Why Horror Seduces Read online

  Horror stories are particularly efficient in targeting evolved danger-management circuits when those stories reflect or respond to salient sociocultural anxieties. We are born to be fearsome, but the things we fear are somewhat plastic and modulated by culture. That is why horror fiction changes over time and from culture to culture—why, say, vampires are popular at one time, in some cultures, and zombies are popular at other times. Works of horror do not change arbitrarily, nor do they vary endlessly. Rather, works of horror vary within a possibility space constrained by human biology. That variation is explicable in terms of cultural configurations. One culture will be particularly receptive to, say, slasher films set in suburban environments; others, to stories of exotic menaces in exotic locations. Hence, the analytical framework that I develop and promote in this book is biocultural: It accounts for the ways in which specific works of horror reflect or engage with sociocultural issues, but it locates such analysis within a framework informed by evolutionary social science.

  The book consists of three parts. In Part 1 I give a brief introduction to horror and academic approaches to horror, and then lay out my theoretical framework. I explain the evolutionary processes that gave rise to negative emotions, how those emotions are targeted by fictional stories, why such stories work, what their psychological effects are, and why so many people are attracted to them. Part 2 consists of analytical applications of that theoretical framework to one particular cultural domain: modern American horror fiction. This delimitation allows me to get into focus the interactions between historical context and evolved psychological mechanisms in the imaginative expression of horror scenarios. Part 2 opens with a brief historical overview of American horror for context. I then analyze a selection of well-known post–World War II novels and films to show how those works are structured to target fears and anxieties—fears and anxieties that loomed large in the works’ cultural context while having deep roots in evolved dispositions—and how an evolutionary perspective helps us get a fix on their meaning. This part of the book is organized by work, rather than, say, thematically, which allows me to go into my discussions of these significant works in depth and to show how an evolutionary approach works in interpretative practice. I focus on highly popular, canonical works—the kind of works that consistently make Best of Horror lists—because such works presumably resonated, and continue to resonate, with a large number of people, which suggests that they were and are particularly effective at fulfilling their function. I have aimed for diversity in the selection of analytical cases, choosing novels and films that play on different fears, target different subsets of negative emotions (ranging from terror, fear, and dread to shock, disgust, and loathing), and feature different kinds of monsters. In some cases, both novel and film versions exist—in such cases I’ve chosen the version that I find most aesthetically accomplished and interesting. (For example, I think—uncontroversially—that Spielberg’s Jaws is better than Benchley’s novel and, perhaps more contentiously, that King’s The Shining is vastly superior to Kubrick’s adaptation in its sensitive depiction of Jack Torrance’s psychological trajectory.) My cases are Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend from 1954 (novel), Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby from 1967 (novel), George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead from 1968 (film), Steven Spielberg’s Jaws from 1975 (film), Stephen King’s The Shining from 1977 (novel), John Carpenter’s Halloween from 1978 (film), and Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s The Blair Witch Project from 1999 (film).

  In Part 3, I draw up conclusions and point the way for future studies, as well as possible future developments of horror fiction. Looking over the recent history of horror, from literature to film and finally interactive entertainment, one can trace a tendency toward ever-increased immersion and agency on the audience’s part. I predict that future technological developments will sustain ever greater immersion—but also increased audience segmentation as some forms of horror become so effective that they appeal only to a highly exclusive niche audience. Virtual reality technology, for example, will allow players to project themselves ever more fully into the fictional universe, and that won’t be appealing to everybody or even to most horror fans. I also look at the increasingly popular “haunts”: commercial horror venues with live actors where audiences pay good money to be scared witless. Like horror computer games, such attractions let audiences sustain the illusion that they are, literally, protagonists in a horror story. Our appetite for being scared in safe contexts is being satisfied in ever more effective ways, and that is unlikely to change. Technological developments may create vicarious horror experiences so intense that only a small fraction of people will seek them out, but given the horror genre’s intimate connections with basic human dispositions, our appetite for horror will not go away anytime soon. In one form or another, horrifying fiction has probably been with us for tens of thousands of years, and as long as we are who we are, members of the fearful species Homo sapiens, horror will stay with us. Given recent advances in the sciences of human nature, we are now in a position to explain why that is.

  PART 1

  An Evolutionary Theory of Horror

  CHAPTER 1

  Sizing Up the Beast

  What Horror Is, and How It Is Studied

  Horror scholars like to suggest that the horror genre came into being with the emergence of the Gothic novel in the late eighteenth century (Bloom 2010, Botting 1996, Kendrick 1991, Punter 1996, Skal 2001). The eccentric British writer Horace Walpole is supposed to have more or less singlehandedly invented the genre with his Gothic romance novel The Castle of Otranto in 1764, a short pseudodocumentary novel about bizarre, ghostly happenings in an old, decaying castle (Walpole 1996). Walpole’s novel made popular several of the elements that would come to characterize the Gothic novel—the exotic setting in a faraway land in a faraway past; the creepy old castle; the dark and secret passageways; the innocent heroines chased by malicious villains; uncanny, inexplicable events contributing to a darkly melodramatic atmosphere, and so on. The Gothic novel had its heyday roughly from 1790 to 1830, a period in which writers such as Ann Radcliffe, M. G. Lewis, and Charles Maturin published spooky stories that were very widely read. Such novels tended to revolve around mysterious, apparently supernatural events and creatures and provided safe thrills for thousands of readers. The Gothic novel remained popular during the nineteenth century—“the great age of the Gothic,” according to Clive Bloom, who identifies this kind of writing as “the [nineteenth] century’s most popular genre” (2012, 212).

  The Gothic novel is clearly an ancestor of many of today’s horror stories, which recycle and rework tropes that were established at least two centuries ago. Creepy old buildings? Sure, they’re in just about any haunted house story you can think of, from Henry James’s 1898 psychological ghost story The Turn of the Screw (1969) to the popular television series American Horror Story (Murphy and Falchuk 2011–) and the film The Conjuring (Wan 2013). Supernatural happenings and spooky monsters? Horror is saturated with them, for example, the television series Supernatural (Kripke 2005–). Ominous atmospheres, secret identities, heroines in peril, underground labyrinths? Yup, plenty of those still around; the critically acclaimed first season of the television series True Detective (Pizzolatto 2014) used them all. But what made the Gothic novel emerge when it did, and why did it become so popular? A common hypothesis in academic horror/Gothic study is that the Gothic novel arose as a consequence of Enlightenment repression. The narrative goes something like this: Following on the heels of the scientific revolution, which posited a rationally intelligible universe and proposed to replace dogmatic belief and unscientific intuition with empirical observation and experimentation, the Age of Enlightenment swept across Western Europe from about the middle of the seventeenth century and until the late eighteenth century. Enlightenment thinkers put a premium on reason, rationality, and science, and fought a hard battle against superstition and scholarly and religious orthodoxy. In this intellectual climate, basic human passi
ons were suppressed: violent emotion, wild imagination, untamed fancy. Those passions found an outlet in Romanticism, an artistic and cultural movement that flourished in Europe from the late eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth century and that celebrated strong authentic emotion, sublime and semireligious experience, and unschooled flights of fancy. The darker Romantic aspects, the more violent and unsettling tendencies and preoccupations, then found an outlet in Gothic fiction (Baldick and Mighall 2012, Jackson 1981, Punter 1996). The narrative is neat, but also simplistic.

  There is probably some truth to the notion that the Gothic novel resonated with Romantic passions, central aspects of evolved human emotive and imaginative registers, which may have been at least partially curbed in the Enlightenment. And there’s certainly a lot of truth to the idea that modern horror is descended from the Gothic novel. Some critics even use the term “Gothic” to describe modern horror, such as the stories of Stephen King (Hoppenstand and Browne 1987, Sears 2011), or use Gothic as an umbrella term that encompasses horror. Other critics claim that “Gothic” and “horror” are synonymous, or at least register that they are often used synonymously (Bloom 2012). My view is that “horror” is the umbrella term, a category that encompasses those kinds of fiction that are designed to instill negative emotion such as anxiety and fear in their audiences, and that Gothic fiction is merely one such kind. The Gothic is a set of conventions that serve a certain set of functions very well, including eliciting a certain kind of emotional response in its audience and engaging with a certain set of themes. The Gothic is an historical phenomenon, just one historically specific incarnation of horror, like the slasher film, whereas horror is a functional designation, one that transcends history.

  Critics agree that horror is notoriously difficult to define (Bloom 2012, Hutchings 2004), but they also tend to agree that the genre is affectively defined—that is, according to intended audience reaction (Cherry 2009, 54, Reyes 2016). As the critic Douglas E. Winter put it in his introduction to the celebrated 1988 horror anthology Prime Evil: “horror is not a genre, like the mystery or science fiction or the western. It is not a kind of fiction, meant to be confined to the ghetto of a special shelf in libraries or bookstores. Horror is an emotion” (1988, 12). Winter perhaps overstated his case. He was writing in the late 1980s when many horror aficionados felt that the horror genre was under attack from the twin evils of commercialization and literary ghettoization, resulting in a glut of subpar publications churned out by hack writers and greedy publishers and resulting also in critical dismissals of horror as a worthy literary form. But his point remains: Horror is affectively defined. And it is certainly true that consumers of horror expect to be scared or at least unsettled when they buy a ticket to a horror film or pull a paperback off the shelf labeled “Horror” in a bookstore.

  In our survey on horror preference and personality, we asked respondents how frightening they prefer their horror media to be. We would expect most respondents to indicate a preference for frightening horror, but that’s not a given. Perhaps people seek out horror exclusively to be stimulated intellectually or aesthetically, or because of peer pressure, or because their curiosity overrides their aversion toward negative emotions evoked by artworks. However, as it turns out, only 3.8 percent say they prefer horror that is not at all frightening. 17.2 percent want their horror media to be mildly frightening, 38 percent want moderately frightening horror, 25.5 percent want highly frightening horror, and 15.5 percent want it to be extremely frightening. Clearly, to the vast majority of horror consumers, negative emotional stimulation is a primary and irreducible attraction of the genre. The striking theatrical trailer for Paranormal Activity (Peli 2009) illustrates the point. This short trailer alternated shots of a theater audience watching the film with scenes from the film itself. In grainy, green-tinged night-vision images, the trailer showed an audience recoiling in fear, covering their eyes, laughing nervously, and screaming in terror (see Figure 1.1). Interspersed were snippets from enthusiastic reviews, including approbations such as “Paranormal Activity is one of the scariest movies of all time” and “genuinely horrifying.” The “scariness” of a horror novel, film, or video game is frequently used as an explicit selling point in marketing campaigns, and as a stamp of approval by critics and consumers (Clasen 2016).

  Figure 1.1: Screenshot from the theatrical trailer for Paranormal Activity (Peli 2009), showing audience members screaming, squirming, and shutting their eyes, implicitly offering the best possible review of the film. Horror audiences expect to be scared, and the scariness of a horror work is often used as a selling point in marketing.

  Much horror scholarship sees horror as a purely cultural phenomenon, something that is exclusively shaped by specific cultural conditions and can be exhaustively explained with reference to those conditions. But the implied notion that horror, by way of the Gothic romance, is a purely cultural invention, the fortuitous byproduct of a certain set of cultural configurations, is untenably reductive. Reductive, because it fails to take into account the deep-seated psychological dispositions upon which horror stories depend and problematic, moreover, because the hypothesis in its strong version ignores horror’s roots in older storytelling traditions. Walter Kendrick, for instance, writes that “scary entertainment, as we know it today, showed its first stirrings in the middle of the eighteenth century” (1991, xxii). Yet the roots of modern horror can easily be traced much further back than 1764. One well-known horror scholar, James B. Twitchell, in his influential 1985 book Dreadful Pleasures writes that “modern works of artificial horror originated in the late eighteenth-century discovery that by inducing extreme feelings of dreadful pleasures, both print and illustration could arouse and exploit powerful feelings deep within the human spirit.” He avoids the culturalist fallacy by conceding that “we can trace the artifice of horror back well before the turn of the nineteenth century,” and goes on to note that “the place to start any comprehensive study of horror (of which this is not one!) would be back in the cave, where doubtless our . . . ancestors nestled among the rocks to watch the flickering shadows play on the walls, pretending that they were watching the forms of charging beasts, the first ‘creature features’ ” (4). Twitchell spends a couple of pages discussing horror elements of Stone Age cave art, such as the weird composite monsters drawn on cave walls by humans tens of thousands of years ago (Wengrow 2014), but then leaves prehistory behind and skips ahead to the horror of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

  In contrast to the critics locating the emergence of horror in the eighteenth century, the American writer and theorist of horror, H. P. Lovecraft famously claimed in his treatise Supernatural Horror in Literature that “the horror-tale is as old as human thought and speech themselves,” which was “naturally [to be] expected of a form so closely connected with primal emotion” (1973, 17). Lovecraft was writing this in the late 1920s, and later in the twentieth century it became fashionable for those few academics who wrote about horror and the Gothic novel to divorce the genre from “primal emotion” and instead focus on the cultural forces that allegedly paved the way for, and gave shape to, such stories. That divorce was fueled by a general intellectual tendency to downplay or ignore biological underpinnings of culture, a tendency that in academia held sway over the social sciences and the humanities for most of the twentieth century and in some disciplines continues to do so (Carroll 2011, Pinker 2002). Lovecraft, however, was more right than he could have known. He was using common sense—folk psychology—and a deep knowledge of literary tradition to arrive at his theory of horror, but recent advances in neuroscience and the cognitive science of religion have vindicated his theory and provided a deeper explanatory framework for his observations (Clasen 2017). Lovecraft posited a natural basis for the appeal of horror stories and claimed that people are biologically susceptible to superstitious fear, a tendency that supernatural horror stories, including the “weird tales” penned by Lovecraft and his ilk, exploit. As
he wrote, “sometimes a curious streak of fancy invades an obscure corner of the very hardest head; so that no amount of rationalization, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood” (1973, 13). People are indeed “trip-wired” for agency detection (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, 714), for imposing pattern on random visual or auditory noise and for inferring agency behind otherwise inexplicable events such as a weird sound in the dead of night; over evolutionary time, we evolved to react fearfully to even ambiguous stimuli that might suggest danger (Atran and Norenzayan 2004, Marks and Nesse 1994).

  Even as the horror story is essentially an ancient art form—probably as old as our ability to create and share imaginative scenarios—the academic study of horror took off only fairly recently, in the late 1970s. The rise of academic horror study followed closely on the tail of a commercial boom in horror fiction, the third Golden Age of Horror in the English-speaking world (Luckhurst 2005). The first two Golden Ages were the massive popularity of the Gothic romance around 1800, and again at the late-nineteenth-century Victorian fin de siècle with the publication of such classics as Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (2002), Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (2003), Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula (1997), and many others. The third Golden Age was signaled spectacularly by such well-known and well-produced films as Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973). Stephen King’s debut in 1974 with Carrie (1999), and his massive subsequent output of commercially successful horror fiction, also did much to popularize the genre. In the 1970s, the upsurge of horror fiction was a cultural trend that could hardly be ignored. Add to that the rise of media studies and cultural studies with their focus on pop culture and low- and middlebrow entertainment, and even respectable academics could spend armchair hours mulling over the cultural significance, ideological ramifications, and psychosexual import of horror stories.