Geography & Architecture of Horror 1 The Geography and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out Francis T. McAndrew Department of Psychology Knox College CONTACT INFORMATION: Francis T, McAndrew Department of Psychology Knox College Galesburg, IL 61401-4999 Email:
[email protected] Phone: +1-309-341-7525 Website: www.frankmcandrew.com Geography & Architecture of Horror 2 Abstract It is the goal of this paper to apply what psychologists and other social scientists have learned about human emotional responses to physical surroundings to an understanding of why some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information can induce a sense of dread in humans. The hoped-for contribution is to bring empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and to explain why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Research has demonstrated that human beings have been programmed by evolution to respond emotionally to their physical surroundings, and natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films. This article applies McAndrew and Koehnke’s (2016) theory of creepiness to the study of classic horror settings and explores the role played by architecture, isolation, association with