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Wesleyan University The Honors College

Scare Me, I Dare You: A Neuropsychological Account of the Horror Film

by

Maya Dorn Class of 2019

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors in General Scholarship

Middletown, Connecticut April, 2019

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………3

Introduction: The Paradox of Horror…………………………………….4

Chapters

1: The Biology of Fear as a Reward……………………………………13

2: Scares………………………………………………………………...45

3: The Spaces In Between the “Scares”………………………………...71

4: Beyond Horror: Constructive Interactions with Other Emotions……98

Conclusions: Fear Reconsidered………………………………………121

Appendix: Key to Relevant Neuroanatomy…………………………...128

Bibliography…………………………………………………………...132

Filmography…………………………………………………………...142

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Scott Higgins for being so supportive throughout the process of writing this thesis. Thank you for taking the time to listen to me ramble about the psychology and neuroscience of fear and how cool I thought horror films were whenever I dropped in for office hours when I was taking Cinema of Horror, then for letting me write an entire thesis about all these ideas I had floating around my mind. Without your guidance, vast knowledge about film, constructive feedback, and encouragement, I could not have turned these ideas into a coherent work. Your consistent optimism and enthusiasm about these interdisciplinary ideas reminded me that I should be excited, not overwhelmingly stressed, to write this thesis. I could not have asked for a better mentor to advise my thesis.

Thank you to Will Barr for acting as my thesis writing mentor and taking the time to read drafts of my thesis, give me feedback, and help me navigate scientific research and writing. I became much more confident in my writing through your mentorship.

I am grateful to the Wesleyan Psychology, Neuroscience & Behavior, and Film Studies Departments for encouraging me to grow as a student over the past four years and for fostering an environment for interdisciplinary learning. Courses such as Research Methods in Emotion, Advanced Research in Culture and Emotion, Research Methods in Animal Research, Behavioral Neurobiology, and the Cinema of Horror built the foundations of this work. Notably, thank you to Professor Robinson for taking the time to meet with me to help me navigate the motivation and reward literature.

I would like to especially thank everyone who acted as academic mentors for me throughout the years. I am in debt to Patricia M. Rodriguez-Mosquera for teaching me how to be a precise and rigorous researcher, teaching how to critically read scientific papers, and allowing me my first opportunity to pursue my own research project. I am also deeply grateful to Zhen Yan and Josh Drake at the University of Virginia for pushing me to grow as a scientist and become more confident in my science.

Thank you to my friends who supported me during this thesis writing process and keeping me less stressed. Many of my insights for this work actually came from conversations with friends that started with me asking, “so why do you think we like horror films?” The friends who have cooked food for me when I was in a time crunch, watched horror films with me, and kept me focused doing work side-by-side, etc. have made this process far smoother and deserve a special shout-out.

Finally, I am forever in debt to my family for raising me and giving me the opportunity to study at Wesleyan. I would especially like to thank my parents. Thank you to my mom for bugging me to add images to this work and print enough copies for the whole family, to my dad for sending me so many neuroscience articles, and to both of you for all of the family scary movie nights. DORN THESIS 4

Introduction: The Paradox of Horror

“Now I need you to put your thinking caps on because I want each of you to draw what you think the future is going to look like. Then we’ll put the pictures in the capsule, and 50 years from today, a group of children, just like yourselves, will open it up to see what you drew. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

Five-year-old, Lucina Embry furiously scribbles numbers onto a piece of paper, and hands it to her teacher to put in the time capsule. This document reveals the time, date, and location of every mass disaster for the last 50 years until the end of humanity. Once Lucina’s writing is uncovered and decoded, Professor John Koestler realizes that the apocalypse is only days away. As a chain of mass disasters builds up to the end of the world, we see planes burn up in flames upon crashing, subway train cars derailed and crushing pedestrians waiting on the platform, tiny cars carrying our protagonists T-boned by large 16-wheeler trucks, and more. I was 11 when I saw

Knowing (2009) come out in theaters. Though it’s not a horror film, the film terrified me, not only as I was watching it, but also whenever I was at home alone in the dark.

I had to sleep in my mom’s bed for nearly an entire year after watching the film. To this day, I still have a visceral reaction when I see 16-wheeler trucks.

Anyone would think that I would never want to watch a “scary” movie again.

After all, people are drawn to do more of things they enjoy, and less of things that lead to negative consequences. Yet, the next year, I grabbed tickets to Insidious

(2010)–– an actual horror film–– when it came out in theaters. Typically, we strongly avoid things that scare us. Some people have such strong acrophobia (fear of heights) that they avoid going to rooftop bars, looking down staircase railings, and traveling to DORN THESIS 5 places like the Grand Canyon. It is our instinct to avoid things that we are afraid of that saves us by telling us to run away if there is a poisonous snake in front of us, rather than to approach it. Still, millions of us pay money to watch our worst nightmares projected onto a screen in front of us, and stay in our seats for the entire movie. Perhaps more interestingly, many of us come back to watch another horror film after experiencing one. What is it that appeals to us and draws us to come back to watch more scary movies after having suffered the negative consequences of one?

The paradox of horror is such that we enjoy watching horror films, though fear is otherwise an aversive emotion. The aim of this thesis is to explore two questions: why and how do we enjoy horror film? I will explore answers to these questions from the perspectives of psychology, neuroscience, and film studies. My fundamental argument is that fear, when experienced in a safe context, activates our reward system, and allows us to enjoy horror film. As long as we are safe when we are experiencing the fear, we pay to enter a contract with the filmmaker, where we want the filmmaker to scare us as much as possible. Filmmakers fill scary movies with jump scares, monsters, creepy atmospheres, etc. because we asked for it. In this work, I will elucidate neurological and filmic mechanisms through which we are allowed to enjoy horror film. As art has the power to uncover parts of the human psyche before the advances of science can, an investigation of the paradox of horror can be revealing of human psychology and the largely mysterious mechanisms of the brain.

The scope of this thesis will progressively go from small to large, first searching for solutions to the paradox of horror in neurons and systems of neurons. DORN THESIS 6

Then, we will look at horror scenes, entire feature films, the genre as a whole, and finally how horror interacts with other genres. The first chapter takes a primarily neurological perspective on our enjoyment of fear. Here, I describe the fear mechanism and the reward system, and how the two systems interact. The second chapter will focus on the parts of the horror film that pump adrenaline through our bodies, primarily jump scares. This chapter’s aim is to use evidence from contemporary neuroscience to highlight how filmmakers use film form to generate thrill from jump scares. The third chapter will focus on the parts of the horror film in between jump scares, and how horror functions as entire feature films. The aim of the last chapter is to look beyond horror and investigate two examples of how horror interacts with other concepts: sex and comedy. From its beginnings with Nosferatu

(1922), sex has strongly underlied horror films. Comedy-horror is a genre that seems counterintuitive, but has generated several successful films.

I write this thesis acknowledging that we are far from knowing everything about the human brain. In this work, I cannot, myself, contribute any new lines of research. Yet, I will attempt to build a new picture of the horror film by integrating three areas of study that do not typically interact. I believe that interdisciplinary studies between science and the arts can generate unique and valuable ideas.

Alfred Hitchcock was the instigator of my interest in film. When I watched

Psycho (1960) for the first time in high school, I was left stupefied, despite the film’s famous ending having been spoiled for me. What astonished me was how intimately

Hitchcock seemed to know me. He knew that we’re most scared when we’re vulnerable–– when we lull ourselves into a sense of safety, only for it to be DORN THESIS 7 undermined. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) seemed so sweet, innocent, and charmingly awkward when we first met him. We all trusted him before we found out that he has brutally killed several people. Moreover, we trusted that Hitchcock would keep our protagonist alive for at least a majority of the film’s duration. I left the film

(closed my laptop) believing that there is no better place for a movie murder than the shower, where we are so vulnerable. The thing that scared me the most was realizing that anyone could be a monster if a sweet motel keeper could turn into a knife- wielding murderer. Psycho scared me most after I finished the film. I started to consume Hitchcock film after Hitchcock film, always feeling like he hit me where it scared me most. I became so fascinated with Alfred Hitchcock because he had a precocious understanding of the psychology of his audience members. He didn’t just use an array of general scary pop-ups to scare the audience, but he cut deep where it mattered most. I believe that a better understanding of psychology and neuroscience can make for films that scare us more effectively, like the films of Hitchcock.

In the inverse, I believe that when we listen to art, we can build a more whole understanding of how people work. Horror in particular can be a good starting point for dialogue between art and the study of the human brain, since understanding fear and reward has become so central to our approach to mental health care. So many psychopathologies are characterized by dysfunctions in the processing of fear or reward. PTSD, anxiety, and specific phobias are related to excess amounts of fear.

Addiction disorders (i.e. drugs and gambling) are driven by overuse of our reward system. Studying the intersection of film and neuroscience/psychology can direct the hypotheses that we pursue in future studies, and ultimately how we approach things DORN THESIS 8 like mental health care. I will conclude this work by highlighting questions that future researchers should endeavor and the broader implications of the findings in my own work.

Lastly, I am interested in this thesis because monsters are fascinating. From a very young age, I always loved Halloween–– the day that we can dress up as completely different beings and celebrate monsters. I enjoyed dressing up as Dracula, and scaring my friends, and I think many of us did too. In my middle school and high school years, I wanted to watch every new scary movie when it came out in theaters because it felt fun to be afraid. I remember being attracted to films like Warm Bodies

(2013), where we realize that the monster isn’t so bad after all. If we take one thing away from this work, I would like to make a convincing case that fear isn’t always so bad. We do not always need to fear fear itself. In some circumstances such as

Halloween, horror films, and roller coasters, fear can and should be celebrated as an enjoyable experience.

Summary and Critique of Literature

In this section, I will include literature for which its primary subject is film or the horror film. By far, the most comprehensive study of the horror genre is by philosopher Noël Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart

(1990). It is important to note that Noël Carroll refers to two paradoxes: 1) we are frightened by things that we know to be fiction and 2) we enjoy horror in the context of art, while we are typically averse to horror. This thesis primarily focuses on the latter. In Carroll’s work, he attempts to define the genre, delineate its core characteristics, and provide an explanation of the paradox of horror. Much of the DORN THESIS 9 previous literature on horror film had been founded in psychoanalytic theory. Carroll was one of the first to write about the horror film without relying on psychoanalysis.

He posits that we enjoy horror film because it provides cognitive pleasures. In

Carroll’s “Cognitive Pleasures Model,” we do not gain enjoyment from the horror itself. What keeps the audience in their seats is deep curiosity with regard to the plot and to the monster itself. Horror strongly invokes suspense. More important, we find the monster so repulsive that we cannot look away–– we seek to understand this unfathomable being.

Noël Carroll defines the typical film of the genre as a work that intends to create a reaction of “art horror” in the audience to the monster. “Art horror” refers to fear that is elicited by art, as opposed to natural horror. Thus, horror, as its name suggests, is defined by the affect that it produces. Monsters are necessary, but not sufficient to categorize a film as horror. To be characterized as a monster, a being must not be able to be explained by contemporary science and the monster must be threatening. Thus, Chewbacca does not include the Star Wars saga in the horror genre. Yet, in the same vein, this definition excludes films such as John Carpenter’s

Halloween (1978), which contain human “monsters,” but almost anyone would call a horror film. Carroll’s definition of the horror film is an imperfect one, but it offers a strong starting point for this work. According to Carroll, the monsters in horror film must perplex us enough to retain our attention despite our impulse to run away from things that repulse us. Monsters must be seen as disgusting. They bewilder and repulse us by confounding our cultural categories. DORN THESIS 10

Carroll proposes five categories of monsters. “Fusion monsters” combine two divergent cultural categories into a single being. Notably, popular monsters such as vampires and zombies blur the lines between the living and the dead. The Annabelle doll creeps us out in the Annabelle and The Conjuring films because it has human characteristics and moves on its own, but is not living. “Fission monsters” diffuse these cultural categories across a single being’s multiple egos. For example, werewolves are human during the day, but turn into vicious wolves at night.

“Magnification” monsters are large-scale versions of beings that already threaten us and creep us out. Giant spiders would be included in this category. “Massing” involves immense groups of these beings that already carry with them a sense of menace. Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) provides an excellent example of this1.

Finally, some monsters are characterized by “horrific metonymy.” An inexplicable air of horror surrounds these monsters. In addition to being categorized as a “fusion monster,” Dracula carries vermin with him, which are associated with malady and contamination. It is in these five ways that we are continually attempt to and fail to understand the monsters in horror films, and hence our curiosity leads to “cognitive pleasures.”

I would argue that in his attempt to explain the paradox of horror without psychoanalysis, Noël Carroll missed the mark on what audiences enjoy about horror.

It does not seem plausible that mere curiosity about things that repulse us could account for our entire desire to feel such negative emotions during film. Personally, I pay little attention to the monster in horror films. Many filmmakers only give the

1 Though it is worth noting that The Birds is a little bit unconventional because birds are not considered disgusting on their own. DORN THESIS 11 monsters mere seconds of screen time–– not enough time for us to thoroughly investigate the strange creatures. Though curiosity about the monster and the plot are two factors that can contribute to our enjoyment of horror film, I argue that they play more minor roles in the paradox of horror than Carroll had thought. There is much more to the human brain than the cortical areas that handle cognition. I will later argue that the same more “primal” parts of the brain that are responsible for fight-or- flight responses and reward majorly contribute to our enjoyment of horror.

Noël Carroll’s ideas were novel, in part, because he was the first scholar to generate a major theory on the paradox of horror without psychoanalysis. With this said, the dominant thought on horror film before Carroll was deeply rooted in psychoanalysis. Thus, it will be important for me to write about these theories to provide historical context to the paradox of horror. One notable film critic who wrote on the psychoanalytic accounts of genre pleasure in horror is Robin Wood. Wood posits three core components of the horror film: 1) the monster, 2) the normal, and 3) the relationship between the two. The monster brings to light something that is either repressed within us or oppressed in our society. According to Wood, the prototype of the normal is the monogamous heterosexual couple and Capitalism. In more progressive horror films, the line is blurred between the normal and the monster. The monstrosities of the normal and the sympathetic characteristics of the monster are revealed. In reactionary horror films, the monster is depicted as purely ugly and the normal is depicted as wholly good. According to Wood, we enjoy horror films because they unearth our desires that have either been repressed within ourselves or oppressed by our societies in a way that provides a sense of release and restoration. DORN THESIS 12

Though Wood’s foundation in psychoanalysis can be problematic, it will be important to reflect on the normal, the monster, and the relationship between the two in our studies of horror film (Wood, 1984).

This thesis will avoid committing the fallacy of that much of the current literature on horror film has of attempting to provide a single explanation of the paradox of horror. It will be valuable to keep Noël Carroll and Robin Wood in mind as we begin our exploration of the horror film, since they represent the dominant discourse on the horror film to this date. I hope to supplement their theories with contemporary research in neuroscience and psychology. Likewise, I aim to introduce a new perspective to the study of the brain by applying findings of the current research to a specific question in the arts.

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Chapter 1: The Biology of Fear as a Reward

To address the paradox of why we enjoy fear in the context of horror film from a neuroscientist’s perspective, we will need to focus on two neural systems: reward and fear. A study in the reward system will serve to elucidate our motivations for wanting something so aversive. We will need to understand the fear response to talk about how horror film affects us. From there, we can find connections between fear and reward. Finally, we will need to understand how we experience film, and how that differs from how we experience reality, to provide a theory of why we enjoy fear in the context of cinema.

The Reward System

The brain’s reward system is what drives us to do a large portion of what we do. Our brain rewards us for doing more pleasurable activities and minimizes our encounters with aversive stimuli. When most people think of reward in the brain, they think of dopamine. Afterall, the reward system is often called the “dopaminergic system.” Many drugs like cocaine try to mimic dopamine. People become addicted to cocaine because it is essentially a switch that directly stimulates reward for the entire time that it is active in the brain. Researchers have planted probes that directly stimulate a rat’s reward system. These probes have been planted in several areas of the rodent dopaminergic system, such as the ventral tegmental area. The rats learned to press a bar to activate the probe. Once the rats in the study discovered that pressing this bar released reward, they would press the bar as much as 7000 times per hour (for stimulation of the interpeduncular nucleus of the tegmentum in Olds, 1958), and continue to self-stimulate in spite of electrical shock, hunger, etc. (Olds, 1958). Our DORN THESIS 14 reward system is a powerful force. We can probably all think of a time when we neglected our responsibilities to do something else that we wanted to do. This was our reward system influencing our behavior.

It is widely accepted that the structures of our reward system are connected through dopamine transmission. Dopamine neurons mostly originate in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), and project to the nucleus accumbens (NAc), prefrontal cortex

(PFC), and amygdala (see figure 1.1). Other dopamine neurons originate in the substantia nigra and project to the ventral striatum2 (Berridge, 2015). With some caveats, which I will describe later, increase of dopamine neurotransmission in the reward system makes us want more of something. When our reward system is activated, we are more inclined to engage in approach behavior (i.e. seeking out the thing that rewards us). One common measure of reward is our decision to choose one reward over something else. We may also be more willing to work harder to attain a reward. Our motivation to attain a reward can be altered by our internal states. For example, we are more motivated to eat when we are hungry (Berridge, 2004). Some rewards can become associated with certain cues. These cues can gain their own attractive value, or incentive salience. Theoretically, we should not be able to reap the reward of caffeine from the mere smell of coffee. Yet, if we learn to associate the smell of coffee with the reward of caffeine, we may be willing to take a detour on our way home from work to grab a cup of Starbucks if we had been smelling our co- worker’s freshly brewed coffee all day (Berridge, 2007). These are a few examples to illustrate how activation of the reward system can manifest itself in our behavior, but

2 For the purposes of this work, the nucleus accumbens and the ventral striatum are names for the same structure that can be used interchangeably. The ventral striatum is composed of the nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle. DORN THESIS 15 we will see later that reward behavior becomes more complicated when we introduce factors such as conflicting punishment.

Figure 1.1 The Reward System: Major circuitry of the rodent reward system. The circuitry is largely the same in the human brain. A majority of the communication between structures in the reward system is mediated by the neurotransmitter, dopamine (DA). Dopamine neurons originate in the ventral tegmental area, and project predominantly to the nucleus accumbens through the mesolimbic pathway and to the prefrontal cortex through the mesocortical pathway. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter and GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter. Abbreviations: mPFC, medial prefrontal cortex; Hipp, hippocampus; NAc, nucleus accumbens; Amy, amygdala; LH, lateral hypothalamus; LHb, lateral habenula; VTA, ventral tegmental area; RMTg, rostromedial tegmentum; LDTg, lateral dorsal tegmentum. Image used with permission from The American Association for the Advancement of Science through Copyright Clearance Center, License Number 4570400942657, from Russo & Nestler, 2013.

Though when most people think of dopamine and the reward system they think of pleasure, pleasure is independent of reward. Here, I will differentiate between liking, “liking,” wanting, and “wanting.” Liking and wanting without quotations refer to our colloquial usage of the words. “Liking” refers to hedonic value as represented in the brain. “Wanting” is used to describe appetitive motivation (not necessarily referring to food, but to desire) for things that activate our reward system.

“Liking” occurs in fewer and more specific brain regions, known as hedonic hot DORN THESIS 16 spots. On the other hand, “wanting” is represented in the brain as the vaster network of systems known as the dopaminergic system (see figure 1.1). Some brain areas that are known to contribute to “wanting” also contribute to “liking,” while others negatively contribute to “liking.” Statistically, it is more likely that we “want” something that we do not “like” than that we “like” something that we do not “want,” yet both occur frequently. For instance, the nucleus accumbens is known to contribute to our reward system. Yet, a hot spot that only takes up 10% of the overall volume of the nucleus accumbens contributes positively to “liking.” In fact, areas of the nucleus accumbens exist that are called “cold spots” for “liking.” Stimulation of these areas may induce “wanting,” but actually decreases “liking” (Berridge, 2004).

Evidence that Horror is Rewarding.

Though liking, “liking,” wanting, and “wanting” often intersect, it is reasonable to believe that horror, with its aversive nature, may be an exception. First of all, it is important to note that not everyone wants or likes horror films. I get a range of responses when I tell people that I am writing my thesis on horror film.

Some people do say, “that’s cool! I love scary movies!” I’ve found that most people say that they can’t stand horror films. Yet, of those people who say that they’re scared of horror films, most but not all say that they could never watch a scary movie. Some say they don’t like being scared, but they still watch them from time to time anyway.

I would not call my friends a representative sample of the overall population

(somehow, I’ve mostly acquainted myself with people who hate scary movies).

Nonetheless, different people experience different reactions to horror films. Of the people who do watch horror films, some people both like and want them, while others DORN THESIS 17

“want” them without liking them. I will not dwell too much on horror film “liking” because the focus of my thesis is to discuss why we are motivated to watch horror films. “Liking” is independent of motivation. It is unclear whether or not we “like” horror films, but it is better established that we “want” horror films (Berridge, 2004).

The fact that horror has continued to produce high grossing films for decades strongly suggests that we “want” horror. When Jaws (1975) first came out, it was the highest-grossing film of all time until Star Wars debuted two years later. Adjusting for inflation, Jaws has grossed approximately $2 billion worldwide according to its

Wikipedia entry. According to AMC filmsite, with adjustment for inflation, Jaws

(1975) is the seventh highest domestic grossing film of all time at. It was more successful in the box office than many vastly influential films including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Avatar (2009), Black Panther (2018), Shrek 2 (2004), and every Star Wars film with the exception of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope

(1977). Also in the top ten highest domestic grossing films of all time is The Exorcist

(1973), ranked at number nine. Without adjusting for inflation, the top grossing horror film of all time is It (2017), which earned a whopping $700.4 million worldwide. Some horror films like Saw (2004) can become successful as entire franchises, making viewers come back for more.

If effort to attain a reward is a common measure of reward system activation, then it should make sense that horror film motivates us. Not only are we willing to pay money to be scared by a movie, but we dedicate hours to sit in one seat and watch a film. Many of us will even spend time and gas money driving out of our way to watch the newest horror hit on the big screen. Something attracts us to horror film. As DORN THESIS 18 a personal anecdote, one time, I was at a sleepover with a group of friends in middle school. We were at the age where I had never seen a real horror film before, but we were starting to become more curious and daring. One of my friends thought it would be funny to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) right before we were about to go to bed. Her older sister had watched it and told her to never watch it because it had given her nightmares. Admittedly, this film does not seem scary to me anymore, but it was terrifying when I had never seen a movie like this before. We felt cool watching the movie that the older kids couldn’t even watch. None of us actually wanted to watch it all the way through, we said we would only watch a few minutes of it until we got too scared. Yet, for some reason, we watched the entire film (at least those of us who didn’t fall asleep). After the really scary parts, everyone would say things like, “Aileen, turn it off,” or “why are we even watching this,” but we kept watching.

The reason why we chose to watch the movie in the first place was to feel cool, but when the jump scares got bad there came a point where that no longer mattered, and we wanted to turn off the tv but couldn’t bring ourselves to do it. We said we did not want to watch the movie, but we still “wanted” to watch it. We attributed an incentive salience to something about the horrors on the screen, and kept our eyes peeled on it, despite the aversive consequences.

The Fear System

Let’s say there’s a poisonous snake in front of me. I’m going to feel afraid.

First, I sense the snake visually. Typically, visual stimuli are first perceived in the retina. From the retina emerges the optic nerve, where the information is communicated via neural signals. Importantly, the first synapse of the optic nerve is DORN THESIS 19 the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus. Visual input goes through rudimentary processing here before it is fully processed by the visual cortex in the back of the brain. There have been cases where blindness occurs, not due to damage or defect in the eyes themselves, but because of damage to the visual cortex. If someone held a pen in front of a person with this condition, and asked them if the pen were on the left or right side of them, they would answer correctly with above-chance accuracy. This is because these people retain preliminary visual processing from the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus (Ajina et al., 2015). I mention this because the lateral geniculate nucleus plays an important role in our visual detection of danger.

When we see a snake, we become afraid before we can even fully process what we are afraid of. This is because the information processed in the thalamus is immediately sent to the amygdala before the information can be fully processed by the visual cortex and we can put a name to the objects in front of us. The thalamus is physically closer to the eyes and it processes a low level of detail fast. On the other hand, the visual cortex processes visual input in high detail and it is on the complete opposite side of the head from the eyes, so it processes information a little bit slower.

The rudimentary visual input from the thalamus allows for swift reaction. Then information processed in the visual cortex allows for the conscious recognition of a snake, and therefore the cognitive appraisal of danger. If the object in front of us were actually a plastic toy snake, the rudimentary visual processing in the thalamus would signal danger to our amygdala. Then a few milliseconds later, our cortex would recognize the snake as fake, and signal to the amygdala that we are not actually in danger. DORN THESIS 20

When threat is detected in the amygdala, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) is activated. The hypothalamus releases corticotropin releasing factor

(CRF) to signal the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH).

When ACTH is released into the bloodstream, it signals to the adrenal gland in the kidneys to release cortisol. Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. At the same time, catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline) are released by the adrenal medulla.

This activates the fight or flight response (see figure 1.2). The heart rate increases, blood pressure increases, and blood flow increases to the muscles. Fight or flight mode also decreases our needs for functions including eating and sleeping (Bear et al., 2016).

Though I describe a situation here in which fear is detected visually, every sensory system sends projections to the amygdala. The amygdala is composed of several distinct nuclei that each has different functions. Here, I will focus on the central amygdala (CeA) and the basolateral amygdala (BLA). Generally, the BLA is thought to mostly receive inputs from various sensory systems, and generate emotional experience. The BLA is by far the largest nucleus in the human amygdala.

Once the BLA processes information, it sends much of it to the CeA. The CeA is generally thought to create output that regulates emotional responses. The BLA receives major inputs from areas including the orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, insula, thalamus (a relay station for every type of sensory input), and unimodal visual, auditory, somatosensory, and gustatory areas. Most of these afferent3 fibers are returned reciprocally from the BLA to the same structures that

3 “Afferent” means incoming fibers, “efferent” means outgoing fibers. DORN THESIS 21 they came from. There are additional outputs from the BLA to the nucleus accumbens. The CeA receives major visceral sensory input from areas including the hypothalamus and the periaqueductal grey (in the brainstem). Once again, many of these incoming projections are reciprocated to the same structures (Vanderah &

Gould, 2016).

Figure 1.2 The Stress System: Threat is detected in the amygdala, which activates the HPA axis. The hypothalamus releases CRF (also called CRH). The pituitary gland, which sits at the bottom of the hypothalamus, releases ACTH, which signals to the adrenal cortex to release cortisol. Image used with permission from The American Association for the Advancement of Science through Copyright Clearance Center, License Number 4570420837044 from Lupien et al., 2009. DORN THESIS 22

Where Fear and Reward Connect

There exist several overlaps between the reward system and fear mechanisms.

If you ask any neuroscience student what the amygdala does, they will immediately say fear. Similarly, if you ask any neuroscience student where fear is managed in the brain, they will point to the amygdala. Though the amygdala has become synonymous with fear, it plays a lesser-known role in positive affect and in reward. Because the amygdala is made up of several substructures, it is tempting to guess that different structures would mediate differently valenced responses. However, that is not correct.

The same parts of the amygdala that are responsible for fear are also responsible for reward.

Structural overlap.

The basolateral amygdala (BLA) responds to both reward and aversion. Once researchers found this pattern, the next problem was to determine how the BLA could parse between reward and aversion if it responds to both. Researchers have found that some neurons in the BLA are activated in response to reward and do not respond to aversion, while another distinct set of neurons does the opposite. Interestingly, some neurons in the BLA respond indiscriminately to both reward and aversion. The field currently suggests a “salt-and-pepper” organization of these three types of neurons. In other words, they are randomly interspersed. There is no clustering of positively, negatively, or neutrally valenced neurons in the BLA. Neurons in the BLA mediate different behavioral responses based on the areas that they subsequently project to.

One study by Stephen Maren reveals that the BLA neurons that respond to positive reward predominantly project to the nucleus accumbens (NAc), an area of the brain DORN THESIS 23 known to play a key role in reward. Activation of these areas promotes approach behavior and reward-seeking behavior. The neurons in the BLA that are activated in response to aversive stimuli predominantly project to the central amygdala (CeA).

This ultimately leads to fear behavior (i.e. freezing or response suppression). Lastly, the BLA neurons that respond to both reward and aversion predominantly project to the ventral hippocampus, which Maren proposes may play a role in contextual control of motivated behavior (Maren, 2016).

Fear and reward have structural overlap in the brain, but the significance of this overlap is still unclear. On one hand, structural overlap is not always a meaningful measure of relationship. The hippocampus encodes memories of my grandmother’s face and what my elementary school looks like, and stores these mental representations in the cortex. It would be absurd if we had one neuron for each memory (i.e. a “grandmother cell”), so our memories are represented in our brains as distinct networks of neurons. One neuron that responds when I think of my grandmother may also be part of a network of neurons that responds when I think of my elementary school. Yet, this structural overlap does not necessarily mean that these two things are related.

On the other hand, structural overlap may indicate an evolutionary benefit of having two different things activating neurons that are in such close proximity to each other. The brain as a whole is mostly compartmentalized by function. Visual processing and auditory processing occur in completely different lobes of the brain.

We did not evolve to have a “salt-and-pepper” organization of these two different functions in the same part of the brain. It is likely more advantageous to have physical DORN THESIS 24 separation between functions that have no reason to have ease of cross talk by proximity4. Though reward and fear at first seem to be at ends with each other, it is possible that we evolved to process these two with neurons in such close proximity to each other because there is some inherent connection between reward and fear.

White matter connections.

What I described in the previous section is grey matter overlap between fear and reward. Grey matter refers to the dense cell body of the neuron–– the structure of the amygdala itself, for example. On the other hand, white matter refers to the axons that provide connection between neurons (see figure 1.3). Grey and white matter are named accordingly because the dense cortex (cell bodies) appears as grey and the axons covered in myelin sheath (a fatty outer layer of cells that protects the axon) appear as white in both post-mortem dissections and MRI scans. As I have alluded, the significance of grey matter overlap is to be taken with a grain of salt. In this case, white matter connectivity might be of more interest to us.

4 Cross talk between visual and auditory input does occur at higher cortical levels. The parietal lobe is known to integrate various sensory inputs into one coherent experience. Yet, at the level of bottom-up processing of color, motion, words, pitch, etc., it would not make sense for these two functions to have cross talk. DORN THESIS 25

Figure 1.3 Neuron Diagram: A neuron receives inputs from its dendrites. If it receives a sufficient excitatory input, it will become activated, and send output through its axon to a post-synaptic neuron. The synapse refers to the connection between two neurons, where neurotransmitters are sent from one neuron (the pre-synaptic neuron) to the next (the post- synaptic neuron). Neurotransmitters can either be excitatory or inhibitory. Excitatory neurotransmitters promote action potentials in the post-synaptic neuron, while inhibitory neurotransmitters inhibit action potentials in the post-synaptic neuron. “Grey matter” refers to the dense cell body (soma), while “white matter” refers to the axons and dendrites that form connections between neurons. (From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dendrite_(PSF).svg)

Before discussing more complex connections across brain systems, we need a crash course on white matter. There are two ways that neurons can communicate with each other through white matter connections: through excitation or inhibition.

Neurons typically maintain a low voltage (around -70mV) with a higher concentration of negatively charged ions5 inside of the cell than outside of the cell.

When a neuron is excited, it will let more positive ions into the cell, raising the voltage. If the voltage is raised to a certain threshold level (around -55mV), the neuron becomes activated, and fires an action potential. This means the neuron lets in a sudden and rapid influx of positively charged ions, which is propelled all the way

5 Ions are charged particles. For example, the sodium atom (Na) itself has a neutral charge, but when a negatively charged electron is removed from the atom, it becomes Na+, a positively charged ion. Common ions found in neurons to generate action potentials include Na+, K+, Ca2+, and Cl-. DORN THESIS 26 down the axon until it reaches the end. At the nerve ending, this positive charge pushes neurotransmitters out of the pre-synaptic neuron to the synapse, where they can reach receptors on the post-synaptic neuron. These neurotransmitters can either be excitatory or inhibitory. Excitatory neurotransmitters will allow positive ions into the post-synaptic cell, raising the voltage, and increasing the probability that the post- synaptic cell will reach the threshold voltage for its own action potential. Inhibitory neurotransmitters cause the voltage in the post-synaptic cell to be more negative, which decreases the probability that the post-synaptic cell will fire its own action potential (it still can, but it would require more excitatory input from other neurons than usual). There are no varying strengths of action potentials. A neuron either fires once it reaches the threshold voltage or it does not fire at all.

The focus of this section will be the excitatory or inhibitory (or unknown) connections between parts of the brain known to manage reward and fear. When we watch horror films, we both feel afraid and experience dopaminergic activation. First

I will outline how stress itself can fuel the reward system. Then, I will write about how our brain decides to disregard signals of threat, in favor of reward input, to keep us in our movie theater seats. While these mechanisms have not been tested in the specific context of horror film viewing, given the current research, these are theories of our enjoyment of horror film.

Constructive interference.

As I have previously mentioned, our fear system and our reward system work in close proximity. There exist neural mechanisms that could possibly allow stress to fuel our reward system. Many of us have experienced the phenomenon of “stress DORN THESIS 27 eating.” When we’re stressed out, we want to eat the junk foods full of sucrose and

MSG that directly target our reward system. Similarly, some of us may know someone who unfortunately became addicted to drugs or relapsed in a time of stress.

In fact, research has shown that stress can increase the likelihood of relapse to drugs of abuse such as heroin and cocaine (Shaham et al., 2000).

Scientists have been able to find a neural mechanism whereby stress makes us more likely to react to cues that trigger motivation for addictive substances, such as sucrose (Peciña et al., 2006). Peciña et al. (2006) found that corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) can amplify incentive salience for a known reward. CRF is a peptide hormone involved in the fight-or-flight stress response. If we remember, CRF is released by the hypothalamus as the first part of the HPA axis. Though CRF is thought to be part of our response to negative-valence stress and the NAc is thought to be part of our response to positive reward, CRF receptors have been found in the

NAc. In fact, the NAc has a number of CRF receptors comparable to those in the amygdala. Peciña et al. used a Pavlovian-Instrumental transfer (PIT) procedure whereby they conditioned rats to press a lever to obtain sucrose pellets, and then they learned to associate a sound cue with free sucrose pellets. On test day, the researchers injected CRF, amphetamine (a substance known to activate the reward system and enhance incentive salience), or a vehicle control into the medial shell of the NAc. The rats that were injected with either CRF or amphetamine showed increased lever pressing when they heard the conditioned sound cue. They did not press the lever more in the absence of the sound cue, which rules out the argument that CRF or amphetamine injections increased motor arousal or frustration in general. Though it is DORN THESIS 28 tempting to argue that we turn to rewarding substances in times of stress to placate our stress, the fact that no sucrose pellets were actually delivered on test day to improve hedonic state debunks this argument. The stress itself magnifies activation of our reward system. Peciña et al. suggest that the role of CRF in the NAc is to

“energize” the goal directed behavior that is normally mediated by the NAc (12).

CRF’s role in both aversion and reward has been shown in the amygdala as well. In the CeA, CRF is released in comparable amounts in response to both stressful and appetitive events. Merali et al. (1998) found in vivo release of CRF by the CeA in response to food intake–– a rewarding event. In 2004, Merali et al. found that CRF and dopamine levels increase in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) when rats anticipate a reward.

The finding that stress can activate the reward system is further supported by research on the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST). The stria terminalis is a large axon pathway that is known to be a major output of the amygdala. A projection from the lateral CeA to the BNST has been suggested to play a major role in stress- induced relapse of cocaine-seeking. The BNST is known to send major efferent projections to parts of the reward system such as the VTA. These efferents to the

VTA communicate using GABA (an inhibitory neurotransmitter), CRF, and glutamate (an excitatory neurotransmitter). The projection of CRF+ BNST neurons to the VTA has also been implicated in stress-induced relapse of cocaine-seeking. The

BNST is also known to receive dopaminergic inputs from the VTA. Research has shown that the BNST responds to both rewarding and aversive stimuli. Mice are motivated to activate a GABAergic pathway from the ventral BNST to the VTA DORN THESIS 29 when optogenetically photoactivated. On the other hand, optogenetic photostimulation of a glutamatergic pathway from the ventral BNST to the VTA mimics stress response, and results in avoidance behavior and decreased reward seeking behavior. Though research on the BNST is in its infancy, it appears to be a hub for communication between the amygdala, the reward system, and the prefrontal cortex, among other brain structures (Ch’ng et al., 2018). Thus, future research on the

BNST will be valuable in further uncovering how fear and reward interact in the context of horror film.

Dopamine has also been found to respond to both aversive and appetitive stimuli. Research has shown that exposure to shock can increase dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex and the NAc. In the NAc, the severity of the stressor correlates with the magnitude of dopamine activity. While it is widely known that addictive substances increase dopamine release in the NAc, it is also true that some drugs with aversive properties can increase dopamine levels in the NAc. Cues that have become associated with shock stress can increase dopamine metabolism in the prefrontal cortex and the VTA (Salamone, 1994). In the VTA, dopamine neuron activation has been found at the times of both the onset and termination of aversive stimuli. Thus, it cannot be simply argued that these neurons fire due to the rewarding effects of the termination of stress (Lammel et al., 2014). Dopamine plays a crucial role in fear learning by promoting the early stabilization of memory traces. Specifically in the

VTA, dopamine neurons modulate action potentials in the amygdala during fear conditioning and exposure to stress (Pignatelli & Bonci, 2015). DORN THESIS 30

When we watch horror films, our fear and reward systems do not need to be in conflict, rather they work together. The NAc has CRF receptors that allow stress to amplify reward. Dopamine, which has long been thought to mediate reward, is also released under stress. This provides evidence that fear can fuel activation of our reward system. In the context of film, fear is the reward. Here, we begin to chip away at the paradox of horror.

Inhibition of avoidance.

While our fear and reward systems fuel each other in certain ways, we do still feel afraid when we watch horror films. Fear typically leads to avoidance behavior.

Yet, in the case of horror films, some part of our brain must decide to stay in our movie theater seats, and that we do not need to run away. Our brains weigh input from our reward system over input from our fear system when we make this decision.

In this section, I will write about how our brains inhibit our default avoidance behavior when we experience fear. Many of the studies I draw from use conflicting punishment/reward procedures, where subjects are presented with both aversive and rewarding stimuli, and must choose which one outweighs the other. This parallels our conflicting feelings of positive exhilaration and fear when we watch horror films.

Both the reward system and the fear system have strong connections with the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the area in the very front of our brains, encompassing the entire frontal lobe, with the exception of the motor and premotor areas. It is the center of executive function, which includes decision-making, cognitive control, conflict monitoring, social cognition, etc. Activity in the prefrontal cortex is the most likely contributor to our ability to enjoy fear. Stimuli in our DORN THESIS 31 environments activate our reward systems and our fear systems, but the prefrontal cortex is where we decide how these limbic6 inputs influence our behavior. We find sugar to be rewarding and many of us find broccoli to be aversive, but that does not mean that our behavior always follows what these limbic structures tell us.

Cognitively, we know that broccoli is healthier than sugar, so we use our prefrontal cortices to decide to eat more broccoli. We can engage in this aversive behavior while still experiencing it as aversive.

The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) in particular has long been thought to play a crucial role in reward. The OFC is the part of the prefrontal cortex directly above the eyes. A recent article by Malvaez et al. (2019) reveals cortical-amygdala projections that drive reward value encoding and retrieval. Projections from the lateral OFC to the BLA are necessary and sufficient for the encoding process of reward value.

Projections from the medial OFC to the BLA retrieve the value from memory. When we watch a horror film, it is our prefrontal cortex that decides to weigh reward input over fear input. We experience the film as rewarding, which our OFC relays to our

BLA.

The fear and reward associated with horrors on the big screen are competing neural inputs. Researchers have studied conflict management by looking at rodent behavior when faced with punished rewards. Piantadosi et al. (2017) conditioned rats to press a lever for sucrose pellets. In one trial, the rats received sucrose every time they pressed the lever, but they faced a 50% probability of being electrically shocked

6 “Limbic” refers to the limbic system, which is synonymous with the emotion center of the brain. The limbic system is closer to the core of the brain than the rest of the cortex, and is thought to have evolved earlier than higher cortical structures, such as our highly evolved prefrontal cortex. DORN THESIS 32 if they pressed the lever. In a control trial, the rats were not punished for pressing the lever for sucrose pellets. To study the roles that limbic structures play in punished reward-seeking behavior, the researchers compared the behavior of 1) rats injected with saline7, with the behavior of rats injected with baclofen/muscimol to inactivate either 2) the basolateral amygdala (BLA), 3) nucleus accumbens shell (NAcS), or 4) the nucleus accumbens core (NAcC)8. During the trial when rats were punished for lever presses, they found that the rats with BLA or NAcS inactivation pressed the lever significantly more than rats with saline injections. With inhibited BLA or NAcS activity, rats were more likely to outweigh reward over punishment, and exhibited approach behavior in the face of a normally fear-inducing stimulus. This suggests that normal activity in the BLA and NAcS promotes avoidance of punishment9. The

NAcS receives strong excitatory inputs from the ventromedial prefrontal cortex

(vmPFC) and the BLA (Piantadosi et al., 2017). The BLA is known to receive input from the orbitofrontal cortex (Vanderah & Gould, 2016). If inhibition of the BLA and

NAcS allows us to approach things that threaten us, it is uncertain how these structures are inhibited in the context of horror film. In this study, researchers used injections to silence activity in these structures. It is possible that signals from the

7 Saline provides baseline measurements of behavior because saline does nothing to the brain. Saline injections are used to control for the possibility that the mere act of injecting rats with a substance can alter their behavior. 8 The nucleus accumbens shell (NAcS) and nucleus accumbens core (NAcC) are two subdivisions of the nucleus accumbens (NAc). The NAc is known to play a major role in the reward system. The NAcS is the more lateral portion of the NAc, while the NAcC is the more medial portion of the NAc. 9 It may seem counterintuitive that part of the nucleus accumbens, which plays such a major role in the reward system, inhibits punished behavior. However, it is important to note that, just like the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens does more than promote reward seeking. In fact, there are hot spots and cold spots in the nucleus accumbens shell can respond to pleasurable or aversive hedonic value respectively (Berridge & Kringelbach, 2015). DORN THESIS 33 prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA, and therefore the NAcS during horror film to prefer competing reward activity, but this is not mentioned in the study. The medial prefrontal cortex has previously been shown to inhibit reward seeking in the face of punishment (Chen et al., 2013). The NAcS also sends inhibitory (GABAergic) projections to the ventral pallidum, a structure known to promote execution of motivated behaviors (Peters et al., 2009; Root et al., 2015). Thus, it makes sense that the NAcS would inhibit punished behavior.

On the other hand, rats with NAcC inactivation were less likely to press the lever during punished trials than rats injected with saline. In fact, rats with NAcC inactivation showed decreased lever pressing even during safe trials. This suggests that the NAcC generally promotes approach and reward-seeking behavior (Piantadosi et al., 2017). Thus, I theorize that when we watch horror films, activity in the NAcC outweighs activity in the BLA and subsequently the NAcS. This is why we are able to stay in our movie theater seats and keep our eyes peeled on the screen in the face of horror. It is unclear how our brains decide to engage in approach behavior over avoidance behavior in natural settings. It is possible that the computation to put greater weight on the approach-promoting input of the NAcC than the avoidance- promoting input of the BLA and NAcS is mediated in the prefrontal cortex. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has been implicated in punishment avoidance behavior. Still, based on this study, we cannot definitively implicate the PFC as the upstream structure that can inhibit the BLA and NAcS and/or excite the NAcC in natural contexts, since these structures were directly inhibited by injections in this study. DORN THESIS 34

One recent study by Seo et al. (2016) provides compelling evidence that limbic input to the prefrontal cortex play a large role in mediation of behavioral output. They found a GABAergic projection from the centromedial nuclei of the amygdala (CeA)10 to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) that mediates reward-seeking behavior. GABA is an inhibitory neurotransmitter, so when the CeA is activated, the neurons that it projects to in the vmPFC are less likely to fire action potentials. Seo et al. used pathway-specific optogenetic activation to stimulate CeA neurons that project to the vmPFC. Optogenetics plant a probe in a rodent’s brain that allows researchers to switch on or off activation of a rodent brain area with the press of a button. The researchers found that the mice displayed reward behavior when this pathway from the CeA to the vmPFC was activated. The vmPFC is thought to have a generally inhibitory effect on behavior, especially approach behavior, so it makes sense that stronger inhibition of the vmPFC should promote reward behavior.

However, activation of the CeA and subsequent inhibition of the vmPFC had no effect on anxiety behavior (Seo et al., 2016). Though the mice displayed more approach behavior under optogenetic activation of this pathway, they were equally as anxious.

10 For simplicity, I will use an abbreviation that we have already seen (CeA) for the centromedial amygdala. The abbreviation CeA is typically used to describe the central amygdala, which I have previously described as critical for fear behavior output. The medial amygdala is another nucleus of the amygdala (like the BLA and the CeA), and its primary role is to process valence and detect threat in olfactory information. The rodents used in this study rely heavily on olfactory information to form fear behavior, which the medial amygdala is critical for. However, since humans have evolved away from relying on olfaction, the medial amygdala is smaller and plays a lesser role in our experience of fear. Seo et al. wrote that they aimed to target only the central amygdala for optogenetic activation, but they could not completely exclude projections from the medial amygdala due to close proximity and lack of clear divide between the two structures. It is their opinion that the central amygdala is more likely to be the key player in this mechanism, so I feel comfortable referring to the centromedial amygdala as the CeA. DORN THESIS 35

Further evidence that limbic inputs to the prefrontal cortex play a role in mediation of fear and reward behavior comes from Burgos-Robles et al. (2017). They found correlated firing between neurons in the basolateral amygdala (BLA) and the prelimbic (PL) medial prefrontal cortex (the part of the prefrontal cortex directly above the limbic system). Optogenetic activation of excitatory BLA projections to the

PL increases freezing behavior (fear response) in response to simultaneously presented shock- and sucrose- predictive cues. While optogenetic inhibition of the same pathway reduced this fear response. They only found these modifications of behavior in optogenetic stimulation of BLA neurons that had identified projections to the PL. Stimulation of unidentified BLA neurons did not produce this effect. Thus, inhibition of BLA projections specifically to the PL is sufficient to promote approach behavior in the face of conflicting reward and aversive stimuli (Burgos-Robles et al.,

2017). The evidence described in this section suggest possible neural mechanisms by which we decide to ignore our detection of threat and to stay in our movie theater seats when we watch horror films.

Art Horror as Safe

So far, I have stated that horror film is rewarding, and that this reward outweighs felt fear, but I have not yet answered the question of why horror film is rewarding. I propose that when we watch horror films, we confront our fears, but knowing that we are safe activates our reward systems. Moreover, scary movies activate our sympathetic nervous systems. When we experience this in the absence of real danger, fight-or-flight physiological responses are perceived as exhilarating.

Thus, when we choose to watch scary movies, we pay to be scared. In a top-down DORN THESIS 36 manner, we consciously appraise the horrors on screen as being what we wanted when we entered the movie theater or turned off the lights and picked the film on

Netflix. Though we may lose ourselves in the world of the movie, our enjoyment is contingent on a part of us knowing that we are safe.

The reward of safe confrontation of fear.

For my 17th birthday, one of my friends gave me a 365 day journal with these words printed on the front cover in big, all-caps, shimmering letters: “DO ONE

THING EVERY DAY THAT SCARES YOU.” As expected, every entry came with a prompt about confronting fears. I wrote about everything from finally having an actual conversation with my physics lab partner to trying new ways to style my hair and submitting my college applications, and it usually felt good to do these things. I started seeing this journal pop up everywhere I went shopping–– Barnes & Noble,

Target, even Urban Outfitters. Anyone who has been to a bookstore recently has probably seen a rise of self-help books in the bestsellers section with titles like The

Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Daring Greatly, Lean In, Presence, Be Fearless, etc.

So many of these books send the message that we need to push ourselves outside of our comfort zones in order to grow and empower ourselves. We intuitively know that many of the risks that we feel afraid taking feel good when they pay off. Once we’re safe, we may even realize that we did not even need to be afraid in the first place.

This is why we might feel a rush after talking to a crush or successfully networking with someone who is a big name in our field. Yet, when reflecting on these situations, it is unclear whether we feel rewarded for the things that we successfully gain from these risks (i.e. the approval of a crush or a job opportunity) or if there is reward DORN THESIS 37 inherent in safely confronting fears. I argue that, though it can be difficult to separate external rewards from internal rewards, our mesolimbic dopaminergic system is activated by the very act of encountering fear in safe contexts.

It has been long known that dopamine facilitates fear extinction (Luo et al.,

2018). Standard treatment for severe phobias is exposure therapy. This uses systematic desensitization to gradually allow people to overcome their fears. In cases of arachnophobia, for example, in the first session, the patients will learn to feel safe when they see a picture of a spider. If the therapist lets a real spider crawl on them during the first session, the patient would feel too afraid, and it would be ineffective.

Still, by the last session, the patient may learn to let a spider crawl on them. They slowly learn that the spider will not hurt them. This type of therapy is effective because our brains release dopamine for forming new associations of safety with things that we previously feared (Abraham et al., 2014). It is important to note that dopamine mediation of the effectiveness of exposure therapy is not sufficient to conclude that safe exposure generates reward. Though dopamine has become synonymous with reward and pleasure, it plays a wide variety of roles in brain function from motor function to coding of associative learning. Learning can occur without reward. Thus, it is possible that the success of exposure therapy is mediated by dopamine, but not by dopamine neurons in the reward system (Berridge, 2007).

Recent evidence has been starting to point to the reward system as a necessary element of fear extinction. Josselyn & Frankland (2018) describe the critical role that protocerebral anterior medial (PAM) dopamine neurons play in fear extinction in drosophila (fruit flies). PAM dopamine neurons are known to provide appetitive DORN THESIS 38 signals in drosophila. Inhibition of PAM dopamine neurons impedes fear extinction.

Luo et al. (2018) extended this finding to mammals. They found that dopamine neurons in the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA) play a critical role in fear-to- safety transitions. Notably, the VTA is a known component of the reward system that can signal better-than-expected outcomes. When we expect to be in danger, but are in reality safe, activated VTA neurons send dopaminergic signals to part of the medial nucleus accumbens shell (NAcS) to generate reward and fear extinction. Though dopamine has long been implicated in the fear extinction process, it is important to note that at this point, it has been less than one year since this evidence of the reward system’s role in fear extinction has accumulated. Much more research needs to be done to fully understand this intersection of reward and fear.

How we can feel safe in the face of fear.

Though more needs to be learned about the neural mechanisms that provide reward during safe experiences of fear, an abundance of literature in film theory exists that can answer the question of how we feel safe when we watch horror films.

Here, it will be important for us to examine theories of viewer identification in film.

This will provide a crucial foundation for answering questions related to how our experiences of fear become enjoyable in the context of film, but not in the context of the real world.

Berys Gaut11 outlines several theories of viewer identification in his essay

“Identification and Emotion” in Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion

(1999), which I will summarize here. Historically, psychoanalytic and Brechtian

11 Noël Carroll largely shares Gaut’s views on viewer identification; I cite Gaut because I find his outline of past views on viewer identification and his language to be particularly helpful in illuminating these ideas. DORN THESIS 39 theories have suggested that film puts the audience under the illusion that the events that occur on the screen are real. By this theory, we, too, would feel unsafe during the most horrific parts of horror film, which is untrue. We would not be able to sit comfortably in our seats if we were under the illusion that a serial killer were truly stalking us or another real person in John Carpenter’s Halloween. Some film theorists posit that we operate under a “suspension of disbelief” when we engage with film.

Under this assumption, we do not actually believe that we are the characters with whom we identify, but we put a hold on this fact to react as if we believe we are the protagonists. If it were true that we mentally become the protagonists and react just like them, we would still all run out of the theaters when the protagonist is being chased by an axe murderer. Another theory on viewer identification postulates that we actively imagine ourselves to be the protagonist (or any character with whom we identify). Here, Gaut provides a counterargument by Richard Wollheim. According to

Wollheim, if I imagine myself to be a fictional character, I must also imagine the fictional character to be in my place. If this were true, I am not only imagining myself to be in Barbara’s (Judith O’Dea) situation in the beginning of Night of the Living

Dead (1968), but I would also be taking on her qualities of dissociation with reality following the shock of her brother’s death by zombies. Since this extent of full identification does not occur, the imagination theory cannot be correct either.

Gaut ultimately provides a strong theory of viewer identification, which I will reference in this piece. According to Gaut:

The act of imaginative identification involves imagining being in her

situation, where the idea of her situation encompasses every property she DORN THESIS 40

possesses, including all her physical and psychological traits (so we imagine

the world from her physical and psychological perspective). Hence what I do

in imaginatively identifying myself with [a fictional character] is imagining

being in his situation, doing what he does, feeling what he does, and so on. (p.

203)

He argues that this is the same approach that we take in empathizing with or trying to understand people in the real world. We do not believe ourselves to be our friends when they tell us a story or ask for advice, but we attempt to mentally reconstruct relevant aspects of their situation. Gaut also asserts that sympathy for a character is not a prerequisite to be able to imagine their situations. This is a virtue of Gaut’s argument because, as Carl Plantinga points out in Moving Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience (2009), we often do not sympathize with the characters with whom we are asked to identify. We do not have to sympathize with

Michael Myers (Nick Castle) as he murders his sister (Sandy Johnson) in the opening point-of-view shot of Halloween, but we still imagine this situation. Similarly, we may identify with a protagonist, but have information that they do not or they may have information that we do not. This precludes us from fully merging our identities with theirs as other theories suggest, but such knowledge dynamics do not preclude us from mentally constructing aspects of their situations.

Notably, Gaut calls attention to several aspects of a character’s situation, which we can mentally reconstruct. These include properties that are physical, perceptual, affective, motivational, epistemic, etc. (p. 205). According to Gaut, we need not imagine taking on every property that a character possesses, but we can DORN THESIS 41 imagine the properties that are relevant to our understanding of the character’s situation. For example, we may try to imagine seeing from a character’s perspective or imagine how physically defenseless a character must feel to understand the situation of being pursued by a monster, but it is not necessary for us to fully want what the character wants12. When we watch fictional movies, we can encounter things that would paralyze us with fear if we were to encounter them in the real world. If we engaged in a full suspension of disbelief or tried to completely overlap our experience with our protagonists’ experiences, we would not be able to watch horror films. When we watch a film on a big screen, much of our peripheral visual field can still perceive the movie theater around us (though we consciously ignore it). The camera’s point of view does not match up with the inputs we receive from our somatosensory and proprioceptive inputs (i.e. we do not move when the camera moves). Even something as subtle as not smelling lasagna when we see a steamy plate of lasagna on the screen cues our brains in on the fact that we are not actually experiencing the events on screen. Though we may try to immerse ourselves in the world of the film, a part of us still knows that we are not actually experiencing what the characters experience.

12 My only point of contention with this theory is that it only applies to the viewers who are motivated to actively immerse themselves in the film. However, there are several factors that can motivate viewing of a horror film. For example, teenagers often watch horror films to achieve a sense of mastery over the film. The first time I watched The Exorcist (1973) at age thirteen, my friend and I made little attempt to imagine ourselves in the characters’ situations. Rather, we distanced ourselves from the film, and laughed about how “un-scary” the film was to us. Similarly, Psychologist Dolf Zillmann has conducted research on male mastery of horror films in the presence of a female companion (Zillmann, 1986). This is an example of what Carl Plantinga would describe as meta-emotions (emotions related to the world outside of the film) influencing our experience of the film. While I believe that Berys Gaut provides the most compelling theory of active viewer identification, I would argue that extra-filmic factors could yield varying degrees of viewer identification. With that said, I will at times write on these varying levels of viewer identification, but in the rest of this piece, I will assume a viewer that actively attempts to imagine the characters’ situations unless otherwise noted. DORN THESIS 42

When we know we are still safe in the face of fear, our brains can reward us, and keep us coming back to the theaters for the next big horror film.

Exhilaration and the fear we asked for.

Since we feel safe when we watch horror films, we cognitively appraise our physiological fight-or-flight response as exhilaration, rather than danger. When I ask people why they think we enjoy horror films, the most common response I receive is

“adrenaline.” While it is true that we enjoy the sensation of adrenaline when we watch horror films or go on roller coasters, it is not the end of the story. If adrenaline itself were rewarding, we would likely see an epidemic of epipen abuse. Epipen is short for epinephrine autoinjector–– in other words, it administers adrenaline. There are many situations where adrenaline does not feel good. Nobody revels in the great adrenaline rush they felt when their lives were threatened in a car accident, stalking situation, etc. Yet, some people are self-proclaimed “adrenaline junkies,” who actively seek opportunities for skydiving and bungee jumping, among other “scary” activities. Truly, the key to enjoying the rush of adrenaline as “exhilaration” is the appraisal of a scary situation as safe.

In fact, a landmark paper by Schachter & Singer (1962) sought to study the effect of adrenaline on emotion. They proposed a two-factor theory of emotion whereby our brains identify emotion based on physiological signals of arousal and valence and our cognitive appraisal of events. If our heart rate increases and good things are happening around us, we will cognitively label this feeling as exhilaration or elation. Yet, if our heart rate increases and we appraise threat in front of us, we feel afraid. Schachter & Singer’s research assistants told participants that they were being DORN THESIS 43 injected with a drug called “Suproxin” for a study on its effect on vision. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either epinephrine (adrenaline) or a placebo. Some participants in the epinephrine condition were told that the drug could cause tremors increases in heart rate, while others were given misinformation about the side effects

(i.e. numbness in toes), and another group was given no information about the drug’s side effects.

Then, participants were told to sit in a waiting room for about 20 minutes with another “participant” (an actor) before the vision exam. Half of the participants waited with an actor who was euphoric–– doodling, playing paper bin basketball, and making paper airplanes. The other half of the participants waited with an angry actor.

In this condition, both the participant and the actor were given a questionnaire with invasive questions asking about things like their father’s income and to list people in their families who need psychiatric care. The angry actor voiced frustration with the questionnaire, and left abruptly. The participants who could attribute their increase in sympathetic nervous system arousal to the “Suproxin” injection were unaffected by the actor’s mood. Similarly, participants in the placebo group were not significantly affected by the actor’s mood. On the other hand, the participants who were unaware that they were feeling aroused because of the injection mirrored the actor’s emotions.

They did not know why their hearts were pounding, so they attributed this to the other person in the room. These participants either joined in the actor’s playfulness or rage.

What Schachter & Singer’s study tells us is that adrenaline itself is not enough to account for our enjoyment of horror film. Adrenaline plus cognitive appraisal of outside events shapes our emotional state. In the case of horror films, adrenaline DORN THESIS 44 experienced in safety makes us feel exhilarated, and activates our reward systems to make us come back for more horror films.

From here on out, we will assume that we want to be scared when we watch horror films. We enjoy the exhilaration. According to Rick Altman in Film/Genre

(1999), a genre acts as a contract between the filmmakers and the audience. When we pay to watch horror films, we acknowledge that we want to be afraid. Fear is the name of the game, so we dare the filmmakers to scare us as much as possible. With our permission, horror filmmakers push the boundaries of what we’re comfortable with, and scare us with repulsive monsters, uncanny presences, and jump scares with loud blasts of sound. In the following chapters, I will detail the tools that filmmakers use to fulfill this contract, and keep us in fearful exhilaration.

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Chapter 2: Scares

At the heart of the horror film are the scenes that get our adrenaline pumping.

These are the scenes in films that people remember for years. Many people who have never seen Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho are still familiar with the famous shower scene and its screeching soundtrack. The single image I remember from The Vicious

Brothers’s Grave Encounters, a film I had not seen since its release in 2011, is a girl

(a ghost, Eva Gifford) in a torn hospital gown, turning around and suddenly roaring at the camera, her face distorting so her mouth looks like a massive black hole and her eyes turn completely white, with large dark circles surrounding them (see figure 2.1).

Though horror is presented as whole feature films over an hour long, what we remember most are the jump scares that last mere seconds. Strong emotional experiences create stronger memories. Here, I endeavor to highlight the neural mechanisms behind our enjoyment of the meat of the horror film.

Figure 2.1: Girl in the hospital gown (Eva Gifford) from Grave Encounters (2011). Image from https://dudewithachainsaw.wordpress.com/

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A jump scare is a sudden assault on the senses that induces startle response. In film, this typically manifests itself as sudden visual pop-ups accompanied by loud noise. Startle response is a brainstem reflex that requires no higher-level cognitive function. Not every scene that makes the audience tremble can be classified as a jump scare. There are scenes where a figure suddenly and silently pops up in the background. This doesn’t startle us in the same way, but it can still make us feel deeply afraid. These types of scares demand cognitive appraisal of a stimulus as a threat to generate the rush of adrenaline. I will call this type of scare the “figure in the background.” Though this does not always take the form of a figure in the background, this name captures the silent and subtle quality of this type of scare. It is a scare generated from silent presence. This chapter will detail the two types of exhilarating scares: jump scares and the figure in the background. Of particular interest will be the neurological and aesthetic factors that determine the effectiveness of a scare. To do so, I will first describe the different techniques filmmakers use to generate intense fear in the audience. To be clear about the focus of this chapter, I will be writing about the scares that are swift, sudden, and exhilarating. Scares are sudden appearances of monsters either with or without a jump scare. The next chapter will address more prolonged ways of generating fear over large portions of run time such as atmospheric horror and suspense.

The jump scare

The jump scare is the most basic brainstem reflex that film can produce. Many film critics call the jump scare a “cheap” tactic, perhaps because it is so basic.

However, no matter how “cheap” we believe the jump scare to be, we cannot DORN THESIS 47 modulate our reaction to it. It is segregated from cognitive thought. In fact, we hardly need a brain to be affected by the jump scare. Jellyfish can experience startle response if something pinches, tugs, or administers electric shock to their tentacles. Sudden and intense stimulation induces startle and escape behavior in almost all animal organisms from sea anemones and earthworms to cats. Researchers have observed startle response in cats, monkeys, dogs, and rabbits that have been decerebrated13 at the level of the superior colliculus. Lesions to almost every brain area outside of the brainstem have no effect on the startle response or its intensity (Eaton, 1984).

According to Michael Davis in Neural Mechanisms of Startle Behavior

(1984), the pathway of the auditory startle response in humans begins with an intense auditory stimulus, which is initially sensed in the cochlea. The first signal is sent through the auditory nerve to the posteroventral cochlear nucleus. The signal then travels through the dorsal and ventral nuclei of the lateral lemniscus, the nucleus reticularis pontis caudalis, and the reticulospinal tract to the lower motor neurons in the spinal cord. This is all to say that we only need a functioning cochlea, auditory nerve, and brainstem to be effected by jump scares. Notably, startle occurs before the auditory cortex in the cerebrum can even process the sound. In humans, the first muscular contraction of startle response occurs in the jaw approximately 14 milliseconds after the initial onset of the stimulus. Many of us have seen the Vine

13 The human brain can be divided into three major parts: the cerebrum, the cerebellum, and the medulla, with decreasing complexity in that order. So far, we have only studied functions in the cerebrum, since it is the seat of all higher cognitive function. The cerebellum generally manages functions like balance. The medulla generally manages automatic and basic life functions such as heartbeat and respiration. Decerebration refers to the inactivation of the cerebral cortex by either removing the cerebrum, cutting across the brainstem, or severing arteries in the brain stem. This essentially kills all parts of the brain that are not necessary for survival. DORN THESIS 48 where a man, holding a plate full of food, walks around the corner to find his friend waiting there to scream in his face. The man famously says, “stop! I could’ve dropped my croissant!” Then he proceeds to pick up some fallen food from the ground. The reason why the man was concerned with dropping his croissant is because the startle response is a full body reflex. It is characterized by sudden eye blinking, opening of the jaw, forward head movement, upward and forward movement of the shoulders, contraction of the abdomen, etc. (Eaton, 1984). Sometimes we even involuntarily scream like the man in the Vine.

Regarding the stimulus itself, it must be a sudden loud auditory stimulus. The effect of the startle is greatest when the sound reaches a high intensity within a short period of time after the initial onset of the sound. For example, in rats the sound must reach at least 90 dB within 12 msec of the initial onset to elicit startle response. Even if the intensity of the sound is high, startle response will not occur if the rise time to reach that intensity from the onset of the sound is too long. Loud sound itself is not enough to startle us if it is a constant or long loud sound–– it has to be quick and sudden (Eaton, 1984).

It is largely believed that humans do not have a visual startle response, or that it is rare in humans (i.e. in cases of epilepsy, Zeydan et al., 2015). Sudden flashes of light can startle animals that rely heavily on vision, such as pigeons. While monsters suddenly popping up on the screen scare us, this may not necessarily be a brainstem response. I have yet to find a jump scare that is purely visual, without being accompanied by a sudden loud noise. We are scared of the monsters that pop up on our screens for cognitive reasons. To be afraid of the sudden appearance of a visual DORN THESIS 49 stimulus, we must first appraise it as a threat or associate it with fear. We do not need to be afraid of a sound to be startled by it. We experience a full body reflex just the same when a monster screams at us from the movie theater screen or when we plug in our headphones and realize we had the music on maximum volume. This automatic response occurs independent of threat detection. If we experienced startle through the visual system in the same way that we do for the auditory system, we would experience full-body tension every time the lights turn on or off. Strobe lights would not be fun, and we would not be able to take flash photography, etc. While sudden and harsh visual stimuli can affect us, it is more cognitive than the auditory startle response. Since jump scares often do involve visual pop-ups, they cannot be described purely by a brainstem response. Yet, they are the closest filmmakers can get to mindless brainstem stimulation.

Here, I aim to describe common ways that filmmakers create jump scares. I will distinguish between unexpected and anticipated jump scares because, as we will see later, they rely on different neural mechanisms to generate fear. In the unexpected jump scare, the audience does not anticipate a jump scare at this moment or in this location. They feel relatively safe at this point in the film, but this sense of safety is suddenly challenged. The anticipated jump scare is a sudden assault on the senses that occurs when the viewer has been primed for a threat. Anticipation benefits from the amplification of suspense and fear during the build-up to the scare. I will conclude the chapter by detailing how these scares gain maximum effect.

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The unexpected jump scare.

One aspect of the human startle response that will be of value when discussing jump scares is attention shift. There are two types of attention: endogenous and exogenous. Endogenous attention refers to the stimuli that you voluntarily place a

“spotlight” on. Our spotlight of attention usually is not focused on the background noise of the radiator, the bit of nose we can always see between our eyes, or the feeling of air molecules on our skin. We focus our endogenous attention on relevant tasks like reading words on a page. But imagine that the radiator broke and made a loud noise or that we were milliseconds away from being hit in the nose with a baseball. The spotlight of attention has moved to an area of the perceptive field to which we were not attending before. Exogenous attention refers to such situations when attention is automatically and involuntarily drawn to a stimulus. The startle response in unexpected jump scares is the result of a sudden and abrasive elicitation of exogenous attention toward a potentially threatening stimulus. In response, the viewer’s fight-or-flight system is swiftly activated, increasing heart rate and skin conductance, possibly eliciting a scream. This is similar to the phenomenon that occurs when someone suddenly sneaks up behind us, and scares us. The fear comes from complete unawareness that the person–– or in the case of the horror film, the monster–– was there in the first place.

Since unexpected jump scares work by suddenly drawing attention to a new stimulus, filmmakers must prevent attention to the stimuli that will generate the startle response. Directors can misguide the audience’s attention away from the imminent scare. For instance, if the monster is actually in the kitchen, a filmmaker DORN THESIS 51 might direct our attention to the adjacent living room, and then surprise us when the protagonist runs into the monster in the kitchen. Directors can also lead the audience to believe that a jump scare will not occur in this scene. If the atmosphere is calm, we might think that we’re safe from monsters in this scene. The most fundamental aspect of an unexpected jump scare is undermining a viewer’s sense of safety–– whether that safety relates to the scene as a whole or a part of the frame.

Though it is hard to ever generate a complete sense of safety from jump scares in a horror film, filmmakers can distract us from the possibility of a jump scare. We have learned to associate the approach of a jump scare with cues like ominous music, unidentified footsteps, strange sounds on a baby monitor, plates inexplicably shattering in the kitchen, etc. Directors can opt to skip the lead up to a jump scare.

One of the most effective jump scares in James Wan’s Insidious occurs unexpectedly.

Renai (Rose Byrne), her husband, Josh (Patrick Wilson), and his mother, Lorraine

(Barbara Hershey) are congregated in the dining room. We assume that this is one of those scenes in horror films where our protagonists merely talk about the strange occurrences in the house–– maybe this is the scene where we will learn about the demon and its past. We had just experienced a jump scare in the previous scene and it’s still too early on in the film for every scene to be full of jump scares, so we think that we’re getting a break. Lorraine describes a dream she had of a dark figure

“visiting” Renai and Josh’s son, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), at night, saying it “wanted”

Dalton. Wan provides us with visuals to accompany Lorraine’s narrative, which serve to distract us. The camera zooms in on Lorraine as she says, “I can still hear that voice.” She looks like she is about to say something more, then we cut to a close-up DORN THESIS 52 of Josh, and a red demonic face appears behind him (Figure 2.2). There is a loud sting on the soundtrack, powerfully startling the audience.

Figure 2.2: A demon makes a surprise appearance behind Josh (Patrick Wilson) in Insidious. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1591095/mediaindex?ref_=tt_mv_sm

Director James Wan uses misdirection of attention to surprise us in The

Conjuring (2013) when we see the mother, Carolyn (Lili Taylor), standing in the doorway of her child’s room, and we suddenly hear the crash of picture frames shattering behind her. Prior to this scene, Carolyn had heard two claps come from somewhere in the house. Her children often play a game of hide-and-seek, where the

“seeker” is blindfolded, and the “hiders” give two claps to help the “seeker” find their location. It is far past the children’s bedtime, so Carolyn goes out to check on her children and tell them to go to bed. At this point in the film, the audience is suspicious that something, other than one of Carolyn’s children, made the clapping sound. When we see a shot from Carolyn’s point of view, looking down the staircase into the foyer, some of us expect to see a ghost appear, revealing who made the clapping sound. Or perhaps some of us expect to hear another set of two claps. For those of us actively searching for the source of the two claps, our attention is likely directed anywhere but the place where the jump scare actually occurs. I doubt many DORN THESIS 53 people would have expected the sudden loud sound of picture frames shattering, so when it occurs, it comes as a shock. In this way, the jump scare works because our attention is misdirected to one area, and we experience a sudden shift of attention.

Though we might not feel a sense of safety as a whole during this scene, we thought that the picture frames on the wall would be safe from demonic presence, but this assurance is swiftly undermined.

The anticipated jump scare.

Rather than suddenly shifting the spotlight of attention and undermining security, the anticipated jump scare often capitalizes on startling us at a time and part of the frame where the viewer is already paying keen attention and expecting danger.

Successful anticipated jump scares require strong suspenseful build-ups. The most successful ones make the audience strain their attention to search for threat in a given area of the screen, then assault the senses once they are already strongly engaged.

Since danger is already suspected, the filmmakers can either confirm or dissolve these expectations. That is to say suspense can either build up to a jump scare involving real threat or a false alarm.

Grave Encounters contains several anticipated jump scares that confirm our expectations of the monster’s presence. In the introduction to this section, I described a memorable jump scare from the film in which a girl in a hospital gown roars at the camera. Prior to the assault on the senses, the camera crew slowly walks up to the girl, the handheld camera shakes, all eyes are glued on her, and this is sustained for several seconds before the jump scare starts. In another scene, the camera crew finds their missing crewmate, Matt (Juan Riedinger), in a ragged hospital gown, standing DORN THESIS 54 next to a bathtub full of blood. The camera crew is repeatedly screaming “IT’S FULL

OF BLOOD!” The peculiarity of the sight keeps our eyes glued to the bathtub.

Suspense is especially high since we cannot see through the blood in the bathtub. One of the crewmates, T.C. (Merwin Mondesir), approaches the bathtub to get Matt away from it. A figure (Michele Cummins) pops out of the bathtub, splattering blood everywhere. A sudden boom and screaming is heard on the soundtrack, creating a startle effect. T.C. is dragged into the bathtub by this figure. We feel terror and disgust. The handheld camera drops to the floor. Because our senses had been so actively engaged in searching the bathtub for threat, it comes as an assault on the senses when this area of our perceptual field is suddenly overwhelmed with stimulation. Unlike jump scares that come from a false sense of safety, the effectiveness of this jump scare is largely driven by how strongly the filmmakers can prime fear with suspense beforehand.

One scene in Insidious uses motion to cue anticipation. First of all, color gets noticeably duller when this sequence starts. The camera tracks Renai as she takes out the trash. Though she walks right by it, we catch a glimpse of a bloody handprint on the window and the figure of a child (Ben Woolf) standing still in the corner. The camera doesn’t follow her when she leaves the house. We see her through the open windows, and the camera pans to follow her, as if something is stalking her. Renai had put calming classical music on the record player, but we hear a scratching sound, then Tiny Tim’s Tip Toe Thru’ the Tulips With Me starts playing. There must be another presence in the house. As the camera is following her, she looks through one window on her way back into the house. Now from her point of view, we see a small DORN THESIS 55 unfamiliar child in a beret dancing to the music in her living room. Had this child snuck into the house? When she looks through the next window, he is gone. Renai sprints into the living room, and we are now aligned with her concern of finding this strange child.

The music cuts when she enters the room. Wan primarily relies on motion to cue Renai on the child’s location. A door swings shut on its own. When she walks up to it, we see the child run behind her, we hear footsteps and a laugh. She turns around, and then sees the child once again. The child seems to defy the laws of physics, entering a room, disappearing, then appearing elsewhere. She follows the child as he runs, laughing into the baby’s room. We see a rocking horse in motion, half hidden by a door. Because we can only see half of it, we are on the edge of our seats, expecting the strange child to be behind the door. Renai looks behind the door, but it is a false alarm. Wan continues to play with us with a pattern of false alarms and confirmed expectations. Once we are already focused on the rocking horse, the door behind

Renai swings open, making a loud, startling sound. She follows the sound of laughter into her son’s room. The camera pans the room, searching every detail for clues of where this strange child is. We heard the child laugh in this room and the moving objects have led us here, so we know a jump scare will happen somewhere in this room. Renai focuses on a pair of shoes under her son’s dresser. The ominous music crescendos. When she uses a hockey stick to move the curtain covering the shoe container, we see nothing and the music abruptly stops. The viewer still knows that the jump scare is coming any time now. Our eyes are glued to the dresser. Less than a DORN THESIS 56 second after this a false alarm, the strange child comes bursting out of the dresser toward Renai, laughing. The dresser makes a sound loud enough to startle the viewer.

Sometimes filmmakers can guide us to pre-focus our attention on a stimulus that is not yet shown on screen. This is commonly achieved through terrified reaction shots. In The Conjuring, there is a scene in which one of the daughters, Christine

(Joey King), had been sleepwalking and banging her head against the dresser. Her sister, Nancy (Hayley McFarland), with whom she shares a room puts her back in her bed. Nancy hears more banging sounds come from the dresser. Nancy opens the dresser, revealing nothing but clothes. Christine wakes up, and we see a close-up of her looking up toward the dresser and gasping. Her eye line guides our attention up and to the dresser. After Christine’s reaction shot, the camera cuts to a long-shot of

Nancy in front of the open dresser–– no threat to be seen yet, but we know that something is in that area. The camera quickly pans up, revealing a demonic woman on top of the dresser. The woman screams and violins shriek. The camera quickly zooms in on the woman before she leaps off of the dresser, onto Nancy. This is different from unexpected jump scares that misguide attention because our attention was directed toward and glued to the top of the dresser before the scare happened.

The reaction shots fixed our attention. In the example of the picture frames shattering, the viewer might have been expecting a jump scare, but nothing guided our attention to that part of the frame.

The first jump scare in The Conjuring concludes with a false alarm of threat.

Carolyn finds her daughter, April (Kyla Deaver), in her room talking to her new

“imaginary friend,” whom she calls Rory. April shows Carolyn an antique music box DORN THESIS 57 she had found in the house, and says, “When the music stops, you see him in the mirror standing behind you.” Carolyn winds up the box herself. The music plays, a jack-in-the-box clown peeks his head up intermittently, and the design of a spiral painted white on the mirror spins. We see alternating glimpses through the reflection of reaction shots of Carolyn and the background behind her. When we get to see

Carolyn clearly, we see a section of her face illuminated by the light reflecting from the mirror, her expression quickly turning from amusement to apprehension and bewilderment. Given that April told Carolyn that Rory would appear behind her, we’re heavily focused on the area behind Carolyn. When we do get a glimpse of movement in the mirror behind Carolyn, this seems to confirm our expectations. The music stops, and our hearts seem to skip a beat. However, Wan undercuts our expectations, and April comes up behind Carolyn to scare her. Even though Carolyn’s own daughter provides no threat to her, we are still scared. The sudden shift from quiet music followed by total silence to April screaming, “BOO! MOMMY!” is jarring. We had been primed to look for threat, and we were startled before we could cognitively realize that there is no danger.

The figure in the background

Fundamentally, the figure in the background is a jump scare without extreme sound. We can be startled by auditory (and tactile) inputs, but not by visual inputs.

These moments can still be terrifying, surprising, or shocking, but they do not elicit the full body reflex that startle response does. The figure in the background involves a more cognitive response to the onscreen horrors. In The Conjuring, perhaps one of the most terrifying moments of the film occurs when Ed (Patrick Wilson) and DORN THESIS 58

Lorraine Warren’s (Vera Farminga) daughter, Judy (Sterling Jerins), is locked in a room, and the Annabelle doll appears in a rocking chair, slowly turning her head toward Judy. Though terrifying, this does not involve the sudden and intense amplification of terrifying auditory or visual stimuli characteristic of the jump scare.

Rather, this type of scare is easier on the senses, with Annabelle’s slow head turn and the scene’s low level of auditory stimulus; it is more insidious. While the jump scare is rote startle response, this involves more complex cognitive systems. The figure in the background creates surprise, but not through sensory overload. Rather, this type of scare feeds on suspense and anticipation or surprise. It is not an assault on the senses, but the mere presence of menace that generates horror. Though surprise and startle may seem synonymous, surprise can exist without startle. Startle is a brainstem reflex that jolts us. Typically, auditory and tactile stimuli startle us. An unexpected and sudden visual stimulus cannot jolt us in the same way, but it can surprise us. We have to cognitively appraise the visual stimulus as a threat for it to scare us. Much like the jump scare, this can be divided into two categories: surprise and anticipated.

An example of the surprise figure in the background is seen in The Conjuring when Brad (John Brotherton) walks outside because he had heard a noise. We hear someone whisper, “look what she made me do.” Because he checks outside, we expect the scare to occur outside. Nothing happens, and he comes back into the house. We see a side view of him backing away from the door, the kitchen in the background. At first, the kitchen is empty. His head eclipses our view of the kitchen door, then once we can see the kitchen again, a figure appears in the background

(Desi Domo). The soundtrack is silent, except for Brad’s gasp when he sees her. The DORN THESIS 59 visual stimulation is not overwhelming, it is subtle. This is not a startle response, but the presence of this ghostly maid generates terror. This is a point where the audience gasps or screams. The camera cuts in to her wrists, revealing slashes, and she whispers again, “look what she made me do.” Though I attempt to categorize these different types of scares, I must acknowledge that their boundaries are often blurred.

This subtle scare is followed by, and arguably acts to build-up, a jump scare, where dissonant strings blast on the soundtrack, she screams “LOOK WHAT SHE MADE

ME DO,” and she charges toward the camera in close-up. Likewise, one could argue that this scare was not a complete surprise, given the whispering we had heard shortly prior to the scare. Still, I would most closely describe this as a surprise figure in the background.

The anticipated figure in the background gains its effect from suspense. In The

Conjuring, there is a scene in which Lorraine tries to see Rory in April’s music box.

At this point, the menace that haunts the house is well established, so we expect to see something in the mirror when the music stops. Parallel to the scene in which the mother looks into the music box, the camera cuts between shots of the mirror in the music box and shots of Lorraine’s reaction. In the reaction shots, once again, we see the reflection of spirals from the music box mirror cast on Lorraine’s face. This time, we also see a close-up shot of the mirror, and the reflected background comes into focus. The area of the background that can be seen through the mirror is constantly changing because the mirror and the spirals painted onto it move in circles as the music plays. This movement of the mirror momentarily obstructs our vision before it makes another 360-degree turn, giving us another peek. We do not know where or DORN THESIS 60 when the figure will appear, so we are in suspense. At one point, when the window into the room behind Lorraine comes into view, we see briefly see the figure of a ghostly child standing in the window. The mirror moves, and this child is out of view.

When the mirror makes a full circle back to showing the window, the child is no longer there. Lorraine looks behind her, accompanied by a subtle chilling sound; nothing is there (see figure 2.2). Here, anticipation, the constant movement of the mirror, and the subtle appearance of a menacing figure generate terror. We feel afraid, not because of a brainstem startle response, but because we cognitively appraise this presence as a threat to the protagonists with whom we are aligned.

Figure 2.3: Lorraine Warren (Vera Farminga) searches the reflection in the music box for April’s friend, “Rory.” Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1457767/mediaindex?ref_=tt_pv_mi_sm

What Makes An Effective Scare

Now that I have outlined different ways that filmmakers try to scare the audience, we have yet to explore the neural mechanisms behind scares. Most horror fans agree that some scares land, while others flop. Of particular interest here will be what neuroscience has to say about making the most effective scares. With regard to the jump scare, there is extensive research on the factors that mediate the intensity of the startle response. According to the research that Michael Davis presents in Neural DORN THESIS 61

Mechanisms of Startle Behavior (Eaton, 1984), the intensity of startle response is wholly unaffected by brain regions outside of the brainstem and the immediate neural pathway of startle response that I have outlined. He claims that lesions to nearly any brain region (or even complete decerebration) causes the organism to startle just as easily as if their brain were fully intact. Yet, other lines of research claim that the intensity of the human startle response can be influenced by factors that lie outside of the brainstem such as emotion (Blumenthal, 2000; Larrauri et al., 2011; Peterson &

Blumenthal, 2018). These findings do not need to be at odds. Davis found that brain areas outside of the immediate startle circuit have no influence on an organism’s ability to respond to simple startle stimuli. In these experiments, organisms were lesioned at various brain regions, and researchers tested their ability to respond to the same startle stimuli. There, the startle stimulus was a constant variable between subjects, and the amount of the brain intact was the independent variable. However, if researchers manipulate the startle stimulus itself (with every human participant having a fully intact brain, of course), they can elicit different intensities of startle.

For example, accompanying an auditory startle stimulus with a change in the visual environment negatively influences the intensity of startle (Larrauri et al., 2011). Thus, we can conclude that the visual system influences startle response (though it may not be necessary for simple startle response to exist). Moreover, if researchers had presented the lesioned/decerebrate subjects with more complex stimuli, we would likely see deviations from the normal. Herein, I will focus on the neurological and aesthetic factors that influence the intensity of our responses to jump scares. DORN THESIS 62

There are two schools of thought with regard to the factors that mediate intensity of startle. Some evidence suggests that attention is strongly influential in startle response. Other researchers believe emotion to be a key mediator of startle response. Studies by Frances Graham and her associates (Anthony & Graham, 1985;

Graham 1975, 1979) provide support for the attention theory. They have found that startle response is augmented when participants are instructed to actively attend to the startle stimulus itself. On the other hand, if participants are asked to pay attention to a reaction time task where they must react as quickly as possible to a (non-startle) go signal, and they are startled, their startle response is reduced. Notably, startle response shows the greatest reduction when the startle stimulus is presented at a time when the go signal is imminent (so the participants are paying the most attention to their task).

In another study by Anthony & Graham (1985), the researchers asked participants to attend to either a visual or an auditory foreground task. In each condition, half of the participants were randomly selected to be exposed to an auditory startle, while the other half were exposed to a visual startle. The researchers found that the largest influence on startle-induced blink was whether the modality of the task and the modality of the startle stimulus were a match or a mismatch. Startle was greatest in conditions in which the two modalities matched. Since attention is known to be a limited resource, the researchers propose that when attention is focused on the visual channel, for instance, there are fewer attention resources available to the auditory system (so it is true that turning down the radio volume in heavy traffic helps you drive better). Finally, Simons & Zelson (1985) found that startle reduction is greatest when we are attending to an interesting stimulus. They presented participants with DORN THESIS 63 either photos of attractive nude men and women (interesting content) or a single photo of a small wicker basket presented repeatedly (dull content). Startle in response to an auditory probe was greatest in the dull content condition because the participants were paying less attention to their visual channel, and thus had more attention resources available for the auditory channel.

Still, emotion is another factor that needs to be considered. Research as early as in 1951 has shown that startle can be augmented if the startle stimulus is presented in the context of another stimulus that rats have been conditioned to fear (Brown et al). In other words, we startle easier when we are already afraid. There is a large volume of research that supports this emotion theory. Though startle is an unconditioned reflex, not an emotion, it carries a valence. On an appetitive-aversive dimension, some reflexes are more appetitive, such as salivation in response to sugar.

Startle is an aversive reflex–– it is associated with a “defense motivation system”

(Lang et al., 1990). Thus, it makes sense that startle reflex and aversive emotions like fear would work to enhance each other. Fear primes startle and startle primes fear.

Lang et al. describe an experiment that (acoustically) startled participants while they were exposed to pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant visual stimuli. Pleasant stimuli ranged from happy babies and chocolate to romantic couples and attractive nudes.

Neutral stimuli included rolling pins, buildings, neutral faces, etc. Unpleasant stimuli included angry faces, aimed guns, medical injections, violent deaths, etc. If the attention theory were the end of the story, we would expect a reduction of startle response in all conditions since the startle probe is acoustic and participants are presented with foreground visual stimuli. However, we see an increase in startle DORN THESIS 64 reflex when participants are simultaneously exposed to unpleasant photographs and the greatest reduction in startle reflex when participants are exposed to pleasant photographs. Emotion has a strong effect on startle response.

Notably, states of emotion are judged on a two-dimensional scale of valence and arousal. This study divides stimuli by valence level, but what about arousal?

Within each category, the stimuli ranged in arousal ratings. An attractive nude or a ski jump is more arousing than chocolate, a neutral face is more arousing than a rolling pin, and an aimed gun is more arousing than a medical injection. Moreover, participants rated pleasant and unpleasant stimuli as generally more arousing than neutral stimuli (the most arousing neutral stimulus used is a mushroom, and this is less arousing than the least arousing pleasant and unpleasant stimuli: horses and angry faces respectively). This is supported by skin conductance measurements when exposed to these stimuli, since skin conductance is a strong measure of arousal. The researchers found no effect of arousal on startle reflex. Though it may seem intuitive that a pounding heart is easier to startle than a heart at rest, that is not the case.

Audience members who are on the edge of their seats in suspense and those who are calm but seriously creeped out by the monster are equally prone to startle.

So now that we know that valence has a strong effect on startle response, how do we reconcile this with evidence that supports the attention theory? I have already alluded to the idea that the attention theory offers an incomplete story of startle response, but it is still supported by copious research. How do the two theories interact? Is one effect stronger than the other? One could argue that the attention theory still offers a better explanation of the findings that Lang et al. present. It is DORN THESIS 65 possible that we startle easier when shown negative visual stimuli because we are so averse to the stimuli that we try to reject the stimuli and pay little attention to them.

Thus, we have maximum attention resources available to our auditory channel when we are exposed to unpleasant visual stimuli. Lang et al. debunk this theory by suggesting that we do pay just as much attention to negative stimuli and positive stimuli. Previous research has shown that “stimulus rejection” is associated with an increase in heart rate and “orienting and attention” is associated with a decrease in heart rate (Lang et al., 1990). If the attention theory offered the best theory, we would expect heart rate to increase when participants are shown the unpleasant visual stimuli. However, Lang and his researchers did record heart rate during the study and found a significant heart rate deceleration when participants were shown unpleasant photographs.

To bolster the emotion theory, Lang and his group of researchers conducted a similar study that startled participants with both visual and acoustic probes. Though the pleasant, neutral, and unpleasant photographs were visual stimuli, Lang et al. found the same pattern of startle increasing as the photographs became more unpleasant, regardless of whether the startle probes were auditory or visual. As a side note, the acoustic startle probes consistently created greater eye blink intensity (their measure of startle) than the visual startle probes. Lang et al. also found that this pattern holds up when participants simply imagine unpleasant, neutral, or pleasant events or objects. Likewise, Lang et al., delineate earlier findings that support the emotion theory from studies that used classical conditioning to generate fear. In these studies, human participants were conditioned to associate a change in illumination DORN THESIS 66 with fear after it had been repeatedly paired with electrical shock. Once they were conditioned, they were exposed to acoustic startle probes. In some trials, the feared change in illumination would occur, in other trials the lights would stay the same. The attention theory would predict that, since the change in illumination is both visual and more interesting than the control condition, startle would be reduced in the presence of the conditioned stimulus. However, the researchers found that the change in illumination, when accompanied by an acoustic startle probe, augments startle. This suggests that the effect of emotion outweighs that of attention on the intensity of startle response.

From this, we can infer that jump scares work best when we are already primed with negative emotion and when we have maximum attention available to focus on the startle stimulus. The best anticipated jump scares should prime us with deep fear and narrow our attention in on the stimulus that is about to startle us. As I will address in the following chapter, the beauty of the anticipated jump scare is that filmmakers can use freely tools such as atmospheric horror and suspense to build up negative affect before the scare. On the other hand, the most effective unexpected jump scares should be preceded by the least interesting visual stimuli so that we have more attentional resources available to the auditory channel. When we click on a

YouTube video of a relaxing car drive through lush green hills, we might be bored until we are startled by a monster screaming at us.

Moreover, in unexpected scares, the real fear comes from not knowing that the monster was there in the first place. Though terrorism and jump scares are incomparable, the unexpected jump scare operates under the same mechanisms that DORN THESIS 67 drive deep nationwide fear following terrorist attacks. Though we are far more likely to die in an automobile accident than we are to die in a terrorist attack, terrorist activity greatly increases nationwide feelings of relative risk. Following the events of

9/11, prevalence of terrorism-related PTSD was 4.3% across the United States

(Marshall et al., 2007). This is because terrorist attacks occur in places where we would otherwise feel safe–– offices, movie theaters, and concerts, etc. It is the undermining of a perceived sense of safety that can scare us deeply (Marshall et al.,

2007).

To synthesize our findings on the effectiveness of scares, I would like to highlight the brilliant ways that Director John Krasinski scares the audience in A

Quiet Place (2018). At the center of the film is the rule that “if they hear you, they hunt you.” We see newspaper clippings with headlines “IT’S SOUND,” the Abbott family sign to each other “too loud,” sand on footpaths, and paint marking the spots on the floor that don’t creak. A Quiet Place prompts us to expect attack whenever we hear sound. In the opening scene, when the youngest child approaches the rest of the family with his rocket ship toy, we see a shot of the father, Lee (John Krasinski), wide-eyed, placing one arm protectively in front of the rest of the family, and the other arm cautiously in front of him as if to say “no.” He removes the batteries, puts it away, and signs to his son, “too loud.” We anticipate trouble when Regan (Millicent

Simmonds), their deaf daughter, gives the rocket ship toy back to him, and he grabs the batteries. The family silently walks along a sanded path until, as expected, the son

(Cade Woodward) turns on his rocket ship toy. Though it’s not a very loud sound for our world, it is the loudest sound we have heard in the film so far. When we first hear DORN THESIS 68 it, we see Lee in close-up, and his face quickly turn from calm into terrified; he stops walking and turns around. We then enter Regan’s subjective experience of not being able to hear, but seeing her entire family turn around, horrified. When Lee sprints toward his son, the one question on our minds is whether or not he will be able to save his son before the monster comes. We see glimpses of fast motion in the forest, indicating that it will be a close battle against time. Then when Lee is almost there, the ominous music is about to hit its climax, we see a profile shot of the monster, now in clear view charging toward the son. Lee is off screen, and the audience is on the edge of our seats, watching for Lee to appear on screen to save his son before the monster attacks. Then the monster swiftly attacks, letting out a scream-like sound as it takes away the boy, startling the viewer.

The genius of A Quiet Place is that we learn to associate sound with impending terror (see figure 2.4). In this case, sound is both the stimulus we’ve been conditioned to fear and the startle probe itself. As previously noted, we are most easily startled with auditory probes–– a scare without intense sound simply does not startle the viewer. Thus, sound has an even stronger ability to generate fear in A Quiet

Place. It is also important to note that, because most of the film is relatively silent, our threshold for acoustic startle is lower. Personally, I was startled when the film cut from silence to a running stream. Though the sound of a stream would not usually startle me, it was much louder than the sounds that preceded it, and thus acted as an assault on my auditory senses. DORN THESIS 69

Figure 2.4: A Quiet Place teaches us to fear sound through shots such as the one above, where Lee (John Krasinski) sternly makes the hush sign. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6644200/mediaindex?ref_=tt_mv_sm

Finally, what remains is how to gain maximum effect through the figure in the background. It is harder to find literature from neuroscience that provides clear answers to this because, unlike startle response, the figure in the background is specific to film and involves multiple factors from higher cortical areas. Nevertheless, the figure in the background is fundamentally fear generated by a visual stimulus. To feel fear, we have to appraise the stimulus as threatening. I argue that the most effective figures in the background are the ones that are the most terrifying. I have not yet addressed the characteristics of the monster itself because it is near irrelevant to the jump scare. We are startled by blasts of auditory stimuli whether they come from monsters or our phones blasting our morning alarm at 8pm when we’re going about our day because we had mixed up 8am and 8pm when we were setting our alarm last night. Startle occurs before appraisal of threat or non-threat. When it comes to the DORN THESIS 70 figure in the background, we are only scared by visual stimuli when it is cognitively perceived as horrifying. Here, filmmakers need to know what scares us. According to

Noël Carroll, these are things that transgress our cultural categories. Horror films often cross the boundary between the living and the dead with their monsters. Things that do not look like they should be part of our world, but still appear in it like demonic presences are terrifying to us. I will write more about what scares us in the next chapter.

According to current research, our emotional state has the strongest impact on how effective scares are in horror film. Other factors such as attention also play into our ability to be startled. Though these are the two largest factors currently known to effect startle response in horror film, future research should attempt to investigate more factors that could influence startle response. Moreover, as the field of neurocinematics continues to emerge, future research should focus on the horror film itself, and exactly which filmmaking techniques are most effective.

DORN THESIS 71

Chapter 3: The Spaces In Between the “Scares”

While the previous chapter focused on specific types of scenes and isolated the film techniques that directors use to generate fear through jump scares and figures in the background, this chapter will look at the film as a whole and how fear exists throughout the film. Though jump scares and menacing figures are hallmarks of the horror film, a film would not be complete without narrative. Jump scares are acute experiences of fear, but filmmakers also have the tools to generate a sense of fear that pervades long stretches of film. Pervasive fear generally takes the form of atmospheric horror and suspense. This chapter will delve into the spaces in between the acute fear by investigating why the “scares” cannot be effective without narrative and describing the value that the spaces in between the “scares” hold in their own right.

Why Feature Film?

Based on the research presented in previous chapters, it would seem that the adrenaline rush from “scary scenes” is the meat of the horror film. Plausibly, we could get the same thrill from a meaningless succession of monsters popping up on the big screen and screaming at the audience. Imagine a parallel universe where narrative feature film is not established as the norm of moviemaking, and “horror films” as we know them are actually 90 minutes of random and successive jump scares. It would be far cheaper and easier to make films with no narrative. Yet, there is a reason why film did not evolve in this way. It is most effective when fear builds over the course of a film, we are immersed by narrative, and we come to identify with the film’s characters. Compilations of jump scares exist on YouTube, but these never DORN THESIS 72 get as many views as the films themselves. They are not as rewarding as whole horror films.

It will be useful to use horror shorts as a point of comparison in our discussion of feature film. Robert Morgan’s Bobby Yeah (2011) is 23 minutes of stop motion animated bizarre nightmare, and Noël Carroll’s and Robin Wood’s dream. According to Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror (1990), horror is repulsive and threatening, but we cannot stop watching because we are so fascinated with the monsters that defy our cultural categories. Our protagonist is slimy; he has human-like facial features and skin, but bunny ears (also made of greasy skin). Detached grimy human faces ooze balls of puss and slither menacingly toward him (see figure 3.1), entities that look like thumbs with faces but no eyes writhe as they shoot bloody sperm-shaped balls of slime at him, and normal horror film sound effects play as a slim creature whose head looks like a dark Sesame Street character chases after our protagonist with a large human finger protruding between its legs (which it thrusts like a penis).

Every creature in this short film is purely grotesque and crosses cultural categories between human and other. They are what Noël Carroll would label as “fusion monsters.” Robin Wood would focus on the fleshy nature of the monsters, especially the monster that chases after our protagonist, thrusting its finger/penis, and describe how the film generates fear from expressions of sexuality by things categorized as

“other.” In the beginning of the short, our protagonist is nurturing his friend, but curiosity drives him to press the red button on his friend’s chest. This is what brings the monsters into our protagonist’s world, and then transports the protagonist out of his world. Like in a feature film, our protagonist has a goal. Here, it is to reunite with DORN THESIS 73 his friend, and our protagonist must battle all of these monsters to make his way back to his friend. Though the film has no comprehensible language, we know that we are aligned with the bunny-like creature because Morgan gives us access to solely his subjectivity through reaction shots and point-of-view shots. Moreover, we want to align with him because he is the only creature that does not appear to be a threat, though he looks like a monster himself. Whether or not the film has narrative is up for debate, but it is more certain that we experience this film by wanting our protagonist to survive.

Figure 3.1: One of the monsters that menaces our protagonist in Bobby Yeah (2011). Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2006697/mediaindex?ref_=tt_pv_mi_sm

Bobby Yeah shares several features with horror feature films: a protagonist, goals, threatening and repulsive monsters, etc. Yet, the short film generates horror in a different way than feature films. For one, this short contains no jump scares (though a horror short can contain jump scares). Because the film does not need to follow the conventions of feature films, it has the freedom to generate horror in novel ways.

Here, Morgan chose to overwhelm us with creatures and plotlines that go beyond the DORN THESIS 74 most repulsive and bizarre things most of us could imagine. We do not know what to expect, and we are constantly shocked by how far Morgan pushes the boundaries of the horrifying and bizarre. Though the short film allows for levels of risk and innovation that big-budget feature films typically do not have, there are advantages of feature film.

Genre Expectations.

When we watch a feature film in the horror genre, unless it is our first horror film, we do not go into it with a clean slate. Rather, we watch horror films within the context of other horror films we have seen. We are strongly affected by conventions that provide us with expectations. In the previous chapter, I wrote about ways that filmmakers could direct us to either anticipate or not anticipate jump scares within a scene. Filmmakers can also use genre expectations to influence our anticipation of a scare. The mere presence of a mirror in horror scenes can prompt the experienced horror viewer to keep their eyes glued to the corner of the mirror because we know that the monster will probably appear in the background behind the protagonist. Of course, conventions are not always fulfilled. Filmmakers can either confirm or disconfirm our expectations in the presence of a mirror. They can even use our attention on the expected place where the monster will pop up to guide our attention away from the place where the real scare will occur. Take the scene in The Conjuring in which the picture frames fall from the staircase for example. In the previous chapter, I wrote about how camera movement and angle preclude us from paying attention to the stairwell, where the real scare will occur. At the same time, tropes tell us to expect the monster to appear in one of the kids’ rooms, since we heard two claps DORN THESIS 75 that mimic the hide-and-seek game that the kids play with each other. Cues within scenes and within the genre direct our attention away from the stairwell before all of the family photos loudly crash on the floor.

Neurologically, genre is important for guiding our film experience. Once we watch a few horror films, we form expectations of each scene. Not only does our dopaminergic system reward us when we see something good, but it also rewards us when we see experience something as better than expected. This is called prediction error. (Berridge, 2007). Dopamine transmission in the primate ventral midbrain fire in proportion to the reward received minus the reward expected (Fiorillo et al., 2003).

Genre conventions tell us that the monster will appear behind our protagonist in the mirror or that it’s a bad idea to go into the cellar in the middle of the night.

Filmmakers can either confirm or disconfirm our expectations. If we believe that our protagonists are going to be in harm, but they are not, our brains will reward us.14 We would not be able to form these expectations in the first place if horror did not exist as feature films in a genre.

14 Though it is likely that our brains reward us when our protagonists are safe, it may more nuanced. What is “better than expected” in a scary movie? On the one hand, we could define a better-than-expected outcome as one where we expect a scare, but are relieved when nothing happens. On the other hand, we want to be afraid when we pay to see a horror film, so a really effective scare could be a better than expected outcome. We do not have the ability to invasively probe peoples’ brains to read dopamine neuron activity when they watch horror films, so there is no way of answering this question. Based on my own viewing experience, I would hypothesize that the types of scenes that activate our reward systems depends on what each viewer wants to see. The more thrill-seeking viewers who beg the filmmaker to scare them as much as possible probably experience dopaminergic activation when the filmmaker not only confirms expectations, but also exceeds them. On the other hand, those viewers who are scared easily, and maybe were roped into watching the film by their friends, might experience more dopaminergic activation when they are relieved to see that the filmmakers don’t go for the expected scare. Some people may even respond to a mix of both. Though this is a question that is impossible to answer in human subjects, the take-away is that researchers do know that dopamine neurons in the reward system show increased activation when we experience better than expected outcomes (Berridge, 2007). DORN THESIS 76

Character Identification and Narrative.

A major reason why it is more effective for horror to be presented in the form of feature film is because narrative guides our film viewing experience through character identification. Film Theorist, Carl Plantinga, provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which film elicits emotion. According to Plantinga in Moving

Viewers: American Film and the Spectator’s Experience, because we are able to align ourselves with characters’ experiences to a certain extent, we exhibit concern for the characters in films. Plantinga calls emotions “concern-based construals.” He illustrates that emotions are elicited by our appraisals of external stimuli and our physiological reactions to these stimuli. If fear is a concern-based construal, we first need characters for which we are concerned. After all, we do not feel fear for an arachnophobic stranger who has a spider in their room. We only feel fear for events that concern us. We may feel afraid for a friend that risks losing their job. We can even feel afraid for strangers if their situation should cause fear for ourselves. If we learn that millions of strangers across the nation are losing their jobs due to a failing economy or if we watch a television program exposing the ghosts haunting a house across the country, we may feel afraid if we believe that we are likely to fall into these dreadful situations ourselves. Though there is an element in horror film of the fear following us home when we leave the movie theater (which I will describe in more detail in the concluding chapter), filmmakers primarily use character identification to generate concern for the events on the screen. Since we startle most easily when we are already feeling negative emotions, concern for character safety is an effective way to maximize the effect of jump scares. DORN THESIS 77

Filmmakers can use our common preexisting beliefs to reinforce identification with characters. Morals play a strong role in our identification. Filmmakers know that we inherently want good to win and bad to lose. If one character is threatening another character, we are more inclined to identify with the victim, especially if we have previously seen the victim as “good.” Most horror films have sub-plots that refer to a genre outside of horror. A Quiet Place, The Exorcist (1973), and a sizable portion of “haunted house” films such as The Conjuring, Insidious, and Sinister (2012) are centered on families. Not only do we sit on the edge of our seats when the monsters invade the Abbott household while Evelyn (Emily Blunt) gives birth in A Quiet

Place, but some of us might cry when the family shows Regan that they still love her or when Lee Abbott sacrifices his life for his family. In The Conjuring, our strongest fear is that Carolyn will kill her own daughter. Though she embodies the monster, we want Carolyn to both survive and expel the demonic presence inside of her because we do not want this family to lose their mother. During the exorcism, we see

Carolyn’s husband (Ron Livingston) is by her side, yelling at the demon to leave his family alone. The demon cannot be expelled until Lorraine Warren touches Carolyn’s head, and reminds her of a “memory she said she would never forget” of her family smiling at the beach. Families can add stakes that structure our concerns. For these scenes to be effective, filmmakers have to make the assumption that most viewers have the common interest of families staying together. Most things that threaten the family structure are deemed as the enemy for whom we have no concern. Other horror films are also teen films or contain romantic stakes. In Halloween, we want the teens to enjoy their teenage years (and implicitly, to survive). Get Out (2017) begins DORN THESIS 78 with romantic scenes of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) greeting Rose (Allison Williams) at the door with a kiss when she brings him coffee and bakery items for their road trip.

We inherently align on the side of love. Then, we feel intense betrayal in addition to fear when we discover the Armitage family’s plot. These stakes work in conjunction with film form (i.e. camera angle) to encourage and shape character identification. In turn, this maximizes our fear.

Horror is maximally enjoyed as feature film because we like stories.

Storytelling is a pastime that long precedes the invention of cinema. We wouldn’t have great epics like The Odyssey, which started as oral tradition before it was written on paper, without our love for passing on stories. Oxytocin is a hormone widely implicated in social bonding. We feel good when our bodies release oxytocin.

Scientists have found that narrative releases oxytocin, and we release more of it the more we pay attention to the narratives (Zak, 2015). Though we do not engage in suspension of disbelief to pretend as if we are the protagonists in films, we do undergo “narrative transportation.” Cohen et al. (2015) define narrative transportation as occurring “when an individual experiences the feeling of entering the world evoked by a narrative because of empathy for story characters and the imagination of the story plot. It is described as a state of detachment from the world, as though one is being carried away by the story” (1). In Cohen et al.’s study (2015), they presented participants with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents called “Bang You’re

Dead!” (1961). They divided the participants randomly into two groups. One group watched the episode in linear time, while the other saw the scenes presented out of order. The participants were told to lift their hands whenever they heard the word DORN THESIS 79

“gun” spoken in the film. Those who watched the film contiguously were more likely to forget to lift their hands, and therefore could not focus as well on the task. They had been captivated by the narrative. Though our enjoyment of narrative is not specific to the horror genre, the concept of narrative transportation is key to our enjoyment of suspense in horror films.

Suspense

In defining suspense (in relation to surprise), Alfred Hitchcock described a dinner scene between two people. It would be a surprise if a bomb exploded under the table, and we had no reason to suspect that the scene had been nothing more than a simple dinner scene. Suspense happens when we see the bomb under the table, perhaps a clock on the wall counting down to imminent doom, and our characters obliviously enjoying their meal (Truffaut, 1985). Suspense is tension that we feel when we anticipate danger, but cannot intervene in the situation unfolding on screen.

In this situation, it is especially frustrating because the characters on screen do not know about the bomb under the table, and thus lack the agency to save themselves.

According to Noël Carroll, suspense is a narrative structure that occurs when ambiguity exists between two outcomes, and we are led to believe that the negative outcome is more probable. In the scene that Alfred Hitchcock describes, we want our characters to look under the table or some hero to come along and disarm the bomb, but we know that this is improbable. Yet, we do still feel some hope. If we had 100% certainty that the doom would occur, we would merely feel dread. It is uncertainty that drives suspense. DORN THESIS 80

I write about suspense as its own entity because suspense is not a feeling (it is neither a mood nor an emotion)–– it is a narrative structure. Suspense is specific to fiction. Colloquially, nobody says that they feel suspense waiting to hear back about a job offer or a college application. Rather, we might say that we feel dread or we feel anxious. Suspense is a narrative device that causes feelings such as fear or dread, but it is not the feeling itself. At the core of suspense, we must know that we have no agency because we cannot enter the fictional world, and we ourselves are safe.

Additionally, there may be differences between the amount of knowledge that we have and the amount of knowledge that the characters have. If a bomb is under the table, all we can do is hope that our protagonist notices the bomb, somebody who knows about the bomb comes to the rescue, or the fire alarm goes off at the restaurant by coincidence, causing everyone to leave before the bomb can hurt anyone. With suspense, we are on the edge of our seats because we have come to align with characters in danger, but all we can do is wait for time to pass to see how events unfold. Since we are not directly in danger, this is bearable to us. In parallel situations in the real world, we are in direct danger. We do not merely wait for time to pass, knowing that we will be safe in the end (or knowing that Hollywood convention is for good to win in the end). If we have agency, we may try to do something. If we are powerless, we may feel dread.

Suspense is a common device used in horror films to build negative affect and anticipation. Remember, preexisting negative feelings make us startle more easily.

Research has shown that suspense can narrow attentional focus and deeply immerse us in narrative transportation, which makes it a valuable ingredient in the build-up to DORN THESIS 81 jump scares. In recent neurocinematic studies, researchers have used fMRI to study the brain’s activity during suspenseful scenes. When participants were presented with clips from suspenseful movies in the center of a screen, with flashing checkerboard patterns appearing in the periphery, fMRI revealed that activity in the peripheral visual processing regions in the anterior calcarine sulcus (inside the occipital lobe) was most reduced during high suspense scenes. On the other hand, activity in the anterior calcarine sulcus (an area known to process central vision) increased during peaks of suspense. This narrowed attentional focus was less pronounced in moments from the same suspenseful scene where the filmmakers put less emphasis on the suspenseful threat. Moreover, mind wandering was minimized during these suspenseful scenes. This is measured by less activity in the default mode network

(Bezdek et al., 2015). When our default mode network is activated, we tend to drift off and think about social things like other people and ourselves. This is the part of the brain that’s activated when researchers tell participants to sit in an fMRI machine and do nothing (Lieberman, 2014). Prior research had shown that stimuli with both negative valence and high motivational intensity narrow our scope of attention

(Matthews and Mackintosh, 2004). This supports Bezdek et al.’s findings, since narrative suspense combines fear of a bad outcome and intense desire for a good outcome. If suspense narrows our attentional focus and if narrowed attentional focus on an imminent startle stimulus amplifies our startle response, then suspense is a wonderful tool for maximizing the effect of upcoming jump scares.

Suspense relies on uncertainty to gain its effect. I had previously stated that dopamine neurons respond proportionally to prediction error, which is a factor of DORN THESIS 82 probability. In varying degrees of probability, uncertainty becomes an added factor in reward function. We experience the most uncertainty when the probability of an event happening is 0.5 (50% chance of it happening). With any probability above 0.5, we can predict that the event will likely happen and below 0.5, we predict that the event is unlikely to occur (Fiorillo et al., 2003). There are different types of firing patterns that neurons can exhibit. Phasic firing refers to rapid firing that diminishes quickly in response to a stimulus. Sustained firing refers to relatively constant neuronal firing over longer durations. Fiorillo et al. (2003) conditioned monkeys to associate distinct visual stimuli with varying probabilities of liquid reward (P = 0, P = 0.25, P = 0.5, P

= 0.75, and P = 1). Depending on the probability associated with the visual stimulus, the monkeys would receive the reward after a 2 second delay following presentation of the stimulus. Dopamine neurons in the ventral midbrain fired in two waves. The first wave of firing occurred at the presentation of the conditioned visual stimulus and the second occurred 2 seconds later when the reward either did or did not occur.

Fiorillo et al. found that phasic firing in the second wave correlated with prediction error. If monkeys got the reward but were not expecting to, they released more dopamine than if they had been expecting the reward. They also found the most sustained firing when uncertainty was highest (P = 0.5). Here, dopamine neurons fired when the conditioned visual stimulus was presented, continued for the next 2 seconds, and peaked when the expected reward would be presented (see figure 3.2). DORN THESIS 83

Figure 3.2: A) Raster and histogram activity of single cell activity in dopamine neurons both at the time of the presentation of the conditioned stimulus and at the time of reward delivery at probabilities of reward delivery varying from 0.0 to 1.0. Incidence of reward is indicated by longer vertical lines in the rasters. Here, we see that dopamine neurons fired most at the presentation of the conditioned stimulus when the monkeys expected a reward. Bin width = 20ms. B) Population histograms of dopamine neuron activity. Both rewarded and unrewarded trials are included at probabilities of 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75. Here, we see the pronouncement of sustained activation at P = 0.5 between the onset of the conditioned stimulus and the delivery of reward. C) Median sustained activity of dopamine neurons at various reward probabilities. The highest sustained activity is seen at P = 0.5. D) Sustained activation at P = 0.5 and phasic responses at P = 0 for all dopamine neurons. Image used with permission from The American Association for the Advancement of Science through Copyright Clearance Center, License Number 4561121190849, from Fiorillo et al., 2003.

I previously wrote about probability and prediction error in the context of whether or not a scare will occur, which can guide anticipation. Genre conventions allow us to predict the probability of a scare occurring, and we are rewarded based on whether the outcome was better or worse than expected (which depends on whether or not we wanted a scare). This dictates phasic firing. Suspense relates to uncertainty DORN THESIS 84 about outcomes within the plot. Though conventions may tell us that the good guys usually win (of course Hollywood does sometimes let the bad guys win in horror films, which keeps things exciting for our reward systems), directors can use the tools of cinema to trick us into thinking that the outcome of the plot is more uncertain than it actually is. Suspense dictates sustained firing of dopamine neurons.

To illustrate how filmmakers can generate uncertainty, let’s take a suspense scene in Train to Busan (2016) for example, in which Su-an (Kim Su-an) and her father, Seok-woo (Gong Yoo), are separated. We do not know whether or not Seok- woo will be able to make it to the front of the train safely past the zombies to reunite with his daughter. The physical distance between the two and the seemingly impossible barriers (zombies) between them generate high uncertainty. The zombies in this film are not the slow-moving zombies of Night of the Living Dead. These zombies are voracious and swift. We’ve seen them sneak up behind people and tear into their necks before they can realize what’s happening. As Seok-woo and his team travel from train car to train car, they successfully manage to beat the zombies with nothing but a baseball bat, a shield, and their bare arms. We seem more certain that this task isn’t completely impossible. Yet, an air of uncertainty remains when a zombie in one train car is inches away from biting a defenseless Seok-woo. Then,

Seok-woo and his group make a serendipitous discovery that the zombies cannot see in the dark and become momentarily disabled from attacking.

The group successfully makes their way to Su-an, but they must keep making their way toward the front of the train where there is a quarantine zone. In one highly suspenseful scene, they crawl through an overhead baggage compartment in the dark DORN THESIS 85 to bypass the giant group of zombies while the train is going through a tunnel.

Though we are confident in this clever idea, they crawl slowly and we do not know how long the tunnel is. Though the zombies cannot see, they can still find their victims through sound, so they also have to remain silent. One man (Choi Gwi-hwa) in the group straggles behind everyone else, and has a hard time coming down from the overhead compartment. He slips and falls to the ground, making a thud. All we can think about is whether or not the zombies heard him fall. Fortunately, they did not, but we still do not know how long the train will be in the tunnel when Seok-woo goes back from the safety of the next train car to help the man up. Uncertainty is heightened when the train goes back into the light before Seok-woo and the man can enter the next train car. They hide behind the seats, but one zombie gets dangerously close to them (see figure 3.3). The man steps on a soda can just as the two decide to run, and suspenseful music ramps up. Once they make it to the next train car, it doesn’t appear as if they will be able to close the door behind them–– one zombie’s head has made it through the door. Their only hope is to make it to the quarantine train car. We see that the door is tightly tied shut and Yon-suk (Kim Eui-sung, who has been established as a prick throughout the film) forbids anyone from letting our protagonists into safety. The group of survivors in the quarantine area fights over whether or not to let the new group of people in. Here, director Yeon Sang-ho generates some of the tensest suspense of the film from the uncertainty of human behavior when some people in the group had been established as good and others as jerks. This uncertainty makes the reward high when our protagonists are allowed into safety. DORN THESIS 86

Figure 3.3: Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) and another man in his group of survivors (Choi Gwi- hwa) hide after a failed attempt to escape the train car in darkness when the zombies could not see them in Train to Busan. One zombie gets dangerously close to them, creating uncertainty and suspense. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/mediaindex?ref_=tt_pv_mi_sm

Atmospheric Horror

When we decide to spend our time and/or money to watch a horror film, we want an experience that will be scary. We do not want to be at ease for a moment of the runtime. Jump scares acutely scare us, but only for mere seconds. Atmospheric horror, with its ability to span entire films, is where we really get our moneys’ worth.

While scares generate emotion, atmospheric horror generates mood. Carl Plantinga posits the following distinction between emotion and mood: an emotion is a concern- based construal, while mood is a more general feeling (Plantinga, 1999). Emotions have causes, appraisals, physiological changes, action tendencies, the ability to be expressed, and the ability to be regulated. Importantly for this distinction, the causes of emotions are objects and events for which we are concerned. Emotions have direction. The word “emotion” comes from the Latin root emovere, which means to move or displace. Happiness is an emotion that we feel when somebody we like DORN THESIS 87 compliments us on our outfit. We feel happy because we are concerned (though not necessarily in the negative sense) with feeling liked by people who we like. The compliment might prompt us to wear outfits like this more often or try to be friendlier with the person that complimented us. Yet, the good feeling that comes from a sunny day cannot be classified as an emotion. Sunshine may prime us to feel more positive emotions, but there are no concerns or action tendencies involved.

When I write about atmospheric horror, what I am referring to is the type of horror that does not produce the fear emotion, but a mood of fear. These are not specific events that cause us to be concerned for our favorite character’s safety.

Atmospheric horror occurs when something just feels off. This makes us feel tense, uneasy, or inexplicably perpetually afraid. We may sense a presence without seeing the monster, even without knowing for sure if it is there. This type of fear can permeate entire spans of the film.

As the name implies, filmmakers generate this mood through atmosphere–– sound, color, camera angles and movements that seem to stalk the protagonist, etc.

Haunted house films really thrive off atmospheric horror. This is the quiet music in minor keys that make us think that something is wrong, without knowing exactly what is wrong. We see atmospheric horror in dull colored images low in saturation. In

The Conjuring, Carolyn wakes up in the morning with unexplained bruises and she appears to age rapidly over the progression of a few days. We feel afraid when Laurie walks up to the doorstep of the Myers’s house, and we see her from the inside of the house. Though we do not get confirmation of the presence of a monster, the camera angle leads us to believe that she is being stalked. An entire franchise of films has DORN THESIS 88 been built on the Annabelle doll, whose eyes seem to give the air of a demonic presence. We are especially creeped out when the presence of darkness seems to invade the innocent. Children are typically joyful, but they are vulnerable and when they start demonstrating bizarre and unexplainable behaviors, we feel uneasy and wonder how they came to be this way. We see this when April tells her mom that she can talk to her friend Rory through the mirror in her music box in The Conjuring.

Childrens’ drawings are a common way to generate atmospheric horror. In Insidious,

Dalton has the power to leave his body and enter an astral plane when he sleeps. He likes to draw the things that he sees in this astral plane including watching himself sleep and encountering a red-faced demon. In Jordan Peele’s Us (2019), Jason (Evan

Alex) draws a man standing on the beach with a hand dripping with blood. The reason why these things creep us out is because we do not know how these dark ideas entered these innocent children’s’ minds, but we suspect that some monster must have been involved.

We feel creeped out when we feel a tension of unknown presence.

Anthropologist, Pascal Boyer, eloquently explains this phenomenon seen in atmospheric horror in Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious

Thought (2001).

What happens in religion is not so much that people see “faces in the

clouds”… as “traces in the grass.” That is, people do not so much visualize

what supernatural agents must be like to detect traces of their presence… our

agency-detection systems are biased toward overdetection. But why is this the

case? … Our evolutionary heritage is that of organisms that must deal with DORN THESIS 89

both predators and prey. In either situation, it is far more advantageous to

overdetect agency than to underdetect it. The expense of false positives

(seeing agents where there are none) is minimal, if we can abandon these

misguided intuitions quickly. In contrast, the cost of not detecting agents

when they are actually around (either predator or prey) could be very high. (p.

145)

We have evolved to detect presence before we explicitly know that something really is there. If we are walking through the woods at night and we believe ourselves to be alone, we will be put in fight-or-flight mode if we hear a twig snap behind us. Though the wind may have snapped the twig off the tree, our first impulse is to wonder if an animal or another person is following us. Our fear system has evolved to feel fear before we know what we are afraid of. In chapter one, I described how preliminary visual input from the thalamus feeds into the amygdala before we can declare the object in front of us to be a snake. Atmospheric horror is a mood of fear that we feel when we do not yet know what we are afraid of.

Susanne Bier’s Bird Box (2018) provides an excellent example of atmospheric horror. Neither our protagonists nor we ever see the monster. We only know that those who have seen the monster were either driven to commit suicide or to reveal the monster to everyone else. Nobody knows why this monster emerged, but its ominous presence has reigned over the Earth for several years. The monster only makes itself known through strange occurrences. In the opening scene, Malorie’s (Sandra Bullock) sister, Jessica (Sarah Paulson), drives the two from a routine pregnancy checkup at the hospital. We first see a woman repeatedly smash her head into the hospital DORN THESIS 90 window until she bleeds to death. After driving through traffic that only seem to follow the rules of anarchy, Jessica wails, “oh my god, what the fuck is that,” and she gets a distant look in her eyes. We see a close-up of her, irises growing and glowing, tears streaming down her face. She loses control of the car and accelerates onto another car so that it flips over. When the two emerge from the accident alive, Jessica steps in front of a large truck and is killed. Meanwhile, people run in all directions and cars explode in the background. There is some presence that is driving gruesome mass suicide, but we cannot see it. Because seeing the presence is what drives people mad, we have learned to fear seeing the monster.

The scene in which a group of survivors drives to the grocery store, with the car windows completely covered using only a GPS and parking sensors, is particularly good at generating atmospheric horror. This is the first time since the initial onset of chaos that Melanie has attempted to go into the outside world. Though there should be no other cars on the road, the parking sensors beep rapidly, indicating that it detects something on all sides of the car. They hear a noise from outside of the car. Through the translucent window covers, we see a dark shadow pass over the car several times. The car shakes violently. When we are able to see from outside of the car, we only see leaves rustle as if in a tornado. We even get one eerie point-of-view shot from this unseen monster flying across the car’s roof. For the entirety of the film, we do not know what we are afraid of, but we know that the threat of discovering its identity is dire.

Filmmakers can use atmosphere to drive curiosity to make us look for scares.

Sometimes, atmospheric horror is nothing more than elements that put us on edge. At DORN THESIS 91 other times, filmmakers can use mood to consciously direct our attention. In Friday the 13th (1980), Ned (Mark Nelson) nearly drowning in Crystal Lake during the exposition does nothing more than increase our level of worry–– it was a coincidence, and he was pulled out safely. On the other hand, in Get Out, Jordan Peele introduces things that seem slightly off to pique our curiosity and get us to pay more attention to details that will later be important. We start to look at Andre (Lakeith Stanfield),

Georgina (Betty Gabriel), and Walter (Marcus Henderson) under a microscope, and actively try to piece information together until we finally learn that they act white because they embody undead white souls. This in turn acts to amplify our fear for

Chris’s safety. Filmmakers can of course disconfirm the expectations of a scare set up by atmospheric horror. In the scene in The Conjuring which I have previously used to describe false alarms of jump scares, we feel unnerved as the camera tracks down the dull hallway with peeling wallpaper, as we hear April talking to herself in her room.

April’s music box itself has an element of atmospheric horror with its antique appearance and clown that peeks his head out of the box as music plays. Yet, when

April appears behind Carolyn in the mirror, our expectations of a jump scare are disconfirmed. As supported by research that we startle most easily when we are already afraid, atmospheric horror plays a powerful role in the effectiveness of scares in horror film.

Addressing Collective Fears

Horror, more than any other genre, has the potential to address our collective fears. Because we enter horror films already agreeing with the filmmaker that we are going to be afraid and offended, horror can address real life monsters in ways that do DORN THESIS 92 not feel confrontational. Rather, this adds to our enjoyment of horror film. According to film scholar, Robin Wood (1984), the normal, the monster, and the relationship between the two are central to the horror film. Though vampires and zombies do not lurk in our world, there are many tangible things that we are afraid of. Most horror films tap into our collective fear of death, especially the unknown after death. We are afraid of ghosts because we have no way of knowing if we are fated to haunt the earth after death. In my opinion, some of the best horror films are the ones that go beyond addressing our fear of death, and use horror as a platform to bring relevant concerns to life on the big screen.

Get Out is perhaps the best contemporary example of collective fears playing out in horror film. Racism is a tangible fear in our current society. The news is flooded with stories of black men and women being shot by police officers. One of the most nerve-wracking moments of Get Out occurs at the very end, when a police car pulls up to the Armitage driveway, and Chris (a black man) is crouched over a bleeding Rose Armitage (a white woman), attempting to strangle her. Walter is on the ground a few feet away, already dead. Rose cries out for help and Chris puts his hands in the air. Peele cuts deep into the real fears associated with racism. The audience knows that nobody would believe Chris that he did not actually kill Walter and that he attempted to kill Rose out of self-defense.

The Armitage matriarch (Catherine Keener) hypnotizes her victims, and puts them into “the sunken place,” where they have no control over their actions. They merely watch life unfold in front of them from afar (see figure 3.4). A Tweet by Peele reads, “The Sunken Place means we’re marginalized. No matter how hard we scream, DORN THESIS 93 the system silences us.” Those victims to the sunken place embody conformity and code switching. In vox.com article called “How Get Out deconstructs racism for white people,” Aja Romano writes,

…within black culture, [the act of adjusting your speech and mannerisms] is

often crucial to fitting into white-dominated professional and social

environments… Get Out frames code switching as a skill that can work

against the self-interests of black men and women because it can make social

interactions all about white people’s comfort rather than their own. Chris’s

own code switching does nothing but increase the danger he’s in.

Walter, Georgina, and Andre make us feel uneasy because they embody this fear of black people having to “whiten” their behavior to fit into certain spaces.

Figure 3.4: Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) falls into the sunken place in Get Out (2017). Image from https://www.polygon.com/2019/3/20/18274280/get-out-themes-jordan-peele-black-film

Moreover, the film is full of microaggressions. Chris goes to a garden party full of rich white people who intrusively feel his biceps and make comments to him like, “is it true… is it better?,” “black is in fashion,” and “do you feel that being

African American has more advantage or disadvantage in the modern world?” Chris is in a social nightmare because he must act cool even though he is clearly taken DORN THESIS 94 back. If he speaks up, the people around him will think he’s being unreasonably upset when they’re just trying to be nice to him. Here, these clueless remarks reveal deep racism (Romano, 2017). The Armitage plot objectifies Chris, putting his body up for auction for his “physical prowess.” Objectification is a real fear for a lot of person of color communities. Watching tangible fears play out on the big screen adds to the exhilaration of watching horror films like Get Out.

I would like to conclude this section by writing about the latest horror hit:

Jordan Peele’s Us. A normal African American family takes a trip to their vacation home in Santa Cruz, where they find a strange family dressed in red jumpsuits standing hand-in-hand in their driveway. The family does not respond when Gabe

(Winston Duke) yells at them to get off of their property. After ominously standing for an uncomfortably long period of time, one of them snaps, and they make a concerted effort to break into the house. Upon closer inspection, the intruders are doppelgängers of our protagonists’ family. Adelaide’s (Lupita Nyong’o) doppelgänger (also played by Lupita Nyong’o) reveals that they are the family’s shadows. While Adelaide got fluffy stuffed animals for Christmas, her shadow received sharp objects that pierced her skin. Whenever the Wilson family sat around the table and enjoyed a delicious meal, their shadows were forced to eat rabbits raw.

The shadows mirrored every movement of those they were “tethered” to; only their lives were not to be enjoyed. Now, the shadows came into the world, each equipped with a pair of scissors and an airtight plan for the “untethering.”

The film begins with young Adelaide (Madison Curry) wandering away from her parents at an amusement park on the Santa Cruz boardwalk. She is drawn into a DORN THESIS 95 fun house with a sign in the front that reads, “Find yourself here.” Adelaide finds herself in a dark hall of mirrors. One of her reflections has her back turned, while

Adelaide is facing her. As it turns out, this is Adelaide’s doppelgänger; they have found each other. It is not until the end that we discover that the Adelaide we had known throughout the entire film was, in reality, the shadow. When the two met, the shadow dragged young Adelaide to an underground facility beneath the fun house.

She handcuffed the real Adelaide to a bed, and entered the world. Once the shadow was in the world, she learned how to live as a normal person, and had even forgotten about her past in the underground world. The real Adelaide, on the other hand, was deprived, and seems to have forgotten about her childhood in the world above. It is not until the shadow Adelaide danced in a ballet recital and the real Adelaide had to mirror her movements in the underground that the other shadows residing in the underground discovered that Adelaide was a little bit different. They chose her as their leader for the revolt. She was the one who plotted that every shadow kills their doppelgänger.

Us taps into fears of deprivation and privilege. The two Adelaide’s met each other at a young age. Though Adelaide’s shadow did not have the skills to succeed in the real world once she entered it, her parents cared for her. They believed her silence and personality differences to be consequences of the trauma of nearly going missing.

They nurtured her, and raised her to be the loving Adelaide that we’ve known for much of the film. The Adelaide that we know is a wonderful mother who teaches her son how to groove to a beat and willingly handcuffs herself to a table for her children’s safety. On the other hand, the real Adelaide was born into a loving family. DORN THESIS 96

Yet, the deprivation of a cold facility made her vengeful and made her forget her identity. She is the one who trained all of the shadows to kill their doppelgängers with scissors, and then line up across America (Hands Across America-style) to make a rebellious statement. Us bears the question of nature vs. nurture. It appears as if deprivation is what makes people bad and privilege makes people good.

Perhaps the scariest thing about Us is how it frames us as the monster.15 On the surface, the monsters are exact replicas of us. John Carpenter once said,

“Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us.” We all have faults and we are all capable of being monsters when in the right (or wrong) circumstances. Digging deeper into the film’s perceived message, we are all culpable in institutions that give some people power, while leaving others struggling to fend for themselves. These are institutions based on racism, classism, sexism, etc. For example, when someone benefits from a loving family who can afford to pay for SAT tutoring, violin lessons, and a reputable private school, they will get accepted into a top college. This takes away a spot at that college from their “shadow,” who may be genetically disposed to have the same IQ, but does not have the same privileges. By accepting the systems in place that keep people in privilege or deprivation, we are all complicit. Though many films do not make the connection between monsters and us so explicit, it is not

15 Watching Us was the first time I had felt so personally implicated as the monster since I had watched the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The only explanation for the sudden appearance of killer birds in The Birds (1963) is because we paid to see them. If sweet Norman Bates could be a murderer in Psycho, then anyone could be a murderer. Strangers on a Train (1951) plays with our fascination with murder, making Miriam Haines (Laura Elliot) so loathsome that we want to imagine her being murdered as Bruno’s (Robert Walker) shadow eclipses hers in the Tunnel of Love. In Rear Window (1954), L.B. Jefferies (Jimmy Stewart) is chastised for being a peeping tom and watching strangers out his window for entertainment, making the parallel act of watching a movie seem shameful and voyeuristic. These films predate jump scares made with CGI, and they demonstrate the power of putting real world monsters on the big screen. DORN THESIS 97 uncommon to find small semblances of us in the monsters on the big screen. This is especially true of the horror films that Robin Wood would label as “progressive,” drawing sympathy for the monster and highlighting the faults of the normal. When horror films act as distorted mirrors of reality, we can learn a little bit more about ourselves. Speaking from personal experience, the introspection and realizations that these films spark simply feel good, and add to my enjoyment of the films.

The exhilaration of the scares is more effective with narrative, genre conventions, character identification, atmospheric horror, and suspense. Moreover, the spaces in between the scares do more than bolster the scares. We like atmospheric horror because we do not want to be at ease when we watch a horror film. We find pleasure in the unknown presences because that was in the contract that we signed when we bought tickets to see the film and be scared. Suspense puts us on the edge of our seats and makes us feel exhilarated whether or not it leads up to a scare. Lastly, horror has the capacity to address collective fears in an enjoyable way. A horror film is more than a series of scares strung together by narrative; it is an entire experience.

Scary movies can narratively transport us and make us forget about the outside world.

At the same time, some of them make us acutely aware of the monsters that await us when we exit the movie theater.

DORN THESIS 98

Chapter 4: Beyond Horror: Constructive Interactions with Other Emotions

As we continue to zoom out from individual neurons to scene analysis and genre conventions, we now enter a realm beyond the horror genre. Here, we look at two common intersections with horror: sex and comedy. From its earliest days of

Nosferatu and Cat People (1942), horror and sex have been inextricably linked.

Moreover, horror-comedy has been a lucrative sub-genre, several films astonishingly having been able to be both scary and funny at the same time. It is intuitive why we enjoy films with love and comedy. These films elicit positive emotions. It appears strange at first that horror, which elicits such aversive feelings, can mix so well with these genres. Previous chapters attempted to explain how we have come to enjoy fear in the context of horror film. The aim of this chapter is to take the mechanisms of horror enjoyment that we learned in previous chapters, and to explore what else filmmakers can do with these same mechanisms. A study on the net positive effects of intersections between these genres can further elucidate how horror can be enjoyable.

Sex and Horror

As is well known in Hollywood, “sex sells.” Some of the most famous horror films, Halloween and Friday the 13th, open with gruesome murders during sex scenes.

For the horror genre in particular, sexual appeal goes farther than surface-level marketing. Sex sometimes acts as the glue that holds horror films together. We’ve seen in many horror films from its very beginnings that sex can become inextricably linked with the monster. Count Orlak (Max Schreck) in Nosferatu was thought to represent sexual desire. In Val Lewton’s Cat People (1942), the monster only DORN THESIS 99 emerges from sexual arousal. Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) is cursed to turn into a vicious panther if she is sexually aroused. When she falls in love with and marries

Oliver Reed (Kent Smith), she must avoid consummating the marriage at all costs out of fear that, as a panther, she could hurt the one that she loves.

The link between sex and horror continues to be strong in the genre today. In

Get Out, the monster is ultimately revealed as the woman with whom Chris has been intimate enough to meet her parents. Rose Armitage lures black men and women in with her sexual appeal, only to give their bodies to the souls of her white family members. When Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis) joins the group of kids searching for

Bill Denbrough’s (Jaeden Martell) missing brother in It, the boys stare at her, wide eyed and mouths agape, as she sunbathes with them in her underwear. We are first introduced to Beverly in the girl’s bathroom when a group of girls are bullying her for having “slept with the entire school.” Later in the film, one of the boys makes the joke that the list of men Beverly has slept with is “longer than my wang.” When

Beverly hears whispering from the drain of her bathtub and gets sprayed with blood from her sink, her father cannot see the blood splattered all over the walls, the kids theorize that only virgins can see the monster. After Beverly attacks her sexually abusive father, she is abducted by Pennywise the clown (Bill Skarsgård), and can only be saved from her trance by a kiss from Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor).

It Follows (2015) presents a clear illustration of the link between sex and horror. Here, sex is the monster. Once our protagonist, Jay (Maika Monroe), has sex with her boyfriend, Hugh (Jake Weary) in his car, he knocks her out with chloroform.

Jay wakes up, strapped in a wheelchair in a parking garage. Hugh reveals that he has DORN THESIS 100 been pursued by an entity that only he could see. The entity can take on many forms, from a stranger to someone familiar, but it is always one person walking in a straight line toward him. It was passed on to him from the last person that he had sex with, and now he has passed it on to Jay. If this thing kills Jay, then it will come back after him. The only way to get rid of it is by moving faster than it can walk or by having sex with someone else. Not even shooting the being in the head can kill it. Eventually,

Jay has sex with her neighbor, Greg (Daniel Zovatto), who had been helping to protect her during this time. Since he had not seen this being since they had sex, he becomes skeptical that it really has been passed on to him. Since Jay had been part of this chain, she can still see the being. When she sees it break into Greg’s house, she follows it to try to warn Greg. Unfortunately, she is too late. The monster has taken on the form of Greg’s mother, half naken. Jay walks in on the monster mounting and humping Greg’s corpse. After a failed attempt to defeat the monster, Jay has sex with her childhood friend, Paul (Keir Gilchrist). Paul was Jay’s first kiss and was also there to protect Jay from this entity; he had a crush on her the whole time, and was upset that Jay chose to have sex with Greg to pass on the monster earlier on. The film ends with a figure following Jay and Paul taking a stroll, hands interlocked.

The monster in this film does not exist without sex. Not only does sex bring the monster onto its victims, but the monster itself is often characterized by “sexual appeal” of sorts. Jay sees the monster in the form of a half naked woman, one breast exposed, urinating onto the carpet through her tight tube skirt. At the beach, the monster appears behind Jay as a girl in short shorts and a tight tank top. Of course, one of the most graphic scenes in the film is the one in which the half naked monster DORN THESIS 101 humps Greg’s dead body. Sex acts as the glue for some more minor details in the film too. When Jay wants more information on the monster, she goes to the address that

Hugh gave her, only to find out that it was a fake address and that Hugh is not his real name. Paul finds a picture of “Hugh” in a porn magazine, which he presents to the local high school to find out “Hugh’s” real identity. When Jay and Paul sleep over for the first time since childhood, they start to bond when they reminisce over a time when they found porn magazines behind a pizza place. When we first meet Jay, she is relaxing in her pool, and finds her neighbors peeping on her. Sex, like the monster, in this film is inescapable. As in many horror films, sex does more than just add appeal to sell tickets, it drives the film.

A psychoanalytic perspective.

Though many modern-day psychologists would cringe at the term

“psychoanalysis,” I would like to highlight a prominent theory on the intersection between sex and horror by film scholar. For this, we return to Robin Wood. Freudian

Psychoanalysis has failed to be proven by medical science, since it deals with concepts such as the unconscious, which were conjured through introspection and cannot be studied with behavioral analyses or fMRI scans. Still, many ideas of psychoanalysis cannot be disproven for the same reasons. Though I would not normally endorse Freudian psychoanalysis, I do believe that Robin Wood’s ideas can elucidate the link between horror and sex in ways that neuroscience cannot. I would like to make it clear that in this section, I am not speaking as a scientist, but rather as someone who enjoys horror film. DORN THESIS 102

According to Wood, horror film is built on repression. He posits two types of repression: basic repression and surplus repression. Basic repression is “what makes possible our development from an uncoordinated animal capable of little beyond screaming and convulsions into a human being; it is bound up with the ability to accept postponement of gratification, with the development of our thought and memory processes, of our capacity for self-control, of our recognition of and consideration for other people” (Wood, 165). Surplus repression refers to cultural repression that “makes us (if it works) into monogamous, heterosexual, bourgeois, patriarchal capitalists” (Wood, 165). Wood focuses on repression of sexuality, especially repression of polygamy, homosexuality, female sexuality, and expression of sexuality at stages of life prior to marriage. That which deserves repression is characterized by “otherness.” The monster in horror film represents the pinnacle of

“the other.” “One might say that the true subject of the horror genre is the struggle for recognition of all that our civilization represses or oppresses” (Wood, 171).

According to this theory, we enjoy horror film because submerging ourselves in these narratives allows us to encounter that which we repress in a non- confrontational way. When we watch these films, we are not consciously aware that the monsters represent the things that we repress in ourselves; otherwise we would be deeply upset. Rather, we enjoy this return of the repressed on a more unconscious level. Wood writes about horror film in terms of the normal, the monster, and the relationship between the two. The most interesting horror films are not the ones where the monster simply threatens the normal, but the ones that muddle the relationship between the two by bringing light to the monsters inside of us and by DORN THESIS 103 invoking sympathy for the monster. Since sexuality is something so many of us are taught to repress for much of our lives (or something that we are to “other” in ourselves), the emergence of monsters in horror film brings with it a return of repressed sexual desires.

Here, I will take a recent film in the vampire sub-genre for example–– A Girl

Walks Home Alone at Night. If basic repression is related to postponement of gratification and self-control, vampires represent release of repression through immediate self-indulgence. They must feed on blood to survive, killing their victims.

Vampires offer an alternative to what we have been taught to repress sexuality for reasons of delayed gratification and self-control. From the beginning, vampires have been figures of sexual desire. Count Orlok of Nosferatu (1922) was the monster that disrupted the normal heterosexual couple, while seeming to have both Thomas and

Ellen under his sway.

A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night closely entangles the relationship between the monster and the normal to the point that the two often become confounded, and it does the same for the relationship between sex and horror. The girl is both monster and protector of women, as well as a symbol for female sexuality. To the girl, men are the monsters. She appears in front of small boys walking alone at night, baring her teeth, and warning them to be good boys and that she is watching them until the day they die. Throughout the film, we can tell that the girl is afraid of falling in love, reminiscent of Val Lewton’s Cat People, in which Irena is afraid of falling in love because expression of sexual desire will turn her into a monstrous cat and destroy her love. Still, the girl and Arash find love, which creates conflict with her need to DORN THESIS 104 survive on human blood. The girl brings Arash back to her room, where they listen to

“Death,” a vivacious Indie Rock song by the White Lies, under disco lights. The scene is charged with both fear and sexual tension, which act to amplify each other.

The audience is acutely aware that, though this couple is capable of loving each other, they are also capable of deeply hurting each other (a type of vulnerability parallel to our relationships in the real world, to a lesser degree). As the song approaches its climax, and the girl and Arash approach each other at a tortuously slow pace, the audience is left in a liminal space of wondering whether or not the two can trust each other when they are so capable of hurting each other. The girl leans Arash’s head back, and descends onto his throat, but then represses her desire to feed on his blood, rests her head on his chest, and they embrace.

What is accomplished through the girl and Arash’s relationship is allowing the audience to (unconsciously) contemplate our own convoluted relationships with basic repression, delayed gratification, love, trust, and fear. Sometimes it feels good for us to hurt other people, especially those who have hurt us. For the most part, we repress this urge to be civil human beings. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night lets us experience the fulfillment of hurting others through the girl, who feeds on men who menace women. Similarly, Wood would say that the film represents a return of repressed sexual desire. In this case, the girl tries to repress all sexual desires because she knows her stronger impulse to feed on and kill men. The girl remains closed off and tries to shy away from this new love because she is afraid that she will hurt the man that she loves–– a problem seen before in Val Lewton’s Cat People. According DORN THESIS 105 to Robin Wood, this space to reconcile with our repressed thoughts and sexual desires drives our enjoyment of horror film.

A psychological approach

I now return to speaking as a scientist. Here, I will focus on findings first brought to light by landmark paper “Some Evidence for Heightened Sexual Attraction

Under Conditions of High Anxiety” by Dutton & Aron in 1974. The study aimed to investigate the effect of fear on sexual attraction. To manipulate fear, Dutton & Aron surveyed men on two different bridges in Vancouver at varying heights. Men in the high anxiety group were asked to be part of the study as they stood on the Capilano

Bridge. With approximately 2,200 visitors per day (according to Wikipedia), the bridge is a popular tourist attraction in Vancouver. The bridge is rickety, made of wood with low handrails and no support between the floor of the bridge and the rapids of the Capilano River, 230 feet below (see figure 4.1). Almost everyone’s heart must be pounding on this bridge, as it sways under the weight of myriad tourists. In fact, the researchers asked several men crossing the Capilano Bridge how afraid they felt on a scale of 0 to 100, and the average response was 65. On the other hand, in the low anxiety group, men were recruited on a solid wood bridge 10 feet above the

Capilano River, with higher handrails and no ability to sway. Men on this bridge reported an average fear rating of 3 out of 100. DORN THESIS 106

Figure 4.1: The Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver, Canada. Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capilano_Suspension_Bridge_-d.jpg

The female interviewer, who was blind to the hypothesis of the study, approached men between the ages of 18 and 35 on each of these two bridges to ask them to participate on a psychology study on “the effects of exposure to scenic attractions on creative expression” (511). She then gave the participants an adaptation of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) in which men were asked to write a “brief, dramatic story based upon a picture of a young woman covering her face with one hand and reaching out with the other” (511). The picture had no obvious sexual content, so it acted to measure projection of sexual arousal. Then, the female interviewer gave the male participants her personal phone number, and told them they could call if they wanted to talk further. As a control, the researchers also used a male interviewer on each bridge to recruit male participants, with the same procedure as the female interviewer. Dutton and Aron found that men who were interviewed by a DORN THESIS 107 woman were significantly more likely to include sexual imagery in their TAT if they were on the suspension bridge than if they were on the low bridge. However, the men interviewed by another man gave similar responses on both bridges. Thus, projection of sexual arousal was related to both amount of felt fear and the presence of an attractive woman. Moreover, male participants were significantly more likely to call their interviewer if a woman interviewed them on the high suspension bridge. In that condition, 18 of the 23 participants accepted the phone number, and 9 of that group of

18 called the interviewer. In each of the other three conditions, only 1 to 2 of the participants called the experimenter after the study.

Dutton & Aron acknowledged that people who chose to cross the Capilano

Suspension Bridge could be a generally more thrill-seeking and bold population than those who crossed the low bridge, so they conducted a second experiment. This experiment largely paralleled the first, but participants in the high arousal condition were given the study on the bridge, whereas participants in the low arousal condition were recruited after they had crossed the high Capilano Suspension Bridge, and allowed 10 minutes to calm their nerves. The advantage of this study was that the participants were pulled from the same population. The second study did not have a male interviewer condition, and only compared results between high arousal and low arousal female interviewer conditions. The second study confirmed the findings of the first–– men used more sexual imagery in their TAT responses and were more likely to call the female interviewer in the high arousal condition.

What Dutton & Aron uncovered is the “spillover effect.” The current theory of emotion is called the “two factor theory of emotion.” This theory posits that our DORN THESIS 108 brain receives two inputs to identify emotion: valence and arousal. Our brain reads whether a feeling is positive or negative and whether it is high-energy or low-energy, then labels the emotion as happiness, sadness, anger, fear, etc. There is no distinct physiological characteristic for each emotion. Thus, we partially depend on context to label emotions as distinct. Anger and fear alike are negative-valence, high-arousal emotions that can cause our hearts to beat faster and our blood pressure to increase, but our cognitive appraisal of a situation allows us to determine whether the object of our emotion is a threat or something angering. We experience the spillover effect when the physiological characteristics of one emotion promote appraisal of a different emotion. In the case of Dutton and Aron’s study, the physiology associated with the high-arousal component of fear was close enough to the physiology of sexual attraction (i.e. increased heart rate) that the participants misattributed their fear as sexual attraction. Thus, men found the woman on the Capilano Suspension Bridge to be attractive, whereas they might not have found her to be as attractive if they had not been in a state of fear.

If fear can amplify sexual attraction, I posit that sexual attraction can also amplify fear by the same mechanism. Though filmmakers may not always do this intentionally, this is the genius of linking sex and horror. Think of the opening scene of Halloween. The entire opening is a long take from the point of view of young

Michael Myers. He is spying on his sister through the living room window as she makes out with her boyfriend on the couch. It feels voyeuristic. After Michael pulls a knife out of the kitchen drawer and puts the clown mask on, we see Judith in her underwear, breasts out, brushing her hair, of all activities (see figure 4.2). It is meant DORN THESIS 109 to be erotic. Through the narrow eye slits in Michael’s clown mask, there are some points when Judith is being stabbed where her breasts are the only things within the frame. Though I will acknowledge that Halloween is no longer as scary to audiences today as it was when it debuted in 1978, I believe that the hints of sexual arousal make this scene scarier than it could have been without references to sex. I attribute this to the spillover effect. Much of the audience probably feels some degree of sexual arousal, and misattributes that as greater fear when Michael murders his sister.

Figure 4.2: In the opening scene of Halloween (1978), we witness the murder of a half-naked Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson) through the eyes of young Michael Myers. His clown mask obscures part of the frame. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077651/mediaindex?ref_=tt_pv_mi_sm

In It Follows, the spillover effect makes Greg’s murder even more gruesome.

Since sex is how the monster is passed on from one person to the next, we learn to associate sex with fear. We feel afraid when Jay has sex with Greg, then with Paul.

When our protagonists first start to scope out the place in The Cabin in the Woods

(2011), Holden (Jesse Williams) begins to watch Dana (Kristen Connolly) undress through a two-way mirror. Eroticism feeds into unease. Holden and the audience DORN THESIS 110 know that we are not supposed to be seeing Dana with her shirt off. It is voyeuristic and we may feel ashamed. Some horror films are made to resemble torture porn. In

Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), widowed Aoyama Shigeharu holds a mock film audition to find his next wife. He chooses Yamazaki Asami (Eihi Shiina). In the end, we see her lay on top of him as she tortures him with needles, repeating to herself

“deeper, deeper.” Once she inserts several needles into his abdomen, she uses her body to put even more pressure on them. Again, sexual arousal fuels intense fear.

Since Shigeharu’s sexual partner is the “monster” in this film, we feel a sense of betrayal on top of horror.

Comedy and Horror

At first glance, the comedy-horror sub-genre seems like it should be a flop. It doesn’t seem possible that we could laugh at something that we are also afraid of.

Humor is a strong positive feeling, while fear is a strong negative feeling. As we saw in chapter 2, we are most easily scared when we are already in a negative mood/emotional state. Similarly, comedy is often used to distract from negative feelings, and we have seen that we are also most easily scared when we are not distracted. Yet, some films like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and The Cabin in the

Woods are miraculously able to combine comedy and horror in a way that is both truly funny and truly scary, without each detracting significantly from the other. Here,

I am going to discuss the structural and physiological overlap between comedy and horror that enable the success of films like Shaun of the Dead and The Cabin in the

Woods.

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Structural overlap between comedy and horror

Overlap does exist between comedy and humor. Humor typically involves incongruity. The formula for a typical joke is set-up, development, and then the punch line. The punch line serves to undercut built-up expectations. On the other hand, in

The Paradox of Horror, Noël Carroll posits a common structure in horror to be as follows: onset, discovery, confirmation, and confrontation16. As I have previously elucidated, expectations play a large role in our experience of horror film.

Expectations, either built within the scene or by genre conventions, can cause us to anticipate a scare or direct our attention away from an imminent scare. Horror can easily feed into comedy if a filmmaker puts us on the edge of our seats in anticipation of a scare, then undercuts it with something comical. This can even happen in horror films that were not intended to be horror-comedy films. Imagine the following sequence. Everyone is silent; the monster is near. Though we cannot yet see the monster, the camera zooms slowly on each of our protagonists’ concerned faces, eyebrows furrowed, searching intently for the first visual confirmation of the monster’s location. We hear a sudden and loud crash from outside. As our protagonist slowly moves closer to the window to see what happened, he becomes more vulnerable to attack and suspense rises. We hear a sting on the soundtrack as something falls past the window. All of this culminates in the monster’s swift arm reaching out to eradicate an unwitting raccoon. The first time I saw A Quiet Place, laughter echoed in the movie theater at the sacrifice of this poor raccoon. Though

16 This is one of a major few plot structures Carroll describes in horror film. He calls this one the “Complex Discovery” plot. DORN THESIS 112 probably not intended by the filmmakers to be funny, the incongruity of the raccoon’s death was the punch line to the build up of such a strong hunch of impending horrors.

In dedicated horror-comedy films, horror often feeds into comedy through gaps of knowledge. In horror films, we feel suspense when we know that the characters are in danger, but they do not know of their own danger. The same narrative structure, at different levels of serious concern or lightheartedness, can induce horror or comedy respectively. If we have deep empathy and concern for the characters’ safety, we will most likely feel afraid. Yet, filmmakers can generate just enough distance in our identification with the characters for us to laugh at their danger. As a whole, Cabin in the Woods is terrifying, and also effective as a comedy because the frame story efficiently guides our distance from the characters. There is a knowledge gap where we know that the horrors on screen are being constructed by

Hadley, Sitterson, and their cronies from a far away, modern and sterile-looking facility. Moreover, we are aware that the situations that the characters find themselves in are homage to the conventions of horror film since Hadley (Bradley Whitford) and

Sitterson (Richard Jenkins) can unleash any monster to deliver common horror film deaths by the press of a button. Following common tropes, the “guidelines” dictate that “the whore must die first” and the virgin must either merely suffer or be the last to die. We are more aware that we are watching a film because it alludes to its own medium, so we are more likely to remember that these people are actually safe and to find humor in their situations.

Being homage of sorts to tropes, Cabin in the Woods takes advantage of our expectations from genre convention to generate horror and comedy. First of all, we DORN THESIS 113 find tropes themselves to be funny when they are overdone because they feel artificial and tacky. We laugh uncomfortably at the characters’ lack of concern when they enter this creepy cabin in the middle of nowhere and investigate the music boxes, antique necklaces, filmstrips, and 20th century diaries in the cellar, knowing that two men in a facility far away are going to punish them for this. Their lackadaisical and oblivious way of bringing upon their own doom undercuts our expectations, which simultaneously generates concern. When we are more acutely aware of the frame story, we move away from our close identification with the protagonists, and are more likely to laugh. At other times, the filmmakers draw us in–– with zoom-ins on reaction shots, onset of menacing music, sympathy for the protagonists, long stretches of time without cutting to the frame story, etc.–– and we feel more afraid.

The first exposure to zombies in Shaun of the Dead provides a strong illustration of how manipulations of gaps of knowledge and distanced identification can drive the interaction of horror and comedy within a scene. The incongruity of the alarmingly blatant signs of the zombie apocalypse that our protagonists keep missing is humorous itself. Shaun (Simon Pegg) watches a news broadcast, and happens to change the channel anytime the newscaster seems like he is going to say something about the zombie apocalypse, but every channel he flips to coincidentally finishes the newscaster’s sentences announcing catastrophe. Shaun and Ed’s (Nick Frost) complete lack of seriousness is so far from our fear of their imminent and horrific destruction that it is funny. We laugh out of discomfort when Ed throws an acorn at the zombie in their backyard (Nicola Cunningham), knowing that this may provoke her. Eerie music begins to play as they stare at her, and realize that she is not reacting DORN THESIS 114 to anything. We are lead to believe that the onset of this music reflects a shift in their subjective experience of discovering that they are in danger. Here, horror is the set up and, “Oh my God, she is so drunk,” is the punchline. The incongruity between character and audience response is both funny and terrifying because they’re in real danger. The filmmakers continue to tag onto this joke with lines such as, “oh I think she likes you, I think she wants to cuddle” and with Ed going back into the house to grab his disposable camera to take a photo of the “couple” (see figure 4.3). The content is comedic, and the rhythm–– the fast-paced editing, the shaky camera movements, and the crescendoing eerie soundtrack–– is that of horror. Playing with the knowledge gap continues to escalate both comedy and horror. While we have enough distance from Shaun and Ed’s ignorance to laugh at them, we still are fully aligned our protagonists after so many close ups of their reactions and point-of-view shots from their perspective. Thus, we do simultaneously feel suspense, worrying that their unawareness will cause them to be bitten by the zombie, especially when Shaun is allowing her to get so close to him.

Figure 4.3: Shaun (Simon Pegg) from Shaun of the Dead (2004) poses for a photo with the “strange girl” (Nicola Cunningham) in the backyard, who seems to want a kiss. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0365748/mediaindex?page=2&ref_=ttmi_mi_sm.

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Comedy can feed into horror as well by distracting us from upcoming scares.

Though in chapter two, I concluded that we are most scared when we expect a scare, we still are scared when filmmakers direct our attention away from an imminent scare. Though not as powerful as anticipation, these types of scares have the power to manufacture a false sense of relative safety, then shock us when our safety is undermined. After Shaun and Ed defeat their first round of zombies in Shaun of the

Dead, we are lulled into lighthearted mood. After a series of jokes, they deliberate a plan to save Shaun’s mom (Penelope Wilton) and ex-girlfriend (Kate Ashfield).

Though this should be a serious discourse, the filmmakers illustrate the plan via an absurdly happy-go-lucky flash forward, where everyone is smiling and holding hands as they escape, seemingly untouched by the catastrophe happening all around them.

Despite the urgency of the matter, Shaun and Ed go through three different iterations of the plan before making a final decision for reasons as trivial as Ed’s desire to smoke. We almost forget about the ongoing apocalypse when we see nearly the same sequence of smiling faces repeated three times. A few more jokes follow, and then

Shaun uses the bathroom. At this point, we are distracted from the real danger of the situation. Then we hear a sting on the soundtrack and a shadow suddenly appears behind Shaun in the mirror. This works to scare and surprise us.

Horror and comedy both involve absurdity and crossing lines. In my Cinema of Horror class, I remember Dr. Scott Higgins saying the first time you cross a line, it’s gross, but the second time you cross a line, it’s funny. Later in the same scene I just described in Shaun of the Dead, Shaun and Ed realize that the two people in their backyard are actually zombies. After several failed attempts at defeating the zombies DORN THESIS 116

(throwing records at them like sharp Frisbees, chucking kitchenware at them, etc.),

Shaun and Ed resolve to beat them over the heads with shovels. The music goes silent, medium-close up of Shaun and Ed bearing their weapons, determination on their faces. This is received as a serious ambush at first, but once Shaun and Ed start to strike far longer than necessary. Exaggeration pushes the action to absurdity. The sound of Shaun and Ed grunting and the sight of blood spattering amplifies the humor.

Conveniently, some of the things that we find horrific are also things that we can find funny. In fact, psychologists have posited that one benefit of comedy is its ability to make danger or stress seem less threatening or serious (Pérez-Aranda et al.,

2018). In particular, disgust is often common to both comedy and horror. Think about how so many of us laughed at the mere mention of the word “poop” when we were kids. The things that repulse us have the incongruity that often generates humor. Noël

Carroll emphasized that monsters must not only be scary, but also repulsive. There is an entire subgenre of horror dedicated to gore that includes films like Hostel (2005) and the entire Saw franchise. We are afraid of pain and we are repulsed to see the things that are normally contained inside of us appear outside of us. Blood spattering, intestines spilling from side wounds, knives gauging eyeballs, and chainsaws cutting through solid bone are the staples of such films. Things that transgress our cultural categories repulse us, but also generate curiosity that keeps us from looking away

(Carroll, 1990). We find werewolves scary because they are both man and wolf.

Zombies are both living and dead. Yet, when the thing transgressing cultural categories is not threatening, it is funny. We laugh at Vines of dogs in sheep DORN THESIS 117 costumes, people doing hip-hop to The Little Einstein’s theme song, an ostrich on skis, and Vatican choirboys inhaling giant helium balloons to hit high notes. Though seemingly disparate, comedy and horror do share common structures that allow the two to interact without detracting from each other.

Shared physiology

One popular theory of humor is the tension relief theory. The incongruity of jokes creates a sense of tension, which is released by laughter. The tension built up by suspense or fear can either be released as laughter or a scream in horror-comedies.

Humor has even been found to have pain-relieving effects because laughter releases endorphins (Pérez-Aranda et al., 2018). Laughing during a horror film can alleviate the negative feelings of fear. This would predict that comedy should detract from horror, since only negative feelings can prime readiness to scare.

In fMRI studies on verbal humor, researchers have found bilateral amygdalae activation during the amusement and mirth part of humor response (Chan et al.,

2012). Though we know that the amygdala is equally involved in reward and fear, there is evidence that humor activates a fear-like response. The mirth associated with laughter activates the sympathetic nervous system, which is associated with fight-or- flight response. Similarly, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and cortisol levels (measured in urine samples) are higher when people watch comedy films than when people watch neutral nature films. In fact, adrenaline and noradrenaline levels are comparable for comedy and horror film viewing. Horror and comedy alike increase heart rates and skin conductance. Researchers suggest that it is mirth, not laughter itself that activates the sympathetic nervous system, since arousal due to amusement is more closely DORN THESIS 118 correlated with these stress reactions than amount of laughter. Some scientists believe that laughter activates fight-or-flight response because it originated in rough-and- tumble play (Martin, 2007). Though many of the body’s reactions to comedy and horror appear similar, scientists are still looking for subtle differences between the two. Nevertheless, physiology common to both horror and comedy suggests that it should not be so surprising that the two can mix so well. When our hearts are already pounding from a good joke, we are close to a state of fear, and can thus transition into that relatively easily.

The spillover effect that Dutton & Aron discovered in their landmark study has been demonstrated in intersections between fear and comedy. Both feeling giddy and afraid involve high arousal. A predominant early theory of humor was the arousal theory that suggested that humor is the dissipation of excess energy. These theorists based this on the hydraulic model of the nervous system. According to the hydraulic model, our drives manifest themselves as built-up energy, which can be resolved if released. For example, engaging in sexual activity or expressing anger can rid us of our drives for sex or aggression respectively. Neuroscientists have since disproven the hydraulic model. Some drives including sex and aggression are positive feedback loops. The more we express these actions, the more likely these drives are to return

(Martin, 2007). This is good news for comedy-horror films. Comedy is arousing, and the more we engage with arousal, the more arousal we will feel. Researchers have found that people laugh and smile more when they watch a slapstick comedy film after having been injected with epinephrine (adrenaline) than after having been DORN THESIS 119 injected with chlorpromazine (a drug that lowers arousal) or a saline solution

(Schachter & Wheeler, 1962).

In 1974, Cantor et al. did a study similar to Dutton & Aron’s study with humor. Cantor et al. wanted to study the effects of arousal and valence on enjoyment of humor. They randomly assigned participants one of four articles. The four articles were a newspaper article about “the strong comeback of the beaver population in

Kentucky” (positive valence/low arousal), an excerpt from Harold Robbins’ The

Betsy (1972) with graphic descriptions of sex (positive valence/high arousal), a newspaper article about “the adverse effects that snowmobiles are having on the ecology and serenity of the American countryside during winter” (negative valence/low arousal), and a graphic description of the “brutal torture and mutilation of a young boy” (negative valence/high arousal). Cantor et al. provided an excerpt of some of the “less extreme” portions of the negative valence/high arousal condition that reads as follows:

Stevens was tied, suspended from his thumbs from the overhanging lamppost,

his feet only inches from the ground, struggling to reach the earth… Brady

approached the trembling Stevens and, without undue ceremony, ripped off

the boy’s pants, leaving his genitals exposed for all to see… From his boot

Brady withdrew a long knife… ‘Kiss it goodbye!’ said Brady… Stevens was

castrated, and, to add to the horror of that dreadful hour, he was compelled to

eat his own genitals. (p. 816)

Many of us could imagine that reading such a graphic passage would upset us so strongly that we would be unable to find anything funny for at least an hour or so. DORN THESIS 120

Still, the researchers instructed the participants to rate a series of jokes and cartoons immediately after having read one of the four articles. They found that participants thought that the jokes and cartoons were funnier after having read either the article on sex or on the brutal torture described above. Though it may be tempting to explain this increased humor appreciation through discomfort-relief, the participants in the positive valence/high arousal condition rated their article with by far the highest levels of pleasantness and relatively low levels of disturbance. Cantor et al. explain these findings with the “excitation-transfer theory.” For the purposes of this work, the spillover effect, the misattribution of arousal, and the excitation-transfer theory are all synonymous for the phenomenon that allows us to transition easily between high arousal feelings like fear, humor, and sexual arousal.

Despite the fact that sex and comedy hold positive valence and horror holds negative valence, they are able to mix well. Sexual arousal and horror can co-exist because both are states of high arousal (arousal in this case referring to general physiological energy). Dutton & Aron discovered this in 1974. Less is known about comedy, and subsequently less is known about how it can mix with horror. Though it is widely accepted that humor is characterized by incongruity, little is known about how factors such as rhythm, distance, irony, etc. contribute to humor. What these intersections with sex and comedy show us is that fear is not always experienced as a negative emotion, but that it can also feed into positive emotions since its physiology is not as distinct from positive feelings as we may commonly believe.

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Conclusions: Fear Reconsidered

We have now studied the horror film from systems of neurons to scenes, films, and genres. To re-cap, we have seen that there is anatomical overlap between our fear system and our reward system. For example, the same part of the basolateral amygdala that responds to threat also responds to appetitive stimuli. Moreover, fear has the capacity to increase activity in our reward system. Since the NAc is dense in

CRF receptors, it shows increased activation under stress. Our reward system releases dopamine when we are allowed to confront our fears in a safe context. This is related to the concept of exposure therapy, which activates patients’ reward systems when they gradually confront their fears. Some part of our brain knows that we are not actually the characters in the scary movies because we do not fully pretend to take the place of the characters in the films; rather we try to mentally recreate aspects of their situations. Because the reward of horror outweighs the psychological costs of experiencing fear, we enter a contract with horror filmmakers where we pay to be as scared as possible.

We get a thrill out of jump scares and “the figure in the background.” Jump scares often get a bad rep from critics because they’re termed as “cheap.” After all, jump scares require no cognitive work; they are merely a brainstem reflex also found in decerebrated cats. Still, we want jump scares, and we are most scared when filmmakers build a state of fear and make us keep our eyes peeled in anticipation of the scares. This is based on the attention theories and the emotion theories of startle reflex. While jump scares rely on loud auditory stimuli to startle us, the “figure in the background” relies on menacing visuals to instill fear in us. Since we have no DORN THESIS 122 brainstem visual startle response, we are most horrified by the “figure in the background” when we cognitively appraise the being to be a menace.

Of course, most of the horror film involves higher cognitive processes than the jump scare. Atmospheric horror and suspense can generate mood, and make us feel tense, on-edge, afraid, creeped out, or off. This makes up a majority of the run time. They can build negative valence feelings and guide our expectations to heighten the effectiveness of scares. They do more than just support more effective jump scares. Since we pay to enter a contract with the filmmaker where it is mutually understood that we want to be as scared as possible, we like atmospheric horror and suspense. A horror film would not be as fun if the scary parts only occurred in short spurts of jump scares. We want the feeling of unsettled presence. Suspense induces narrative transportation, and we forget about the world outside of the movie theater.

Likewise, it is important that horror is depicted as feature film within the conventions of a genre. Narrative allows us to build relationships with the characters. Within a genre, we can form expectations, which guide our experience of the film.

Finally, horror is not always alone. From its beginnings, sex has always played an underlying role in driving horror film. We saw a psychoanalytic theory that horror represents the return of the repressed, which parallels a surfacing of repressed sexual desire (especially sexual desires that society tells us to repress like homosexuality). In a landmark psychology study by Dutton & Aron (1974), we learned that we could misattribute the high arousal of fear as that of sexual arousal, and vice versa. Then we studied the comedy-horror subgenre, and sought to elucidate how the two genres can successfully come together, though it appears as if the two DORN THESIS 123 should conflict. Horror and comedy have similar structures of incongruity and rhythms of tension and release. Moreover, horror and comedy both elicit similar physiological responses–– activation of the fight-or-flight response. Similar to the crossover between sex and horror, there is a spillover effect between comedy and fear. This serves to teach us that our physiological reactions to positive and negative emotions are not as different as we would otherwise expect.

The purpose of this thesis was to create a new perspective on horror film through conversation between psychology, neuroscience, and film studies. This type of interdisciplinary work can make for more effective horror films. We are most easily startled by jump scares when we are already afraid and paying close attention to the imminent startle stimulus and when we are in a state of negative valence (but arousal does not matter). Filmmakers can capitalize on this and use atmospheric horror to more strongly guide our attention and to make us feel negative emotions.

Directors could experiment with priming jump scares with different negative valence emotions from sadness to anger, since arousal has no effect on our ability to startle.

Though arousal cannot magnify the intensity of startle response, arousal from different sources can be misattributed. We know that sexual arousal can be read as fear. Future filmmakers can play with different ways to trick us into thinking we’re more afraid than we actually are if they induce high arousal by things like anger, surprise, and excitement. Though I did not focus on this in my thesis, having a clear understanding of precisely what we are afraid of can make for more efficient scares, like those in Hitchcock’s films. DORN THESIS 124

A study of horror film can also shine new light on the current literature in psychology and neuroscience. Here, I am going to focus on this work’s implications for mental health care, since fear and reward are entangled in so many psychopathologies from anxiety to addiction disorders. I do not claim that the findings in my work will illuminate a unique panacea for these illnesses; I am merely looking at psychopathology from the perspective of horror film studies. For most people, fear is the enemy. Generalized Anxiety Disorder can sometimes manifest itself in a fear of appearing afraid or anxious. On a more minor level, when a friend tells us they’re stressed, we don’t normally think of this as a good thing. Here, we saw that fear and positive emotions do not need to be mutually exclusive. In fact, a common approach to anxiety disorders in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is to encourage the patient to be able to sit with their anxiety, and still enjoy their activities. For example, a therapist might ask a patient if they still enjoy a meal with their friends if they’re feeling anxious. One of the most viewed TED Talks of all time is called “How to make stress your friend.” In this talk, psychologist, Kelly

McGonigal, proposes that we stop making stress the enemy, and rather take advantage of stress to maximize our success. Our fight-or-flight response evolved to heighten our awareness and strengthen our physiological capacities in times of danger. McGonigal says that if we keep our stress under control (rather than letting it control us), we can capitalize on the boost that it gives us to face challenges more effectively. Stress can help us talk to a crush, get our work done faster, or play better in an important sports game. These are not completely new approaches to mental health, but horror film reminds us of something that is easy to forget, especially when DORN THESIS 125 we are struggling with stress or fear–– that experiencing fear in safe contexts can create positive outcomes. I am not suggesting that scary movies should be a new therapy for fear-related disorders, but I believe that what we have learned from our enjoyment of horror film contains ideas valuable to other contexts of fear.

Though we know substantially more about the human brain than we did a decade ago, or even than we did in September when I first started writing this thesis, there are a lot of gaps in our understanding of psychology and neuroscience. We are limited in the ways that we can study the brain. To truly answer many of the questions this work poses, we would need to be able to probe individual neurons in the fear and reward systems, and study how neurons in different systems excite or inhibit each other when we watch horror films. However, there are many major problems with this approach. First of all, it would be unethical to cut healthy peoples’ heads open, and record neuronal activity. Second of all, we probably would not be able to get a read on how people naturally view horror films, since having an open skull could be fear-inducing on its own. The emerging field of neurocinematics is trying to understand what happens in the brain when people watch films, primarily through fMRI. However, fMRI is not sufficient to answer all of our questions. fMRI is an indirect technique of reading neuronal activity, since it measures oxygen consumption in the brain, under the assumption that neurons that are firing are using energy. Though we have developed high quality fMRI machines, fMRI is not sufficient to tell us how individual neurons excite or inhibit each other. We saw that the basolateral amygdala has a salt-and-pepper organization of neurons that respond to either threats or rewards. In an fMRI scan, it would be more difficult to DORN THESIS 126 differentiate between these neurons in the basolateral amygdala and to where they each project. With these constraints in studies of human neuroscience, researchers often resort to studying animal models so that they can use more accurate and invasive techniques. Yet, we cannot ask a rat to watch a horror film.

Given these limitations, I propose several questions that future scholars can pursue to gain a better understanding of the paradox of horror. Neurocinematics is a very new approach, and most current studies in the field aim to understand the basics of how our brains respond to film. Once the field establishes a more solid foundation, there are endless questions that can be pursued. Researchers can tweak a nearly infinite set of variables in film to see how the brain responds. For example, one future study could use fMRI to study higher cortical activity and startle response amplitude to jump scares with varying degrees of filmic cues pointing the audience’s attention toward the imminent scare. Another future study could investigate the effectiveness of jump scares at various the durations, from swift to drawn out. Other studies could vary something as minute as volume of the auditory startle stimulus.

With regard to the fear are reward systems, we are far from a full understanding of either or how they interact with each other. I pull heavily from the ideas outlined in Josselyn & Franklin’s review in Cell called “Fear extinction requires reward” to suggest that dopamine neurons in the reward system is involved in fear extinction. This article presented novel findings and was published in October of

2018–– after I began writing this thesis. Neuroscientists have far to go before we can fully understand how the reward system interacts with the fear system during safe confrontation of fear. Future studies should aim to further uncover the connections DORN THESIS 127 between dopamine neurons in the reward system, the amygdala, and the prefrontal cortex to find where they all intersect.

Though our understanding of this intersection of film, psychology, and neuroscience is in a rudimentary stage, I hope that this work shines new light on our experience of the horror film. From The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) to Halloween

(1978) and Halloween (2018), we have invested billions of dollars in the making and consumption of horror film. Unlike some other genres like the western, horror has lasted nearly as long as film itself and has spanned the globe. Not everyone likes scary movies, but it is a large-scale phenomenon in our culture. Our enjoyment of horror highlights something that appears irrational on the surface, paying for something that makes us feel negative emotions. My goal is that this work can be a jumping point for new ideas on the horror film and the sometimes-counterintuitive ways that people work. I hope that if we take away one idea from this thesis it is this: though we fear fear itself like a monster in a horror film, the monster is not always so bad. It might even be wise at times to make friends with the monster.

DORN THESIS 128

Appendix: Relevant Neuroanatomy

(Definitions adapted from Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain, 4th ed., by Mark F.

Bear, Barry W. Connors, & Michael A. Paradiso).

Figure A.1: Directions in Neuroanatomy. Ventral is in line with the stomach of a four-legged animal, while dorsal is in line with the back of a four-legged animal. Anterior and rostral refer to the front. Posterior and Caudal refer to the rear. Medial is closer to the center and lateral is closer to the sides. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/365636063475985581/

Action Potential: A brief spike in the neuron’s membrane voltage caused by voltage- gated ion channels rapidly opening and closing along the axon in one direction away from the soma and toward the postsynaptic cell to allow positively charged ions into the cell.

Adrenocorticotropic Hormone (ACTH): A hormone released by the pituitary gland in response to stress. This is the second step of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal

(HPA) axis.

Amygdala: Found in the anterior temporal lobe, the amygdala is an almond-shaped nucleus known to mediate emotion. In particular, the amygdala plays an important role in the appraisal of appetitive vs. aversive stimuli. DORN THESIS 129

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): Region of the cerebral cortex that is known to regulate higher cognitive functions such as decision-making and emotions, and has been implicated in pathophysiology of mood disorders.

Axon: A neurite that conducts action potentials away from the soma toward the postsynaptic cell.

Basolateral Amygdala (BLA): One of several nuclei in the amygdala. The basolateral amygdala is known to have different neurons that respond to either rewarding or aversive stimuli. The lateral nuclei of the amygdala receive most of the amygdala’s sensory input, and send output to the central amygdala.

Bed Nucleus of the Stria Terminalis (BNST): A nucleus in the stria terminalis. The stria terminalis is a major axon projection from the amygdala. The BNST has been implicated in both reward and avoidance responses, and facilitates communication between the amygdala and the reward system, among other structures.

Brainstem: The diencephalon, midbrain, pons, and medulla. The brain stem regulates basic functions such as breathing, heart rate, sleeping, and eating.

Central Amygdala (CeA): One of several nuclei in the amygdala. The central amygdala serves as the major output of the amygdala.

Corticotropin-Releasing Factor (CRF): A hormone released by the hypothalamus, which signals the release of adrenocorticotropic hormone by the pituitary gland. This is the first step in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis that activates in times of stress.

Cortisol: A steroid hormone released by the adrenal cortex in the kidneys, known as the “stress hormone.” DORN THESIS 130

Dendrite: A neurite that receives neurotransmitters from presynaptic neurons.

Dopamine: A catecholamine neurotransmitter implicated in the brain’s reward system.

Grey Matter: A densely concentrated area of neuronal cell bodies (soma) that appears grey in a freshly dissected brain.

Hippocampus: Part of the medial temporal lobe known to play an important role in the encoding of memories.

Hypothalamic-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) Axis: Part of the stress response. A system of neurons and endocrine cells that release cortisol.

Hypothalamus: Part of the diencephalon known to regulate homeostasis and drives

(i.e. hunger, thirst, sex, and stress). In the stress response, it releases corticotropin releasing factor to signal the pituitary gland to release adrenocorticotropic hormone.

Limbic System: A group of structures known to be involved in emotion.

Neurotransmitter: A chemical that provides communication between neurons. It is released by the presynaptic cell and is received by the postsynaptic cell. A neurotransmitter can either excite or inhibit the postsynaptic cell.

Nucleus Accumbens (NAc): A critical component of the brain’s reward system that receives dopaminergic projections from the ventral tegmental area (VTA). The nucleus accumbens also mediates hedonic value of stimuli. The nucleus accumbens can be divided into the nucleus accumbens core (NAcC) and the nucleus accumbens shell (NAcS).

Orbitofrontal Cortex (OFC): A part of the prefrontal cortex often linked with pleasure. Regions of the OFC, such as the medial regions seem to correlate with DORN THESIS 131 subjective pleasure ratings. This area also seems to play a role in the monitoring and predicting of reward values.

Soma: The cell body of a neuron, containing the nucleus.

Substantia Nigra: A group of cells in the midbrain. Some dopamine neurons originate in the substantia nigra that project to the ventral striatum.

Synapse: The small gap between presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons where neurotransmitters from the presynaptic cell binds to receptors on the postsynaptic cell.

Thalamus: The dorsal part of the diencephalon, known to relay sensory signals to the cortex.

Ventral Striatum: For the purposes of this work, the ventral striatum and the nucleus accumbens are names for the same structure that can be used interchangeably. The ventral striatum is composed of the nucleus accumbens and the olfactory tubercle, and is known to play an important role in the reward system.

Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA): Part of the reward system known to be the origin of a majority of the brain’s dopamine neurons.

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex (vmPFC): Part of the prefrontal cortex implicated in functions such as decision making, risk processing, and self control.

White Matter: Concentrated areas of axons that appear white in freshly dissected brains.

DORN THESIS 132

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Park, N. (Producer), & Wright, E. (Director). (2004). Shaun of the Dead [Motion

picture]. United States: Universal Pictures & Rogue Pictures.

Satoshi, F., Akemi, S. (Producers), & Takashi, M. (Director). (1999). Audition

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[Motion picture]. United States: Lionsgate.