Why Horror Seduces Read online

  Why Horror Seduces

  WHY HORROR SEDUCES

  Mathias Clasen

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  © Oxford University Press 2017

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Clasen, Mathias F. author.

  Title: Why horror seduces / Mathias Clasen.

  Description: Oxford; New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2017. |

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017005226 | ISBN 9780190666514 (pbk. : alk. paper) |

  ISBN 9780190666507 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190666545 (Oxford scholarship online) | ISBN 9780190666538 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Horror tales, American—History and criticism. |

  American fiction—20th century—History and criticism. |

  American literature—Psychological aspects.

  Classification: LCC PS374.H67 C53 2017 | DDC 813.009/164—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005226

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Horror, Fear, and Evolution

  Part 1:An Evolutionary Theory of Horror

  1.Sizing Up the Beast: What Horror Is, and How It Is Studied

  2.How Horror Works, I: The Evolution and Stimulation of Negative Emotion

  3.How Horror Works, II: Spooky Monsters, Scary Scenarios, and Terrified Characters

  4.Fear for Your Life: The Appeals, Functions, and Effects of Horror

  Part 2:Evolutionary Perspectives on American Horror

  5.Monsters Everywhere: A Very Brief Overview of American Horror

  6.Vampire Apocalypse: I Am Legend (1954)

  7.Trust No One: Rosemary’s Baby (1967)

  8.Fight the Dead, Fear the Living: Night of the Living Dead (1968)

  9.Never Go Swimming Again: Jaws (1975)

  10.Haunted Houses, Haunted Minds: The Shining (1977)

  11.Hack n’ Slash: Halloween (1978)

  12.Lost and Hunted in Bad Woods: The Blair Witch Project (1999)

  Part 3:Future Evolutions in Horror Entertainment and Horror Research

  13.The Future of Horror

  References

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is the result of years of research on, and a longstanding fascination with, horror and monsters. Thirty years ago, nobody could have predicted that I would write a book on horror. I was an anxious kid who’d give spooky stuff of any kind a very wide berth indeed. I wouldn’t whistle past the graveyard, I’d stay the hell away from it. I’d get nightmares from the most innocuous ghost story. In the summer of 1992, when I was 14, some friends lured me to a screening of Sleepwalkers—a schlocky vampire/werewolf film based on a Stephen King script. I had to walk out of the movie theater about halfway through because I couldn’t stomach it, and I’ve never quite recovered from that loss of face. Two years later, a new friend invited me over for a day of movie watching. That new friend, Mike, had gotten his hands on a LaserDisc edition of The Stand, another Stephen King adaptation. It completely blew me away, but in a good way. From that day, I was hooked on horror. I’d like to thank Mike for setting it all in motion on that fall day in 1994. I’d also like to thank the horror artists who deepened my appreciation of horror—above all Stephen King, Peter Straub, Dennis Jürgensen, and John Carpenter. Thanks for the countless nightmares, and for top-notch research material.

  I’d like to thank also the many colleagues who have supported and helped me over the years, and who have critiqued my ideas and prompted me to refine them. Joe Carroll has been my toughest critic and strongest supporter from the beginning. He’s the most ruthless and the most generous editor I know. Without his help and encouragement, this book would’ve never been written. Steven Pinker has been exceptionally helpful and inspiring, going out of his way on several occasions to support a young scholar. Jon Gottschall took me under his wing and introduced me to the small but welcoming world of evolutionary literary scholars when I was a wide-eyed graduate student—including Brian Boyd, Judith Saunders, Brett Cooke, Dirk Vanderbeke, and Marcus Nordlund. They have all been helpful and supportive beyond the call of academic duty. I’ve benefitted enormously from my friendship with Emelie Jonsson, a young evolutionary literary scholar who’s as generous as she is smart. I’d like to thank also Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, as well as their colleagues in the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UCSB, for providing a hospitable and motivating intellectual environment during my visiting fellowship in 2011. Thanks to my friends and colleagues in the GotPop research network on popular culture at Gothenburg University, especially to Joe Trotta and Houman Sadri for stimulating conversation, and to monster scholars extraordinaire Todd Platts and Stephen Asma.

  My colleagues in the Department of English at Aarhus University have patiently listened to my ideas about the evolved underpinnings of horror. Special thanks to my old supervisor, Peter Mortensen, who continues to be invariably supportive (despite his not unreasonable conviction that my literary tastes converge with those of a preadolescent boy). Thanks also to Ocke-Schwen Bohn who introduced me to evolutionary psychology during my undergraduate studies, and thanks to all the other colleagues—not least Jane, Martin, and Marianne—who make this a great department. Aarhus University has fostered an intellectual environment highly hospitable to interdisciplinary evolutionary work, and I thank my evolutionarily-minded colleagues for fruitful discussions and collaborations: Jesper Sørensen, Marc Andersen, Uffe Schjødt, Kristoffer Laigaard Nielbo, and Armin Geertz of the Religion, Cognition and Culture Research Unit; my colleagues in the Centre for Biocultural History; my old squad in Peter C. Kjærgaard’s research group—Casper Andersen, Jakob Bek-Thomsen, Stine Sloth Grumsen, Hans Henrik Hjermitslev, and Prof. K himself; Andreas Roepstorff and his passionate team of researchers in the Interacting Minds Centre; and Michael Bang Petersen and his crew in the Politics and Evolution Lab. I’d like to thank also the many, many English students who have enthusiastically discussed my ideas with me, especially my MA students and the students in my elective courses “Fear for Your Life” (2016), “Fifty Years of American Nightmares” (2014), and “Demons, Depravity, and the Devil’s Spawn” (2013).

  I have been fortunate to have several specialists read the entire manuscript and give thoughtful and critical feedback. Joe Carroll and Emelie Jonsson read the whole thing and prompted me to constantly revise and improve. Some chapters they read several times as I struggled to bring out my ideas clearly and coherently. Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen also read the entire manuscript, offering excellent advice and suggestions and helping me with the figures for the book. The four anonymous reviewers, commissioned by OUP, each provided encouragement and helpful comments.

 
I’d like to thank my editors at OUP, Norman Hirschy and his assistant Lauralee Yeary. They have been exceptionally supportive, helpful, and pleasant to work with throughout the process. Norm is not a big horror buff, but that never dampened his invigorating enthusiasm for the project. I enjoyed exchanging with Lauralee recollections of horror stories that profoundly disturbed us as kids. Growing up thousands of miles and several years apart, we were both terrified by that X-Files episode about a monster that would squeeze itself through mail slots or air vents and erupt into unsuspecting folks’ apartments and rip out their livers and eat them. No fava beans or anything fancy like that, just raw predatory hunger. It’s a potent scenario that resonates with an ancient alarm system in human nature.

  Finally, the biggest thanks of all go to my family—Laura, Tobias, and Camilla—without whom life would be a “barren, cheerless trial,” to quote Robert Neville. Knowing that I don’t like to tackle the stuff alone, they have patiently sat with me through many horror films, they have played horror video games with me, and they have accompanied me through haunted attractions. I’m particularly obliged to my wife, Camilla, who somehow manages to be unconditionally supportive and pointedly critical at the same time, and who invariably lets me snuggle up when my research gives me nightmares.

  Chapter 10 was published in a slightly different form (under the title “Hauntings of Human Nature: An Evolutionary Critique of King’s The Shining”) in the journal Style 51(1) (2017):76–88. I’m grateful to the editor, John Knapp, and the publisher, Penn State University Press, for allowing me to include the essay here.

  Introduction

  Horror, Fear, and Evolution

  When was the last time that you were really afraid? And I mean truly, heart-thumpingly, hair-raisingly horrified, not just anxious over an important meeting or nervous that you might have left the keys in the front door. I’m willing to bet that for a lot of you, the last time you were really afraid was in the darkness of a movie theater, in front of the TV or computer screen, or in bed with a novel. Those of us who live in controlled and relatively safe environments come face to face with true fear primarily when we seek it out, for example in fiction. Many of us flock to see horror films in the cinema, eagerly await the next Stephen King novel, and with some trepidation download the latest survival-horror game on our laptops. Why? Well, that’s one of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Another is the question of how horror fiction even works, given that we know that it’s fiction, it’s make-believe, it’s actors acting afraid, computer-generated monsters, pixels on a screen, ink on paper, clever programming. Yet still the well-told horror tale, in whatever medium, can evoke very real and very strong emotional and physiological reactions in us, essentially sending us on a backwards evolutionary roller coaster ride, straight back to our deep ancestry as hunted prey. And we love it.

  Horror in whatever medium is one of the most consistently popular and profitable genres (Prince 2004). In the United States alone, in the period 1995–2015, horror films grossed close to eight billion dollars. That’s the number 8 followed by nine zeroes, and it’s excluding the sometimes overlapping genres of thrillers and suspense films, which together grossed another fifteen billion dollars in this period (The Numbers 2015b). Even cheaply made horror films can make it big at the box office. Some of the most striking box office hits are horror films. The independent 2009 picture Paranormal Activity (Peli 2009) had a production budget of $15,000; worldwide, the film grossed more than thirteen thousand times its production cost, or close to $200,000,000 (The Numbers 2015d). The 1999 horror film The Blair Witch Project (Sánchez and Myrick 1999) tells a similar story, produced for $600,000 and grossing about $250,000,000 worldwide (The Numbers 2015a). Moviemakers hoping for a high return-on-investment can do much worse than to invest in horror films. On a list of the most profitable movies ever, about a quarter of the films are bona fide horror flicks—with titles such as Jaws (Spielberg 1975) and Insidious (Wan 2010) figuring prominently (The Numbers 2015c).

  One 2013 study sampled the Danish population and found that out of about five hundred respondents, 47 percent claimed to like horror in whatever medium. 32 percent said they like horror in some contexts—they’ll watch horror films in the company of good friends but would never do it alone, for example. Only 21 percent said that they don’t like horror at all (Johansen 2013). A new study paints a similar picture. Together with two colleagues, the media researcher Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and the psychologist John A. Johnson, I’m conducting a large-scale survey of Americans’ horror preference and personality. We’re asking a representative sample of more than 1,000 Americans about their relationship to horror—their usage patterns, their preferences, their personality profile—and we’re crunching the numbers as I write this. One thing is clear, though: Most respondents say they like horror. We gave the survey participants a statement—“I tend to enjoy horror media”—and asked them to indicate the degree to which they agree with the statement, ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree). More than half, or 54.4 percent, agree with the statement, selecting 4 or 5. 17 percent neither agree nor disagree, and only 28.6 percent respond in the negative range (1 or 2). Most people, Americans as well as Danes, really do like being scared by fictions, even stories about ridiculously improbable events and characters such as wood-dwelling witches, demonic possessions, and vengeful sharks. The question remains: Why? Why does horror seduce?

  The paradox of tragedy—the appeal of artworks that evoke negative emotions—has puzzled philosophers for millennia (Smuts 2009). Literature and film scholars have grappled with the issue for decades. Horror scholars specifically have attempted to explain our strange fascination with horrifying stories, often by reaching back to Freud’s outdated ideas about how the mind works. According to a Freudian theory of horror, the genre disturbs us by metaphorically confronting us with repressed material such as infantile sexual and/or murderous impulses. We thrill at the sight of a limb chopped off by a chainsaw-wielding maniac because such an act evokes the infantile fear of castration; supposedly, the limb—an arm, say—is a symbol for the penis. There is, in the Freudian view, a pleasure associated with confronting “forbidden,” repressed material, but also a price to pay, namely the negative emotions produced by the story. On this account, we are drawn to the genre despite the negative affect it produces (Carroll 1990, 168–178, Freud 2003 [1919], Schneider 2004). But Freudian psychoanalysis has crumbled under more than a century of scientific scrutiny, which has falsified or failed to find evidence for the psychological mechanisms and processes that Freud posited. Building a theory of the attractions of horror on the foundation of orthodox psychoanalysis is like building a house on sand. Freud and his followers put together a model of the psyche which we now know to be wrong in almost all substantial aspects. No, the Oedipus complex—the cornerstone of the psychoanalytical edifice—doesn’t seem to exist (Daly and Wilson 1990). No, little girls don’t really suffer from penis envy. No, dreams aren’t encrypted communiqués from some officious, homunculian archivist residing in the subconscious. Dreams serve functions, certainly, such as memory consolidation and experience simulation (Gottschall 2012), and they often deal in metaphor, as does all human cognition, and we may gain insight into our own mental lives by analyzing the content and emotional tenor of a dream. But coded messages from the unconscious? There’s just no evidence to support such a function. The list of falsified (or non-verified) Freudian propositions goes on. It really is an impressively long list (Erwin 1996, Macmillan 1997). Is there a scientifically robust alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis and models of psychological function built on Freudian assumptions? Yes. Over the past few decades, scientists have made huge advances in building a model of the mind that integrates findings from evolutionary biology, social and affective neuroscience, human behavioral ecology, cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and many other scientific fields. This model has the strength of being vertically integrated—that is, sustained and constrained
by converging evidence from a wide range of disciplines and sciences. What’s more, it is crucially relevant to making sense of the forms, the functions, and the appeals of scary entertainment.

  In this book, I situate the study of horror fiction within the larger framework of the evolutionary social sciences. I define horror as the kind of fiction that is manifestly designed to scare and/or disturb its audience. I use the word fiction in a broad sense, to encompass fictional storytelling in literature, film, television series, and computer games. Many critics distinguish between supernatural horror and psychological horror. Supernatural horror involves some kind of suspension or breach of physical law, usually embodied in or caused by some kind of supernatural agency such as an uncanny monster or a ghost. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) is a case in point, as is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1997). Psychological horror, on the other hand, does not involve violations of physical law, but features naturalistic (if often implausible) menaces and scenarios. Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) is a pertinent example, as is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960). In this book, I focus mostly on supernatural horror, which is doubly paradoxical: It is weird enough that people are attracted to the kind of entertainment designed to make them feel bad . . . but why would educated, enlightened audiences thrill to stories that feature monsters that have shambled straight out of the darkest lore of prescientific superstition? My argument is that we cannot begin to answer this question, or the questions raised above, without situating our investigation within the best current scientific understanding of how the mind works.

  My central claim is that horror fiction is crucially dependent on evolved properties of the human central nervous system, and thus that a nuanced and scientifically valid understanding of horror fiction requires that we take human evolutionary history seriously. While evolutionary psychology has received considerable criticism over the years—some of it justified, some of it misguided (Laland and Brown 2011, Kenrick 2013)—evolutionary social scientists have made massive advances in identifying and explaining the functional structure of the mind. They argue that our species’ evolutionary history has resulted in a species-typical psychological architecture, and I argue that this architecture fundamentally constrains our horror stories and the types of monsters that we imagine and are captivated by. Horror fiction targets ancient and deeply conserved defense mechanisms in the brain; when it works, it works by activating supersensitive danger-detection circuits that have their roots far back in vertebrate evolution, circuits that evolved to help our ancestors survive in dangerous environments. Humans have an adaptive disposition to find pleasure in make-believe that allows them to experience negative emotions at high levels of intensity within a safe context. And that is what horror offers.