Perhaps no other cinema and literary genre has already experienced the same exploration of genre variations as horror. Giant ants, blobs, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, humanoid monsters, shapeshifting creatures, living dead, living meteors, interdimensional demonic books, mind-controlling aliens, bloodthirsty hounds from hell, televisions as infernal gateways, invisible bloodthirsty dinosaurs… yes, you read that right: El sonido de la muerte (“The Sound of Horror”, Spain, 1966) features an invisible prehistoric reptilian creature hatching from a fossilized egg after being inadvertently awakened by controlled explosions carried out by a group of archaeologists. Given enough time and a competitive environment, every cinema genre is set to exploit a mind-blowing number of variations of its own tropes, but horror truly stands out. Is there anything that has not been thrown at the wall by horror producers to see if it sticks? Is there a limit to what can be literally thought of? And, most interestingly, why are we so addicted to horror?
Horror has been a staple of human storytelling since forever. A constant presence in religious narrative and literature, horror provides a powerful hair-rising flooding of neurochemicals and hormones in our bodies. The adrenaline rush we experience while watching a horror film brings about a neurophysiological response not dissimilar to a real-life fight-or-flight response: our hearts pump faster, our breath becomes deeper and faster, our pupils dilate, and our palms become sweaty. We may be comfortably seated in front of our TV screen, but we cannot fool a system honed by millions of years of evolution. When the flick is good, it really feels like there’s a real danger (Grodal 2017).
Postmodern intellectuals came up with a definition for the increased cross-media incapacity of distinguishing reality from fiction – hyperreality is the term coined by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to describe this contemporary malady. Indeed, today we have astounding special effects the likes of which have never been seen (to the point that they are increasingly used to undermine credibility in factual reality and manipulate real news; Solon 2017). Evolutionarily speaking, this incapacity is not something totally unexpected. Rather, we just have to do with a matter of degree and not of kind. As a hominin species, Homo sapiens has always been prone to experience sensory illusions and cognitive miscalculations because of constraints exerted by its very own evolutionary history [1]. The colour red, for instance, elicits stronger emotional responses and alertness: it’s the colour of blood, of fire, of sexual arousal, things that literally relate to paramount matters of life or death (Kuniecki, Pilarczyk, and Wichary 2015). And we do not need a rocket scientist to figure out that black is tied to night-time darkness – which, for a mainly diurnal and prominently visual primate like H. sapiens, easily translates into potential danger. No wonder that red and black figure prominently on horror posters [2].
Poster designs are only one of many ways to elicit artificially a specific neurocognitive response and command attention. Human beings are particularly adept at engineering ways to recreate exaggerated versions of what has always evolutionarily tickled them – red lipsticks, cosmetic surgery, dolls, and kawaii or cartoon characters specifically designed to signal cuteness and prompt attachment, artificial sweeteners, foods dangerously ultra-rich in sugars, fats, or salt, and so on and so forth (Morris 1977; Barrett 2004). Cinema is one of such supernormal stimuli.
From the sloped floor of a movie auditorium we are catapulted to the darkest pits of hell. We feel like we are being pursued by a relentless predator. We run for our life to escape a merciless psychopath. Basically, we experience an exaggerated version of the thrill our ancestors were addicted to when they listened to the storyteller around the campfire. We imagine being in those situations, and we revel in storytelling because, thanks to mirror neurons and our intuitive mind-reading ability, we are neurophysiologically hardwired to set ourselves into someone else’s shoes [3]. We are indeed evolved to be
“storytelling creatures and should have been named Homo narrator (or perhaps Homo mendax to acknowledge the misleading side of tale telling) rather than the often inappropriate Homo sapiens. The narrative mode comes naturally to us as a style for organizing thoughts and ideas” (Gould 1994: 26).
The cooperative-enhancing properties of storytelling are H. sapiens’ very own trademark superpower (Smith et al. 2017).
Notes
Please note that the opening image has been added on 8 July 2021.
[1] Judgmental illusions, or biases, can provide interpretive shortcuts when we have to act quickly; they might signal the current mismatch between prehistoric hominin ecology and Anthropocene ultrasociality; or they can just point to evolutionary engineering limits and useless remnants. Examples are, respectively: the bandwagon effect, which reflects our heritage as social primates; the Müller-Lyer illusion in depth perception; the coccyx, the appendix, or the visual blind spot as far as our physiology is concerned.
[2] Conversely, non-urban, green, natural settings elicit a specific, calm, focused, relaxed state of mind, reflecting the neurocognitive roots of our evolutionary history within ancestral primate enviroments (Kuo and Faber Taylor 2004; Park et al. 2010; Bratman et al. 2015).
[3] And even if we cannot stand the hero’s journey or we differ in our brain organizations, we can still enjoy the action, the dialogues, and the minutiae of the plot. In storytelling, there’s something for everyone.
Refs.
Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co.
Bratman, G. N., et al. (2015). “The Benefits of Nature Experience: Improved Affect and Cognition.” Landscape and Urban Planning 138: 41–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.02.005
Gould, S. J. (1994). “So Near and Yet So Far.” The New York Review of Books 46(20): 24-28.
Grodal, T. (2017). “How Film Genres Are a Product of Biology, Evolution and Culture: An Embodied Approach.” Palgrave Communications 3(17079). https://doi.org/10.1057/palcomms.2017.79
Kuniecki M., Pilarczyk J., and Wichary S. (2015). “The Color Red Attracts Attention in an Emotional Context: An ERP Study.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 9:212. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2015.00212
Kuo, F. E., and A. Faber Taylor (2004). “A Potential Natural Treatment for AttentionDeficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: Evidence From a National Study.” American Journal of Public Health 94(9): 1580–1586. http://dx.doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.94.9.1580
Morris, D. (1977). Manwatching. Lausanne/London: Elsevier/Jonathan Cape.
Park, B. J., et al. (2010). “The Physiological Effects of Shinrin-yoku (taking in the forest atmosphere or forest bathing): Evidence from Field Experiments in 24 Forests Across Japan.” Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine 15(1): 18–26. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12199-009-0086-9
Smith, D., et al. (2017). “Cooperation and the Evolution of Hunter-gatherer Storytelling.” Nature Communications 8(1853). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-02036-8
Solon, O. (2017). “The Future of Fake News: Don’t Believe Everything You Read, See or Hear.” The Guardian, July 26. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jul/26/fake-news-obama-video-trump-face2face-doctored-content