Creativity from constraints
You know the drill. You went to the movies to watch the latest installment or the much talked about reboot of your favourite horror series. You read the interviews, you heard the podcasts, you checked some quite promising non-spoiler reviews. This time it really looked like the new movie could be a lot of fun. All you hoped for was some fresh thrills and a breath of fresh air, and then… meh. Nothing. Been there, done that. Déjà vu. Just more of the same.
Is the narrative palette of the horror genre somewhat more limited than other genres? Which narrative variants are the most successful? All else being equal, we can easily expect to see certain themes catch the interest of the public, while other subjects are easily skipped, avoided, or forgotten. As a matter of fact, we are able to imagine more things than what might be optimally attention-grabbing. This cognitive ability is quite an adaptive asset in an ever-changing world, especially when we have to consider worst case scenarios and plan for potential disasters. However, you can really have too much of a good thing. Just as such ruminations can easily become cognitively maladaptive (Clark and Beck 2011), too much horror can become financially maladaptive. Not dissimilar from the alcohol industry warning “drink responsibly,” you may want your customers drunk enough to make a profit but sober enough to keep on buying your products. This means that indulging in extreme horror tropes can become quite taxing visually and psychologically – which, apart from initial shock value, attention-grabbing headlines, and possibly the creation of a sub-genre niche, translates into minimal revenues, if any, for the industry as a whole (Fecile 2018; Nemeth 2015).
Be that as it may, a limited palette of potential plot combinations is not just a problem for the horror genre – it’s a general feature of the computational machine that is our brain which affects all genres. The human brain is not a blank slate. Our intuitive understanding of the outside world (whether social or natural) is cognitively constrained by a basic grid made up of five ontological categories (PERSON, ANIMAL, PLANT, NATURAL OBJECT, ARTEFACT) and three domains related to our own inborn expectations with regards to physics, biology, and psychology (Boyer 1999; Boyer and Ramble 2001). In human storytelling, from theologies to comic book heroes, from urban legends to current (and despicable) post-truth politics and fake news, minimal counter-intuitiveness, that is, a minimal number of breaches or violations of such ontological domains, is the key to make the contents not just attention-grabbing but also memorable, transmittable, and fertile for future interpretations (Boyer 2001). This is something quite useful in evolutionary terms, because having our level of attention biased towards minimal violations makes us prone to remember potential life-saving environmental information.
Now, storytelling can be deprived of any truth value while still being cognitively compelling and neurochemically rewarding because of our inborn biases and preferences. The unexpected presence of crocodiles in a river where they are not supposed to be or a brook turning red (and therefore signaling the potential life-threatening presence of chemical alterations) are quite good things to remember to avoid predation and intoxication. However, as long as storytelling success is concerned, a burning bush unconsumed by flames and inscribed into a prestigious, hierarchically approved religious narrative is equally fine. Minimal violation is the key: an anthropomorphized river able to read the minds of its fellow brooks every other Wednesday and able to teleport itself wherever it wants to communicate with a bleeding house might be just a bit too far-fetched [1].
Horror ontologies and where to find them
As far as the horror genre is concerned, then, the hypothesis is that the most successful horror films will be those that are centered on the least possible number of cognitive violations. A tentative matrix of category violations in horror films can be of help in understanding what works and what does not, and which category/domain violations are the most exploited in the genre (see Table 1 below).
TABLE 1. A tentative matrix of category violation in horror films. The list is merely illustrative and does not take into account the historical precedents of each breach/violation nor the financial success of each entry. Please note that horror tropes and plots do usually include more than just one counterintuitive violation. See text for details.
After a preliminary search on online resources (IMDb, Wikipedia), I have chosen some titles to provide a bit of background to the qualitative exploration of potential genre tropes and patterns. The first thing that struck me is that horror films do usually include much more than just a mere couple of major counterintuitive violations: sometimes, they are jam-packed with violations of all kinds. However, if we look carefully, the denouement usually reveals that a superhuman agent of sorts operates behind the scene as a powerful deus ex machina, that is, as the ultimate cause of many disconcerting and unconnected events. Thus, we have spirits’ retribution (Poltergeist’s cemetery desecration; the titular witch in the Blair Witch Project), gods offended because of desecrated religious relics (e.g., Mayan temple in The Ruins), and demonic entities hell-bent on making human beings suffer (e.g., the Dark Ones in the Evil Dead franchise; Freddy Krueger in the A Nightmare on Elm Street franchise; the evil clown in It; the Cenobites of the Hellraiser franchise, etc.). Usually, multiple, mind-boggling, and horrifying individual ontological violations are just signs and proxies for an overarching (super)human and everyday reality-defying willfulness. This is a neat narrative trick to justify the presence of such an abundant variety of paranormal phenomena and reduce the cognitively taxing experience to just the simplest, most intuitive cognitive slot of Homo sapiens’ computational machinery (Guthrie 1993): anthropomorphic agentivity. In other words, the prime mover is just a human-like agent with an anthropomorphic understanding of vengeance and retribution able to control ARTEFACTS and influence, possess, or alter the minds and behaviours of other agents.
This agentive explanation might also explain why the most successful violations in the genre appear to be those affecting animate beings, with counterintuitive PERSONS and ANIMALS being by far the most compelling (and financially successful) antagonists of the genre. Interestingly, while monster movies focused on biological and psychological violations probably had their heyday between the 1950s and the 1960s (with some sporadic outliers in more recent mainstream market; e.g., The Host, South Korea, 2006), today the balance has seemingly shifted towards psychological violations in terms of both audiences’ interest and critical acclaim, recently culminated in the four Academy Awards nominations and the Best Original Screenplay won by Jordan Peele’s Get Out (USA, 2017; see also Black Swan, USA, 2010; The Babadook, Australia, 2014; It Follows, USA, 2015; Hereditary, USA, 2018, etc.). In any case, as far as the main plot and antagonist(s) are concerned, we are still firmly set into the double “animate being” category.
Legatees of a horror heritage
Another constraint worth noticing applies here. Despite any psychological, subtle variant, horror still remains primarily a visual experience – mainly because we are primarily visual animals. As any cinema aficionado knowledgeable in the history of its many sub-genres can testify to, horror needs to be seen or, at the very least, perceived thanks to visual cues. As palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould wrote once,
“Primates are quintessentially visual animals, and have been so endowed since the first tree-dwellers of earliest Tertiary reconstructions had to move nimbly among the branches, or fall to their deaths away from further scrutiny by natural selection. Humans, as legatees of this heritage, learn by seeing and visualizing” (Gould 2001).
And the horror genre, being a mental gym and a social repository of cautionary tales, of situations to avoid, and prosocial cooperation aimed at (hopefully) defeating the psychopathic trickster on a rampage, provides many ways to “learn by seeing and visualizing.” Which is exactly what the fear-processing informational exchange between the amygdala and the hippocampus is all about (whether or not there is really something to learn – remember, the neurochemicals can override and become the medium). This digression also explains why literary cosmic horror with its vivid, nihilistic descriptions of indescribable and unknowable terrors completely out of human comprehension, seems to be poorly represented… prehistoric, invisible, bloodthirsty dinosaurs notwithstanding [2].
Nature vs. (evil) artefacts
It is interesting to note that most films considered in the PLANT category underperformed at the box office. In line with the agentive penchant of horror, a possible pattern worth exploring further would be that domain-violating plants are not perceived as a particularly rewarding or exciting horror experiences for viewers. There is only so much the audience can take, and a talking carnivorous plant or evil toxin-releasing trees do not probably rank among the most compelling horror antagonists [3]. Indeed, it seems that violations specifically concerning NATURAL OBJECTS are much more relevant in the fantasy genre. While no niche was left unexplored during Hollywood’s Golden Era (see, for instance, the living meteorite in Sherwood’s The Monolith Monsters, USA, 1957), talking tree-like humanoids, talking anthropomorphic lions, and rivers or oceans behaving as animate beings are a staple of fantasy epic, as depicted in L. Frank Baum/Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz, C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia or J.R.R. Tolkien/Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
However, while concerns regarding expectation-defying evil ARTEFACTS seem to be commonplace in horror films, they rarely represent the ultimate antagonist. In most cases, it is the anthropomorphic evil which these ARTEFACTS and structures are soaked in or imbued with that provides the ultimate explanation for any scary violation – which takes us back to the anthropomorphic and agentive basis of horror itself [4]. For instance, the Evil Dead’s Necronomicon is merely meant to supply an interdimensional portal for powerful demonic entities capable of possessing both PERSONS and ARTEFACTS. The vintage 1958 Plymouth Fury featured in Christine is possessed by another demonic entity. Even the X-Files’ ‘black oil’ is revealed to be a sentient alien virus with multiple, and at times mind-boggling and poorly written, counterintuitive properties.
Off the top of my head, I can think of at least four possible contributing factors to explain the resilience of this pattern (cf. Slingerland and Collard 2012; Taves 2014; Jensen 2014; Paden 2016; Clasen 2017):
anxieties concerning the individual and collective safety of ultrasocial modern technologies devised by an anthropoid ape recently turned primarily sedentary. In other words, culture modulates and trumps evolutionarily selected fears (cf. Jones 2018). Indeed, in our ultrasocial post-industrial setting we are more at risk of being run over by a car than killed by toxic berries, mauled by hungry bears, or bitten by spiders or snakes;
our evolved attention to the appeal of previous item ownership to get cues concerning social status about ancestors and out-groups (as potential fiends), combined with the cognitively persuasive (and logically fallacious) sympathetic or contagious magic (i.e., the transference of the owner’s characteristics to the artefacts);
the human penchant for institutionalizing social contracts and behavioural norms in cultural taboos whose violation brings about the disruption of the social system. Punishment for ill-fated, naive, dangerous, taboo-breaking individuals is a typical trope of horror films, especially taboo-ridden teen horror movies;
our intuitive sense of moral disgust which combines evolutionarily selected responses from different domains to provide us with an in-built avoidance system (regarding food, hygiene, sex, etc.). We intuitively co-opt disgust for social purposes, which contributes to flag dangerous in-group norm or health violations. Indeed, in order to make the most of the neurophysiological short-circuit between social and physiological domains, the horror genre routinely associates haunted artefacts with physical dirt, disgusting bugs, and dirty business; see for instance cities, buildings, or haunted houses in basically every horror films (from Proyas’ alien Dark City, 1998, to the ‘temple’ in Pizzolatto and Fukunaga’s first season of HBO’s True Detective, 2014, to every single haunted house depicted in horror movies or franchises such as The Conjuring).
Notes
This post has been updated on 26 April 2020.
Please note that this post was originally written on 6 May 2019. The opening image has been added on 8 July 2021.
[1] Cinematic case in point: if you’re not a skilled writer, overpowered, god-like superheroes’ arcs can be quite difficult to manage. This might help explain the 2019 U-turn of the Warner Bros./DC Extended Universe towards more human and relatable characters after a less than stellar box office and critical response (cf. Shazam!, USA, 2019, or the TV series Doom Patrol, USA, 2019-).
[2] Gorak’s The Darkest Hour (USA/Russia 2011) might be recalled here, but it is a sci-fi film. Bier’s Bird Box (USA, 2018) is more centered on a psychological violation, for the creatures are not technically invisible (they assume the shapes of someone’s worst fears). Benson and Moorhead’s The Endless (USA, 2018), on the other hand, is a recent and quite interesting take on existential cosmic horror.
[3] Even though something is beginning to change (albeit quite slowly), the persisting socio-political indifference with regards to the environmental threat posed by anthropogenic climate change in ultrasocial urbanized societies might also be recalled here.
[4] With some limits: humanoid ARTEFACTS capable of sexual reproduction are more likely to become a sci-fi drama or mystery trope (e.g., Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, USA, 2017).
Refs.
Boyer, P. (1999). “Cognitive Aspects of Religious Ontologies: How Brain Processes Constrain Religious Concepts.” Scripta Instituti Donneriani Aboensis 17(1): 53-72. https://doi.org/10.30674/scripta.67243
Boyer, P., and C. Ramble (2001). “Cognitive Templates for Religious Concepts: Cross-cultural Evidence for Recall of Counter-intuitive Representations.” Cognitive Science 25(4): 535-564. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0364-0213(01)00045-3
Clark, D. A., and A. T. Beck (2011). Cognitive Therapy of Anxiety Disorders: Science and Practice. New York and London: The Guilford Press.
Clasen, M. (2017). Why Horror Seduces. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fecile, J. (2018). “‘Banned in 46 Countries’ – is Faces of Death the Most Shocking Film Ever?” The Guardian, Oct. 1. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/01/banned-in-46-countries-is-faces-of-death-the-most-shocking-film-ever
Gould, S. J. (2001). “Reconstructing (and Deconstructing) the Past.” In S.J. Gould (ed.), The Book of Life: An Illustrated History of the Evolution of Life on Earth, 6-21. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
Jensen, J. S. (2014). What is Religion? London and New York: Routledge.
Jones, D. (2018). Sleeping with Your Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nemeth, B. et al. (2015). “Bloodcurdling Movies and Measures of Coagulation: Fear Factor Crossover Trial.” British Medical Journal 351. doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.h6367
Paden, W. E. (2016). New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective. London and New York: Bloomsbury.
Slingerland, E., and M. Collard (eds) (2012). Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Taves, A. (2014). “Non-ordinary Powers: Charisma, Special Affordances and the Study of Religion.” In D. Xygalatas and W. W. McCorkle (eds), Mental Culture: Classical Social Theory and the Cognitive Science of Religion, 80-97. London and New York: Routledge.