Horror movies, explained by human fear

Each genre has its own tropes. Westerns feature black and white hats as well as face-offs among lone gunmen in middle of otherwise empty streets. They also have nearly obligatory shots of broad-open spaces under brightly colored skies. A Rom-com has obligatory meeting-cutes. Murder mysteries have their quirky detectives who make unlikely connections, noir stories have their femmes fatales and grievous setbacks for hardbitten heroes, musicals have their “I Wish” declarations of intent and their supposedly spontaneous choreography. In any genre you can name, there are long-established patterns for efficient, effective storytelling, and creators who have to decide whether to subvert those expectations, or give longtime fans of the genre what they’ve been trained to want to see.

The most trope-driven genre in fiction is horror. It’s hard to name a single horror story or movie or TV show that doesn’t either draw on some form of familiar, longstanding trope, or establish one that’s subsequently been copied over and over. Horror is constantly being reinvented and redesigned, and it’s the genre that evolves fastest in response to every new cultural, social, or technological shift. But it’s still a genre of recurrence, of traceable and echoing patterns that link the first spooky stories told around a campfire to the nonstop barrage of cheap, enthusiastic indie films pouring onto streaming services today.

There’s a fundamental reason for that. And given what a wide field horror has become, and how hugely horror stories vary, it’s a counterintuitive reason. Horror is all about manipulating fear in order to shock and excite an audience. The truth is that humanity fears only a handful of basic things.

Fear’s fundamentals

Zoe Deschanel and Mark Wahlburg huddle together around Ashlyn Sanchez in the middle of a deserted, windblown city street in a stylized promotional image for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening

Image by 20th Century Fox

Most people, if pressed, could lay out at least a few things they’re afraid of, whether they’re physical things like spiders or violent strangers, or more abstract possibilities, like unemployment or publicly humiliation. Horror stories offer a variety of terrifying scenarios. They range from the plausible (being lost in the woods), to the impossible but not likely (getting eaten or bitten by a shark) and even the unimaginable. M. Night Shyamalan is keen to have people watch. The Happening to be frightened by the wind spreading malevolent pheromones that make people spontaneously impale themselves on whatever comes to hand, that isn’t exactly a common occurrence.)

The fear of the unknown is at the root of almost all fears. Nothing unnerves people like the understanding that they might have to deal with something they don’t have the experience or tools to deal with. And while horror stories put a thousand faces on that fear, after a while — after enough experience with the genre — all of those faces start to look like the bones underneath them.

“Fear of the unknown” can be splintered and reskinned in many, many ways to give horror stories their specificity. Because they cannot predict what will happen afterward, people are afraid of dying. They’re afraid of the dark, because it has the potential to hide just about anything they could imagine. They’re afraid of newly created things, because the possible downsides haven’t fully been established yet. (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is effectively a scary story about the possible horrors electricity could bring to society, which is something we don’t worry about much anymore — we’ve moved on to making horror movies fussing over whether the internet might make ghosts better at murdering us.)

And on an atavistic level that’s just another form of “fear of death,” people are afraid of being prey instead of predators. This is why horror stories are filled with creatures who want to eat people, both real-world and folklore animals, our own scientifically flawed creations, or unknown critters.

Beyond the basic survival questions of what wants to devour us, lay eggs in us, or just kill us for fun, we’re afraid of the unknowns inherent in our own bodies. Science doesn’t fully understand how the human brain works, or how to fix it when something goes wrong. We have a wide range of paranoid and exploitative movies about madness, some much more complex than cultural commentaries such as American Psycho To mad-slasher movies such as the Halloween Friday 13th franchises, where “insane” is synonymous with “murderous, implacable, and nearly invulnerable.”

We’re similarly afraid of what happens if our bodies break down in ways we can’t predict or control, which drives fear-of-aging movies like Shyamalan’s An Old Version The Visit, stories about fast-spreading diseases like Stephen King’s The StandAnd Stories of body-snatchers in which something unknown is able to take our bodies and identity. We’re also terrified of what happens if someone else damages our bodies, leading to decades of increasingly graphic horror stories about kidnappers and torturers, sadists and rapists, serial killers and mad scientists.

People are always a source of new information. You can’t always see what another person is thinking, even with the closest and most dearest. It’s a short jump from there to the knee-jerk fear of anything that looks or acts human enough to fool people, but has a secret face and a secret agenda, and might sidle up to us in a tempting way. Vampires, fairy-tale shapeshifters, and Scarlett Johansson’s alluring hunter-alien in The SkinAll of these are extreme examples of how we express our concern that others might mistrust us, or that someone or something might have malicious intent.

The basic fear of the unknown is what even the best horror movies of the past decade fail to convey. InvaderIt follows is scary because it’s incredibly strong, implacable, and deeply malevolent, and because it always looks like someone its victim knows, until it attacks. But above all, it’s scary because no one knows what it is, or how to stop it. In the title creature Babadook is unnerving because of its eerie presentation and the mysteries around what it is and what it wants — and even when those questions seem to be answered, it still represents the fundamental unknowability of people. The Hereditary is full of shocks that push the envelope on viewers’ discomfort, but it’s ultimately about people with hidden agendas that the protagonists don’t know about, and don’t know how to counter, until it’s too late. Scratch just about any horror movie’s surface, and the blood beneath it is just that old fear of the unknown, hiding under a new and elaborate skin.

This is the second reason for fear

A spooky pair of eyes superimposed over a run-down looking cabin in a shot from Evil Dead 2

Lionsgate photo

The fear of terror is but one part of the larger picture. Fear of isolation is the only baseline terror comparable to it in terms of terror stories. Not only are we afraid of facing something we don’t understand, we’re afraid we might have to do it alone. Most of us grew up knowing that there is a system in place to guide and protect us.

Life experience may give us plenty of reasons to be cynical about how much the government, the police, our teachers and bosses and parents, or any other designated authority can or will help us when we’re in trouble. Horror stories can be more powerful when they aren’t reliant on authority.

Horror creators have found chilling ways to exploit the threat and dread of isolation, from early Gothic conventions, like sending a character off to a distant country house to live among strangers, to modern ones, like unplugging a character’s phone every time he tries to charge it. Future horror offers many new options to isolate people. Alien’s tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” is the implication that the victims are literal light-years from comfort or help.

Remote cabins in the woods, defunct and abandoned carnivals or farms or ghost towns — they’re all tropes because they all represent different kinds of isolation. The cops who dismiss the protagonist as hysterical, the mayor who refuses to close the beaches after the shark attacks, the mentor who gets body-snatched first and lures other people to their doom — they’re all tropes because they help shut down any sense that protection or rescue is an option. Humans are social animals, and we have the same sense as any other pack creature that there’s safety in numbers, and danger in being left behind for whatever predators follow.

The horror promise

A shirtless young man looking at himself in the mirror sees hockey-masked killer Jason Voorhees coming up behind him with a bloody axe in Friday The 13th Part V: A New Beginning

Paramount Pictures Photo

However, there are limited ways of isolating people. There are also only so many ways that you can depict the unknown. Horror is reliant on well-established and tested images because there are only so many fears universally enough to unnerve large audiences. Given the crowded field of horror, it is a challenge to find a new route into these core ideas. That’s the threat of walking on well-trod ground: If a given book, game, film, or show doesn’t live up to the best examples of the genre, there’s a cadre of horror fans who are all too eager to loudly sigh and point at some previous example that did the trope better.

However, the vast library of well-known horror tropes also offers a great opportunity. For one thing, horror’s heavy use of tropes means that creators can draw on the successes of everyone who worked the terror mines before them. People watching a great horror movie aren’t necessarily frightened solely by what’s onscreen. The tension is built by their memories of similar horror stories that ended badly for them. Because they are able to predict what will happen to many of those unlucky, film-franchise criminals such as Jason Voorhees or Jigsaw, Pinhead, and Michael Myers still have viewers at the edge of their seats. When a knife-wielding slasher stalks a victim in a horror game, or characters in a ghost story start feeling an unexplained chill, or the words “Day One” ominously appear onscreen in a zombie movie, horror audiences feel a frission of anticipation, because they know what’s coming — they just don’t know when, or how bad it’ll get.

Even for creators drawing on the exact same trope — say, that fear of shark attacks, and of being eaten — there’s still room for an infinite variety of tones and themes, approaches and angles. One shark story can be transformed into an iconic classic by character-framing and world-building. JawsOne turns into another in a thrilling thriller Deep Blue SeaA third is a movie that blurs the lines between middle and top. The Great WhiteThis is a. Horror stories’ effectiveness generally don’t come from which tropes they use, so much as how well they build stories around them.

It’s also well worth remembering that most of the greatest and most memorable horror stories mix and match tropes, taking advantage of the infinite number of combinations. Stephen King’s IT isn’t just an evil-clown story. Its monster can be both a shapeshifter or mind-reader. This inhuman creature can appear as vulnerable as possible to prey on isolated, and most vulnerable individuals. The Thing isn’t just an alien story, it’s a bodysnatcher movie and a study in isolation and “Who can you trust?” paranoid dynamics. The Exorcist is about an unknowable and powerful entity, but it’s also about loss of innocence, loss of physical control, loss of faith, and the gross-out factor of being covered in green vomit. So on and so forth.

The simplest promises are the best source of horror stories We’re going to scare you. It’s exciting to be afraid for a little while, and then remember that you were safe all along. Most of the time, that means that you have to use the same tools and techniques that work every single day, no matter how many times they change. But there’s a darker, more complex promise running under the genre: We don’t ever have to worry about running out of stories that scare us, because we’re always going to be scared of the same two things. We can never know everything, and we can never escape the ways in which we’re alone. That’s bad news for humanity, maybe, but it’s great for horror creators. They may have to go back to the same well over and over for scares, but it’s a deep, dark well, and it’s one we’re never really going to be able to fill.

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