit of an older film, right. Contagion came out in 2011, directed by Steven Soderbergh, who, you know, is obviously amazing. And the, the cast of the film is incredible, right? You have Kate Winslet and Gwyneth Paltrow and Matt Damon and Jude Law and Laurence Fishburne. And the plot of the film is essentially concerning the spread of a highly contagious virus.
And it's, it's, you know, it's transmitted through like respiratory droplets. And so the film is watching, you know, the spread of this virus, attempting by medical researchers to identify and contain this disease.
There's a loss of order, of social order aspect as the virus spreads worldwide. And then, you know, eventually there's this introduction of a sort of vaccine to halt its spread. And it's, it's a multi narrative cinema, you know, it's it's many different independent narratives that kind of all are related, which I often find to be some of the most. I often find it to be the most entertaining type of storytelling, if I'm honest.
And so if you haven't seen Contagion,
[00:15:46] Speaker C: give it a watch.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: But people who had previously immersed themselves in apocalyptic media reported feeling more mentally equipped to handle the uncertainty of the. Of COVID right? And it's not because they enjoyed the chaos, but it's actually because they had rehearsed it. And rehearsal reduces shock.
Your brain builds predictive models. And you know, if you've mentally simulated disaster before, your nervous system doesn't treat uncertainty as completely novel.
And you might, you know, if you work in a corporate environment, you, or even not actually, if you work in any sort of environment in which there are strong established risk management protocols, you are familiar with and have received training on what to do in the event that there's an active shooter in your workplace, or if there is a riot outside, or if there is a bomb threat, right? And so you practice these things. So that way, God forbid, the day comes where you have to know what to do in that situation, your body doesn't immediately result to instant panic and not knowing what to do, right? You know what to do because you've practiced it and you've rehearsed it. And so simulating disaster means that your nervous system doesn't treat these things as a new first time experience. And this novelty is what spikes anxiety the most.
Uncertainty without a model is terrifying.
And uncertainty without a model is stressful.
You're able to navigate it, but it's very stressful. Like, wouldn't it be so much better if you were simply prepared for this active shooter incident rather than never having even thought through it or practiced it in a, in a drill, right? Or evacuated a building in practice just to make sure you know where to go.
So maybe horror is rehearsal, maybe it is emotional simulation. Maybe it's us saying to our own nervous systems, let's practice being afraid and surviving it and coming back down afterwards. And that feels empowering.
But of course, not everyone likes horror.
And that difference is just as interesting because enjoyment of fear isn't random.
It actually correlates with personality. So let's talk about trait theory for a second.
The Big 5 personality model, which you might be familiar with, measures openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
This has been studied extensively in relation to horror consumption.
And so people that are high in openness to experience, which means that they're curious and imaginative and drawn to novel stimuli, are significantly more likely to enjoy horror. And that makes sense because horror is intense, it's symbolic, it's abstract, and it plays with reality.
So high openness individuals tolerate ambiguity better.
They're comfortable sitting inside unsettling imagery, and they don't need an immediate resolution.
And this makes sense, right? Because horror is intense and it's symbolic and it's abstract and it plays with reality, right? So being able to absorb this unsettling imagery and not needing that immediate resolution, you know, is definitely, definitely, you know, something that I consider myself a very highly open person. And for me, this is great, right? I don't need. I don't need resolutions to films. More often than not, I prefer that there isn't one because I get to kind of create my own ending in my head and my own resolution.
Not everybody's like that, right? Because there's another major factor with this, and that would be sensation seeking. Sensation seeking is a trait that's often associated with dopamine sensitivity.
So this is kind of essentially how strongly you crave intense experiences. So high sensation seekers pursue stimulation. They like roller coasters, they like extreme sports, and they like emotional intensity.
And horror delivers all of that safely.
It spikes adrenaline without actual physical risk.
But here's where it gets a little bit more complicated.
Let's think about neuroticism.
Neuroticism refers to emotional reactivity, how sensitive you are to stress, anxiety, mood fluctuations.
Intuitively, you might assume highly neurotic individuals would avoid horror altogether. But the research actually shows some mixed results.
Some high neuroticism individuals avoid horror because it overwhelms them, but others consume more of it.
And this is where anxiety research becomes relevant.
Because if you live with generalized anxiety, for instance, your fear is often diffused.
It's not really tied to a visible monster. It's not tied to, like, a concrete threat. It's more of an ambient dread.
And ambient dread is exhausting.
But horror takes that, you know, sort of shapeless anxiety and gives it form.
So instead of, you know, something bad might happen, right? That's what you live with. If you live with generalized anxiety is just this constant fear that something bad, it might happen to you.
So instead of that, you get a visual.
Here is the monster, this is your threat.
Here's the narrative arc here.
And so that sort of containment of that anxiety and giving it a form reduces the chaos of the brain. And that's regulating, right?
It's one of the reasons why and you may know, but I'm not particularly a fan of this film. But films like the Babadook resonate so deeply with audiences who struggle from and with grief or depression. And it's because the monster isn't random.
It's an embodiment of suppressed emotion.
Right? The Babadook centers around a mother and a son who are grieving the loss of, like, you know, the mother's husband and the son's father. And this grief is something that they sort of fear but don't really acknowledge, because grief is something that, I mean, there's a reason why there are medical professionals in a world that exist that only work with individuals struggling with grief, because grief is such a powerful, powerful feeling, and it has so many different stages and takes on so many different forms for everyone, right? No one person grieves the same as another person.
And it's highly, highly fact and case by case specific.
[00:24:35] Speaker C: But
[00:24:37] Speaker B: instead of saying, well, you know, grief to me is sadness and grief to me is anger, and grief to me is the complete denial of acknowledging that the situation happened so I don't have to deal with it, the monster in the Babadook doesn't allow for that avoidance and denial to take place.
So it's a physical embodiment of this suppressed emotion.
It gives it a face, it gives it a name, it gives it actions.
We could also look at. It Follows.
I love It Follows.
It Follows is essentially about a young girl who is struggling with, you know, anxiety.
And this anxiety looks like every time you have sex with someone, there is now a naked, large person that only you can see following you around. I very much think it's a metaphor for std, sexually transmitted disease.
And throughout the film, right, the threat is always slow, but it is inevitable. And it's always approaching that is anxiety.
It doesn't sprint and doesn't explode.
Anxiety sort of just walks towards you constantly.
And when anxiety becomes metaphor, it becomes more manageable because you can look at it and see it, you can analyze it and you can talk about it.
And that's what the main character in It Follows does, is she can see this anxiety because they look like people that are following her.
And she can talk about it with her friends, right? And those around her to say, like, I'm struggling with this thing, you know, And I know that it may not be relevant to you and you may not be experiencing it as well, but I am.
And through that, you're able to sort of analyze it when you allow other people in.
And at the end of the film.
Whether this anxiety resolves cleanly or not, you step out of the narrative, you're still here, your nervous system calms down, and you practiced tolerating fear without disintegrating.
That matters.
So let's stay with this idea that fear can be regulating, because that sounds counterintuitive at first.
Fear feels destabilizing, but controlled, predictable, chosen fear is different.
There's a body of research in media psychology by Ron Tamberini and James Preentz, specifically their 1990 paper on disposition theory and the enjoyment of frightening media, where they look at why people voluntarily expose themselves to to fear inducing content.
One of those arguments that they make is that enjoyment isn't just about liking fear itself. It's about the emotional payoff that comes from resolution, from seeing justice restored or order returned, or at the very least, having that threat contained.
Then in 1996, Dolph Zelman's excitation transfer theory expanded that idea. He argued that the physiological arousal lingers and intensifies whatever emotion follows it. So the fear that you feel during a horror film amplifies the relief and the pleasure that you feel when the threat resolves.
Which means the more intense the fear, the bigger the payoff.
But here's where it gets even more interesting psychologically.
There's something called anxiety sensitivity, a construct studied extensively by researchers like Steven rice and Richard McNally. Anxiety sensitivity refers to how afraid you are of your own fear symptoms.
So, for example, if your heart starts racing, do you interpret that as dangerous or uncomfortable?
People high in anxiety sensitivity are afraid of the sensations of fear itself. They're afraid of the racing heart and the dizziness and the sweating.
And they interpret those sensations as catastrophic, right? So now think about horror movies. They deliberately trigger those sensations.
Why would someone high in anxiety ever choose to watch or participate in a horror film?
So here's the paradox.
Some research suggests that voluntary exposure to fear in safe contexts can function similarly to exposure therapy.
And I'm sure you've maybe never thought of exposure therapy in this capacity.
But exposure therapy, which is used in cognitive behavioral treatments for anxiety disorders, works by gradually exposing someone to a feared stimuli in a controlled environment, so that the nervous system learns that activation does not equal catastrophe, right?
Think of as an example if someone is afraid of bugs or arachnids, right? Which I am.
I very much am. There's no secret about that. I'm terrified of anything that has basically a sort of exoskeleton of sorts and has more than two or four limbs and let's say for example, that you were to be put in a room with a tarantula.
I know.
I know that tarantulas are not inherently dangerous. They People have them as pets. Like, I understand that there's nothing inherently dangerous about a tarantula simply even being in the same room as me. Even though when I think about the fact that tarantulas live on the same planet that I do, it makes me want to die.
But
[00:31:59] Speaker C: if someone were to put me in a room with a tarantula, of
[00:32:02] Speaker B: course I understand that catastrophe will not take place. Right? There's no.
Nothing is gonna happen or come in that murders my entire family or kills
[00:32:16] Speaker C: me or makes the world stop spinning, right? So
[00:32:24] Speaker B: I know that even if I watch a horror film about
[00:32:33] Speaker C: a surgery
[00:32:33] Speaker B: gone wrong, which is one of my biggest fears, and I would argue. I would argue is a good, natural thing to be fearful of, because it does happen.
It does. There's not been a case that I'm aware of where a tarantula is in the same room as another human being and their whole family dies.
And it's correlated to the fact that the tarantula is in the room.
[00:32:58] Speaker C: But I am terribly afraid of a surgery gone wrong,
[00:33:04] Speaker B: especially in instances where, like, anesthesia doesn't really work.
You, I'm sure, remember. I remember the trailers to this film.
I'll never forget them.
[00:33:20] Speaker C: It's called Awake. It was a 2007 release. It's a psychological thriller.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: And the film is about a person who experiences anesthetic awareness during a heart transplant. So he's paralyzed and conscious at the same time.
And he can overhear, you know, sort of all the things that are happening around him.
And so, you know, they're awake, they're paralyzed, and they're not able to communicate to the doctors that they're conscious.
And so it's one of the most terrifying things I could ever imagine happening ever, ever in the world.
So if I were to watch Awake, it would sort of communicate to me, okay, this is a fear that I have.
But, you know, he didn't die during the surgery.
There wasn't an ultimate catastrophe. I'm not taking away the fact that real people experience this and do suffer with the trauma of being aware of this experience. And I'm not diminishing that in any capacity. I feel so deeply for people that have experienced this.
But, you know, it's not that the son would die instantly if that were to happen to me, right?
So horror films can function as this sort of, like, informal exposure. So that way, I don't actually have to endure a surgery while I am paralyzed by anesthetic awareness to prove to myself, right, that it's something that you can survive.
So in this controlled environment, you know, this, this informal exposure, you're able to activate. Your heart is able to race, maybe you sweat, you tense up, but then nothing bad happens to you, and you survive it.
And over time, your brain begins to update its prediction model.
This is very similar to what clinical psychologist Michelle Krask describes in her work on inhibitory learning models of exposure therapy. It's this idea that fear reduction isn't about eliminating anxiety. It's about building new safety associations.
And horror gives you fear activation followed by safety over and over and over again.
Every time you watch a horror film, you activate, you have fear activation. And then you remember that you're in a movie theater with a hundred people and that nothing bad's gonna happen to you or that you know, you.
And for some people, that's deeply regulating. I think not for everyone, but some.
There's also a study published in 2020 by Colton Scrivener and colleagues examining horror fans during the, you know, like I mentioned before, the COVID 19 pandemic. And they found that those individuals who frequently consumed that media felt more prepared and resilient during these crises.
So Scrivener's suggestion of horror acting as a simulation tool allows for that mental rehearsal. And the word simulation continues to come up, right? Fear as rehearsal or practice or controlled chaos.
So let's pivot slightly, because regulation is just one piece, but personality is an entirely other piece.
And when we talk about the big five, right, the openness, the conscientiousness, the extroversion, the agreeableness, the neuroticism, these are the strongest predictors of horror enjoyment, tending to be openness and sensitivity seeking. So Marvin Zuckerman's work on sensation seeking in the 1970s and 80s laid the groundwork for this.
High sensation seekers require more stimulation to feel engaged, and their dopamine systems respond differently to novelty and intensity. For them, horror isn't overwhelming.
It's actually stimulating.
Low sensation seekers might experience the same stimuli as distressing more than exciting.
And, you know, same movie, different nervous system thresholds.
But then you take someone who is highly neurotic, and some of those, those individuals would avoid horror because it destabilizes them. But others engage with it because it mirrors their internal landscape.
This diffuse of anxiety becomes concrete, and internal dread becomes visible.
[00:38:48] Speaker C: And visible threats are easier to process. Right, We've talked about this
[00:38:55] Speaker B: one other Example of this would be the Invisible Man.
[00:38:58] Speaker C: Right? Let's think about that for a second.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: That film is literally about gaslighting and an unseen threat. But psychologically, it's about the terror of not being believed, the anxiety of invisible danger.
For someone who's experienced that dynamic, the film isn't just scary, it's actually validating.
And validation regulates. Right, Maybe the Black Swan, right, is a beautiful film.
Black Swan is about two ballet dancers who are sort of mirrors of one another, and they are participating in the Black Swan, the ballet, or they're playing the part of the Black Swan.
It's about identity fracture and hallucination and perfectionism and body horror as a sense of self criticism.
And that's neuroticism externalized.
The monster isn't just supernatural, it's internal pressure.
Horror then becomes your own personality mirror. And it shows you exaggerated versions of your own cognitive distortions, right? That paranoia, the splitting, the hyper vigilance, the catastrophizing. And there's something strangely grounding about seeing your internal fears projected onto a screen.
It says to that person that this is shareable.
This isn't something that's just inside of me.
So let's talk about trauma for a minute, because this part is delicate.
Trauma sensitizes the nervous system.
Bessel van der Kolk in the Body Keeps the Score, talks about how trauma rewires your threat perception.
The amygdala becomes hyperactive. The prefrontal cortex, you know, your rational regulator becomes less effective under stress, which means that your baseline arousal is higher.
So why would someone with trauma history engage with horror films?
Well, for some, they don't because it's overwhelming.
But for others, horror provides something that real trauma didn't, which is controlled.
In trauma, fear is involuntary.
In horror, fear is chosen.
You press play, you can press stop whenever you want.
You know how it ends.
And that type of predictability is everything you know. There's also research by Dolph Zilman in Affect Regulation suggesting that individuals sometimes seek out emotions congruent with their internal state.
It's a concept explored in Zilman's mood management theory.
And if your internal world already feels chaotic, horror may feel congruent to you. Rather than jarring, it sort of matches your nervous system's baseline.
And that matching can feel stabilizing.
That doesn't mean that horror heals trauma, but it can provide structured exposure to intense affect. And structure makes intensity survivable.
[00:42:42] Speaker C: But now let's widen the lens.
Fear is not just regulation, it's actually cultural. If you think about it, every era sort of builds its own monsters out of its own anxieties. Then in 1960, Psycho, right, Alfred Hitchcock's film disrupted audiences because it shattered trust in normalcy. The motel owner next door, the polite young man, the hidden deviance of it all.
And post war America was dealing with conformity and repression and the fear that darkness lived sort of beneath the surface of suburban order.
And then in 1973, we have the Exorcist, right? And the Exorcist captured cultural panic at the time around moral decay and the loss of religious authority and the vulnerability of children, really.
And even into the late 70s and 80s, there were slashers, right? Like, that was a huge time for slasher films. So we had Halloween and A Nightmare on Elm street, Friday the 13th. Like, these films turned adolescence into a sort of battleground of sex and autonomy and rebellion and punishment.
And then post 9 11, we had a shift in horror again. We had films like Saw and Hostel. And those were incredibly graphic, gory, bodily invasive.
Yeah, I think invasive is a good word because fear moved from this supernatural right to being more of a physical vulnerability. We have that loss of control and randomized violence and institutional failure.
And then in 2017, Jordan Peele's get out reframed horror through racial tension and hypocrisy. And the monster wasn't a ghost. It was the politeness, it was the smiling, assimilation, it was the erasure of identity. Jordan Peele quite literally turned microaggressions into body horror.
If you've never seen Get Out, I highly recommend.
It is a film that has a black man who is dating a white woman, and he goes to stay with her and her family for, you know, a period of time. And during that period of time, a sort of plot uncovers where he realizes that his girlfriend brings people, brings black people, men to her family's home, so that way they can be used to carry out a sort of life extension. I don't want to give it away.
It's horrific.
And so this type of, you know, horror that Jordan Peele kind of created for us is cultural fear, but it's made visible.
And even more recently, you have films like Hereditary and Midsommar, which lean into grief and inherited trauma and relational breakdown. So horror isn't just external, it's generational and psychological and existential. And I think that because culturally, we're less afraid of monsters now and we're actually more afraid of ourselves.
So let's actually sit inside of a scene for a minute because it's one thing to talk about theory, like, you know, the nervous system and excitation transfer and personality traits, but horror actually works through craft and precision. So let's go back to Psycho.
The shower scene, the infamous shower scene is talked about constantly. But what's fascinating isn't just the violence. It's how little you actually see.
Alfred Hitchcock never shows the knife entering the flesh of this woman.
The terror that we feel is constructed through editing.
There's rapid cuts and close ups and like these violins that screech, you know, as the. As the score. And that music, which was composed by Bernard Herrmann, is doing almost all of the emotional work because you're not actually seeing anything.
Philip Goldstein in the Sounds of Fear Music and horror Films talks about how dissonance in horror scores destabilizes the listener's predictive processing.
So basically, our brains are constantly anticipating resolution in music.
So when we hear unresolved dissonant strings like in Psycho, the brain stays tense because the expected harmonic resolution never fully arrives.
So you're neurologically suspended. And that sound never lets you kind of settle.
But that's intentional, right? Because horror manipulates your expectations and it stretches anticipation longer than comfort would allow.
But that anticipation is more distressing than the actual scare itself.
So it's more terrifying for us to have not seen this knife entering the flesh of this woman in the shower than it would have been if we had actually seen it without any of the score. Right.
There's actually research that shows that uncertainty produces more sustained anxiety than known negative outcomes. In other words, waiting for something bad to happen can be more stressful than when it actually finally does happen. And horror directors understand this intuitively.
So they kind of withhold information and they withhold you from seeing things.
They pace things a little differently and they let the silence linger. Think about a great example. A Quiet Place.
A Quiet place is a 2018 post apocalyptic horror film directed by John Krasinski, starring Emily Blunt. And the whole film is essentially based around a story of a mother and a father struggling to raise their kids and survive in this post apocalyptic world, right, that has been inhabited by these otherworldly creatures, monsters, they look like to me, that are blind, but they have an acute sense, heightened sense of hearing. It's sort of like the.
The monsters that you see in the Descent, right? They, they can't see very well, but they can hear everything.
And so that silence becomes the threat.
The sound design becomes psychological architecture in a way.
And when you remove the dialogue and the ambient noise, every tiny sound becomes Amplified. And, of course, a lot of this has to do with the way that the film is mixed, right? So they'll have certain, you know, sounds that they'll make louder, right? Especially. This is especially true when you watch things in a theater, right, because you have surround sound, and so you're able to hear things a lot more clearly, and you're able to hear things that you otherwise probably would not have heard if you were watching it at home or even watching it with headphones in.
The way that things are mixed to be played in theaters allows, I think, for this type of scare and this type of horror to really thrive because every single small sound is so amplified. And your brain is scanning, and scanning is a survival behavior. And your auditory cortex heightens sensitivity. So you, like, lean forward in your chair and your body prepares for this scare. It's. It's participatory, right?
So let's contrast that with Get Out. Get out isn't relying on jump scares the way that a slasher does. It's not, you know, the way that Michael comes, you know, into the closet or the way that Freddy emerges from the bottom of the bathtub.
It builds unease socially. And the horror in get out accumulates through these micro behaviors. You have politeness, but all of the politeness feels rehearsed. And you have compliments, but they don't really land right.
And everyone's smiling, but the smiles don't really reach the eyes, so they're sort of empty.
And Jordan Peele sort of weaponizes this social discomfort. And that's what brilliant is that the audience often recognizes the tension before the protagonist even does.
And that creates dramatic irony.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: You're.
[00:52:27] Speaker C: You're ahead of the character, right? You're. You're ahead of the main character. And that produces a different type of anxiety because you're watching someone walk around a trap that you already see.
And psychologically, that activates protective instinct, right? You have your mirror neurons, which fire and your empathy circuits. Engagement. You're not just afraid of yourself. You're actually afraid for him. And he's not a real person, right? He's a. He's an actor playing a character in a film.
And that fear for others activates very similar psychological responses to fear for the self. So horror isn't always solitary. Sometimes it's relational.
Going back to Ari Astor's film Hereditary again, right? Toni Collette at the dinner table scene.
The dinner table scene is one of the greatest scenes of all time, horror or otherwise, right? That fucking face on your face is one of the greatest lines of any film ever delivered. And there's no supernatural events, there's no music swell, nothing jump cuts. It's literally just the raw grief of this family turning into accusations that this mother is accusing the death of her daughter, who is played by Millie Shapiro, onto her son.
And that scene is horrifying because it removes the supernatural buffer entirely, right? It's, it's plausible. Like you could see this happening in real life. It's domestic, it's happening inside of their home, and it's intimate because it's the, the deepest feelings that these family members have that we're seeing play out on screen. So this horror is emotional exposure, which is very, you know, very scary for many people because that emotional exposure can be just as physiologically activating as a physical threat. And studies in social neuroscience show that social rejection activates similar neural pathways as physical pain, right? So like, if you were to ask someone on a date and they said no, you might feel, you'll say, like, oh, that's hurtful or that's painful, but you might actually feel physical pain.
So when horror taps into relational rupture, right, that, that shame and betrayal, your brain processes it as a real threat. And that might be why modern horror leans more psychological, because we're hyper aware of social fracture.
So horror evolves, right, Accordingly.
And so I want to zoom back out again, because fear isn't just individual, it's collective. And when you watch horror in a theater, right, something different happens because you have other people with you, right? You have laughter. And people will gasp, right, when they see something on the screen. And they might even clutch the arms of a stranger.
There's research in emotional contagion, this is done by Elaine Hatfield, for example, showing that emotions spread rapidly in groups through a sort of unconscious mimicry. So when someone next to you jumps at a jump scare, your body reacts faster.
That shared fear amplifies the intensity, but it also amplifies the relief, because when everyone exhales together, it actually bonds you.
So sociologist Emile Durkheim called this collective effervescence, the heightened emotional energy that emerges in shared ritual spaces. And horror screenings absolutely function like a ritual. You all gather in one place at the same time, the lights turn off, you endure this film together, and you exit a different person than the one that you entered as. And that's communal regulation, right?
On the other hand, there's fandom and Matt Hill's and fan Cultures talks about how fans don't just consume media, they build identity around it.
There's horror conventions, right? That you can go to, you can cosplay as your favorite characters. You can participate in online forums. There are rewatching rituals, right? Like, you know, the times where it is an actual. The calendar falls just so that it is a Friday and that Friday is a third, the 13th day of the month, right? And so there will be theaters around the country that will play Friday the 13th, and people gather to rewatch this film even though they've already seen it a hundred times, because it's so fun to re watch it in this community.
Because fear becomes your community. It's fascinating because evolutionarily, fear was always about isolation from threat.
And now fear becomes a bridge between people. And there's something very human about saying, that really fucking scared me.
And being able to say and admit, like, me too.
Shared vulnerability reduces the shame. And when horror fans often talk about feeling understood in those spaces, it makes sense. If you enjoy intense emotional states that other people avoid, you might feel different. So finding others who lean into this sort of similar darkness feels validating, and validation regulates identity.
So let's take that and get a little bit existential for a minute. Because underneath monsters and jump scares and personality traits, horror always circles one thing, which is death. And it's not always literal death. Sometimes it's relational death or identity death, and sometimes ego death.
But mortality is the undertone.
The terror management theory, which, if you're not familiar, is, you know, developed by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Puzinski, and that argues that much of human behavior is driven by your awareness of your own mortality.
We all know that we're going to die.
That knowledge of knowing that we're going to die is destabilizing.
So we build cultural systems and beliefs and identities to, like, buffer against that anxiety.
And horror confronts death directly but safely because you watch someone else die, you watch someone else confront annihilation, yet you remain, you survive the film.
And that symbolic survival reinforces your psychological buffer. It's kind of like saying, death exists, but not tonight.
And maybe that's part of the appeal, because we can't rehearse actual death, but we can rehearse proximity to it.
And rehearsal reduces terror.
And I keep coming back to this idea that horror is a rehearsal space, and it's not just for a disaster, but it's for the self.
When you watch a horror movie, you often ask yourself, what would I do?
Would I run?
Would I freeze?
Would I sacrifice myself? Would I protect someone else?
Horror sort of forces moral simulation, and moral simulation clarifies identity because you actually get to test in that moment who you think you are without consequence, because nothing you know is actually going to happen as a result of what you're doing in that movie theater.
That's pretty powerful because identity isn't built only in the calm. It's built in imagined crisis.
So we've talked about the body.
We've talked about regulation.
We have talked about personality traits.
We've talked about anxiety, sensitivity and exposure.
We've talked about trauma and control.
We've talked about culture building monsters out of its fears.
We've sat inside scenes.
We've talked about music and pacing and silence.
We've talked about collective fear and fandom.
But I want to slow this down one more time and kind of pull the threads together without tightening them too much.
Because I think the most interesting thing about horror isn't that it scares us.
It's more so that it organizes fear.
And humans need organization.
[01:01:44] Speaker B: There's research in cognitive neuroscience, particularly predictive
[01:01:48] Speaker C: models, predictive processing models suggesting that the brain is constantly trying to minimize uncertainty.
The brain is a prediction machine.
It builds models of the world and updates them based on error signals.
Uncertainty, especially unstructured uncertainty, is metabolically sensitive and expensive.
It stresses the system.
That's why ambiguity can actually feel worse than bad news, because at least bad news is defined.
There's a 2016 study by Hirsch, Marr, Peterson et al. On the intolerance of uncertainty that found individuals high in uncertainty intolerance experience significantly more anxiety when outcomes are unclear, even if those outcomes aren't necessarily negative.
The unknown is destabilizing.
Now you think about horror. Structurally, horror introduces the unknown, but then gradually reveals its shape, even in ambiguous endings. The threat has a pattern, has a rhythm, has rules.
Then you learn how the monster operates.
And once something has rules, it's less chaotic, even if it's lethal.
I think Yorgos Lanthimos really proves this well, right. He.
His films are taking place in an experience, right?
In a world, an experience that has defined rules.
[01:03:36] Speaker B: And so the killing of a sacred deer, right? Great film.
[01:03:41] Speaker C: You have a man
[01:03:45] Speaker B: who has all
[01:03:46] Speaker C: of these things happening to his family. He's a doctor, and he has medical things that are happening to his children, their health, and he can't make heads or tails of it.
And then in comes Barry Keoghan's character who sort of says, well, I know that there's this chaos that's happening to you and your family.
If you want to make it stop, I know how. Because there's. Here's this defined set of rules that you have to play by. And so once we sort of have those rules, the film takes a different tone.
It no longer becomes like, wow, what the fuck is all of this stuff that's happening? Why is it that this man's son can't walk anymore all of a sudden? And why is it that his children are not eating anymore? Right. We have this sort of defined set of rules to live through. And Yorgos Lanthimos does a great job with these rule sets that he creates for this, his films, because he doesn't allow the film to stop being mortifying to witness once those rules are introduced.
Even in something like the Witch, the Witch feels atmospheric and ambiguous. If you haven't seen the Witch again, highly recommend.
The witch was a 2015 folk horror film directed and written by Robert Eggers, starring Anya Taylor Joy, who I happen to love. And the whole film is set in New England in the 1630s.
And there's this narrative that kind of unfolds about a Puritan family.
They're being preyed upon by this evil force that they can't quite figure out that lives in a wooded area by their farm.
And in their sort of desperation, they turn to others, you know, in their community and in their family, even when their oldest daughter has been accused of being a witch, which at the time was obviously like, one of the worst things you could accuse a woman of being.
And so it is an atmospheric film. It's very ambiguous, but there's still this sort of internal logic, because there are boundaries to the madness.
There is structure to that paranoia. And that structure regulates.
And I think that's why horror can feel strangely soothing to some people, because real life fear is often amorphous.
There's health anxiety, climate anxiety, economic instability, aging, relational uncertainty, loss.
These fears don't have jump scares, right?
You don't wake up on your birthday and have a jump scare that you're a different number.
They have slow dread, and horror takes slow dread and dramatizes it, right? Like it makes it into a drama. It speeds it up and it intensifies, frames it for you. And then when the movie is over, it ends it. And the ending matters, even if the ending is tragic, especially if the ending is unresolved.
The credits roll, your body recalibrates, your nervous system completes a stress cycle.
Emily Genagowski talks about this in Burnout and Their Work. Burnout. The importance of completing the stress response cycle. Your body needs a signal that the threat is over, and horror provides that signal. Because you sit in activation, you endure it, and then you Exit cycle complete.
And when you complete stress cycles regularly, particularly in contained environments, you build tolerance for activation, and that's regulation. It's not the absence of fear. Certainly not.
It's the ability to move through it.
Now take that and layer a personality on top of it.
If you're high in openness, horror might feel intellectually stimulating to you.
If you're high in sensation seeking, it might feel thrilling.
If you score highly in neuroticism, it might feel like externalized anxiety.
If you have trauma history, it might feel like reclaiming control.
If you're low intolerance for uncertainty, horror might feel unbearable. Same stimulus, right?
[01:08:37] Speaker B: We're all.
[01:08:38] Speaker C: You could have five to six people, five to 10 people, right in one room watching the same film at the same time in the same setting, same stimulus. But you'll all have different experiences because you all have different personalities and different nervous systems and different histories. Your profile for your traits are different. And that's why conversations about horror enjoyment can feel so personal.
When someone says, I don't understand that. You can watch that, what they're often really saying is, my nervous system would not enjoy that.
And that's valid.
But for others, horror isn't dysregulating, it's calibrating.
Well, now let's bring culture back in, because culture is just collective nervous system.
Every era has ambient anxiety, and horror becomes the art form that metabolizes it.
Cold War paranoia gave us invasion narratives.
Religious panic gave us films about possession.
Economic collapse gave us apocalyptic wastelands.
Digital surveillance gave us psychological invasion. And social fracture gave us allegorical horror like another Jordan Peele film us, where the monster is the very self that you've repressed. Or the Babadook, where the grief is shown to you as a creature, or midsommar, where relational codependency inevitably becomes ritual sacrifice.
The monster is rarely random.
It's highly contextual. And when you watch horror, you're not just watching fear. You're watching cultural anxiety crystallized into narrative and participating in it.
Which brings us back to fandom and shared viewing. When you and thousands of other people process the same fear together in theaters, online forums, conventions, you're collectively metabolizing anxiety.
And Matt Hills talks about how fan communities create interpretive frameworks right around the media. They analyze and debate and sort of reinterpret, which means that the fear doesn't just spike and vanish. It gets discussed and dissected.
And through that discussion and dissection, it gets transformed. That transformation reduces the helplessness.
Talking about fear changes its texture.
It moves from visceral to conceptual and from raw to reflective. And that shift is regulation also in and of itself.
So I want to end somewhere a little bit quieter.
Because underneath biology and personality and culture, there's something deeply human about choosing fear.
It's almost philosophical.
When you watch horror, you're brushing up against your own fragility.
You're watching characters lose control. They lose safety, lose identity, and sometimes even lose their life.
But here you are, and you're staying with it, and you're not turning away.
That matters, because avoidance strengthens fear.
Engagement softens it.
And horror is engagement, practice. You're saying, I can look at this, I can feel this, I can tolerate this.
I can come back down from this.
And that might be the real appeal here. It's not the adrenaline or the shock, but proof. It's the proof that you can enter intensity and exit fully intact.
Proof that activation doesn't require or equal annihilation.
Proof that fear rises and falls. And maybe that's why we willingly scare ourselves.
Not because we enjoy suffering, but because we're practicing survival.
We're practicing our identity and our regulation and our mortality in a safe container. So the next time you press play on something terrifying, maybe ask yourself, what am I rehearsing right now?
Is it resilience?
Control?
Anxiety?
Am I bonding with other people?
Am I confronting mortality?
Maybe I'm testing who I would be under pressure, because I don't think it's random. I think the stories were drawn to reveal the shape of our fears. And maybe the shape of our fears reveals the shape of our nervous systems. And maybe, just maybe, horror isn't about loving fear.
It's about learning how to live with it.
I genuinely love to know. Are you someone who seeks out horror or avoids it? And if you seek it out, what do you think that your nervous system is practicing?
I can't say for certain that I know what my nervous system is practicing for.
But I do find this concept of practicing and, you know, horror as rehearsal very, very intriguing.
So that's what I have to say today.
I'm gonna leave it there.
I hope you've enjoyed this episode.
Before I let you go, of course, I have to remind you that the final girl on 6th Avenue is part of the incredible Morbidly Beautiful network. Morbidly Beautiful is your home for horror. If you love horror in any way, shape or form, then you are welcome with us@morbidly beautiful.com.
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And yeah, I'll talk to you very, very soon. Thanks for listening. And never Forget that I'm 6th Avenue's very own final.
[01:15:43] Speaker B: Grave.
[01:15:45] Speaker A: Drag your f to the scre welcome to the graveyard where the film screams back your name Every cut, every shadow you dissect the dark exclaim.
