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As Halloween draws ever closer, it’s time for what has become a bit of a Thoughts on Thinking blog tradition to post a horror/fear-associated piece. My first post in this realm of thought covered 5 Reasons We Enjoy Being Scared. In this piece, we’ll discover the “what” that makes us scared.
To start, anything can be scary—and I mean anything. It just needs context. For example, clowns are not supposed to be scary. They are funny—singing, dancing, joke-telling jesters. But, if we change the context of the clown and their purpose, then it’s reasonable to understand why they’re scary. My dislike predates the horror movie IT (1990), which is said to represent a landmark increase in coulrophobia (fear of clowns) cases. I remember being around three or four and not wanting to leave a carnival. When my Dad told me it was time to go, I snuggled my face into his shoulder and had a cry. Then, all of a sudden, I heard strange laughing close to me. I opened my eyes and found a clown’s face directly in front of mine. He was trying to cheer me up, but scared the hell out of me—just the mixture of surprise, my emotions at the time, and the novelty of a stranger with a painted face so close to me.
Context is key. All those situational variables play into creating fear. When we look at the common tropes for what makes something scary, we start to see the importance of context. For example, visually speaking, dark locations set a good scene because humans aren’t great at seeing in the dark. Anything can be out there. It creates uncertainty and uncertainty is frightening. Couple that with sound, like a bass-driven rhythm that slowly increases in tempo, getting faster and faster until it feels like it’s right on us. Imagine that in the dark… or better yet, imagine no sound. Then, suddenly, in the dark, you hear a faint knock. What is it? There it is again. It could be anything, completely benign; but then again, that uncertainty kicks our imaginations into gear. Turn on a dim light in an old, decrepit house. Cobwebs, squeaky floors. It’s a dead house, nothing here but decay. So, then why can you hear footsteps coming down the stairs?
Maybe what you see doesn’t look right. It’s not obvious, neither gory nor grotesque. It’s just off. A classic example is in The Shining, where director Stanley Kubrick made a point of creating a symmetry throughout the film, but subtly distorting it in each scene, in some way, to create that unrelenting unease while viewing (e.g., the two girls dressed like twins, but one is slightly taller than the other). The “offness,” though not scary in a traditional sense, plays tricks with our sense of positioning and organisation, perverting our sense of “as things should be” and creating a sense of dread. Then, on the other hand, what is “off” might be something that is blatantly scary in the traditional sense (particularly for the squeamish): blood, guts, gore.
Perhaps it’s not just something tangible that’s “off,” it’s the illogical… the things that don’t make sense, what we can’t understand—like the same person passing the same doorway, from the same side in quick succession…physically impossible. Nothing overtly scary about it, other than not knowing how that could be. So, it’s about uncertainty and the unknown. If that example took place in the context of a sci-fi movie, we could say that it was time travel or teleportation, which demystifies it a bit, but without that context, the uncertainty is what makes it scary.
The horror genre has become so big that there are genres within horror. For example, it would be unfair to say that Friday the 13th (slasher) and Midsommar (folk horror/mystery) are both the same kind of film, just as it would be unfair to equate Shawshank Redemption and Caddyshack. Such distinctions in horror are useful for audiences because different things scare different people. Growing up, I saw every slasher there was and, though scary at the time, they are comedic to me now because I understand them. They are predictable, and when you can expect something, the fright wears off. For example, a good jump scare is one placed when least expected (e.g., the famous one in Insidious); but if too many are used in a film, it loses its effect because you wind up expecting them.
New genres develop in light of horror’s popularity, because we’ve seen what’s been done before: you’ve got the aforementioned slashers, gore-fests, Lovecraftian cosmic horrors, ghost stories, psychological thrillers, found-footage horror, analog horror, etc… The only “genre” which I vouch for as a 40-year-old man as one that could freak me out is surrealistic horror.
Honestly, I’m not even sure you could call it a genre. A surreal horror could sit comfortably in any of those genre classifications above. Most horrors are defined as such because they involve some surrealistic trait (e.g., the supernatural), given that surrealism is about the illogical and the surprising. In a “genre” sense, though, surreal horrors are often described as surreal because they create a dream-like context. With that, surrealism doesn’t have to be scary and can fall into genres completely removed from horror (some of my favourites: Being John Malkovich, Brazil, Last Year at Marienbad).
The downside of surreal horror is that it’s often “hit-or-miss” because people are scared by different things (i.e., ideas and contexts). Some surreal horrors, designed to be scary, don’t impact me in the slightest. On the other hand, the surrealism that really gets me comes from the non-horror films, that might have a particular scene or two, that had no business being scary, but nonetheless creep me out because I don’t expect it (e.g., 2001: A Space Odyssey, Inland Empire, Trainspotting). These are the ones that evade the aforementioned predictability and familiarity and, again, create and exploit uncertainty.
This brings me to the one factor that I think really epitomises what makes something scary: it elicits the fight, flight, freeze (or appease) response. If you can exploit that response in your storytelling, you can create something scary. I know that’s not terribly useful with respect to explaining what creates fear (rather what fear creates), but the reality is, there’s no easy answer, other than “it depends.”
Don’t forget that fear is irrational. When we engage something scary, it’s because of our emotional response to it… and our emotions aren’t rational. There are no rules in the irrational (I suppose much the same can be said about the surreal). So, anything can be scary to the right person in the right situation. However, the chances of that thing being scary can be enhanced by exploiting other factors regarding fear we know about more generally, as discussed above. Add context. Think about your setting; make it feel “off.” Curate an appropriate soundtrack. Create intrigue. Surprise them (but don’t belabour it). Be unpredictable.
