DECEMBER 26th, 1973. All across the US, hordes of people brave the cold, dark winter to queue up outside movie theatres. Many wish they hadn鈥檛.
鈥淚鈥檓 not going back in there,鈥� said one woman after leaving halfway through. 鈥淚 just had to come out, I couldn鈥檛 take any more,鈥� said another. . Cinemas started stocking smelling salts and barf bags. 鈥淚鈥檝e never seen anything like it in the 24 years I鈥檝e been working in movie theatres,鈥� said Robert Honahan, .
The cause of their distress was The Exorcist, a movie about a 12-year-old girl possessed by an evil spirit. You might think that the scare stories would have driven people away, but all they did was add fuel to the fire. The film was a sensation, raking in $66 million in its first year. Adjusted for inflation, it is one of the highest-grossing films of all time.
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Anyone who has seen The Exorcist 鈥� or The Ring, or The Blair Witch Project, or A Nightmare on Elm Street, or any one of thousands of similar movies 鈥� can identify with the audiences of 1973. Torn between watching and not watching, we peer between our fingers, waiting for the next stomach-churning wave of fear, knowing it can only get worse. And when it鈥檚 all over, we breathe a sigh of relief, laugh, and wonder why we did it.
So why do we do it? To Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University in Denmark, the question is his life鈥檚 work. 鈥淲e have a strange ambivalent fascination for the terrible,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 have made it my career to understand why.鈥�
When he was 14, Clasen鈥檚 friends persuaded him to go with them to see a Stephen King film, Sleepwalkers. He is still living with his decision. 鈥淚t was terrifying,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 had to walk out.鈥� He lost face and had to prove himself, so he read The Stand and The Shining and some other Stephen King novels, and gradually learned to enjoy the fear.
Our fascination with horror fiction is probably as old as our love of storytelling 鈥� which is to say, as old as human nature. The Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest surviving works of literature, features a monster called Humbaba, created by the gods to be 鈥渁 terror to human beings鈥�. The demon in The Exorcist is also a Babylonian creation, Pazuzu.
Long before Humbaba and Pazuzu were terrorising the ancients, people surely sat around campfires listening to stories of demons and monsters, casting nervous glances into the gloom.
Today darkness is still a time to close the curtains, turn off the lights and wilfully scare ourselves stupid. About a hundred horror, thriller and suspense movies are released every year, collectively grossing over $2 billion.
On the menu
Why are millions of people willing to spend money to be scared? In academic circles, the appeal of horror has usually been explained in Freudian terms 鈥� as symbolic manifestations of repressed desires and anxieties. Clasen thinks that鈥檚 rubbish. 鈥淚f we want to understand it, we have to take account of biological programming 鈥� evolved features of human cognitive architecture,鈥� he says. That means peering into the deep past.
Our early ancestors lived in an environment replete with danger. Today, the savannahs of East Africa are patrolled by six species of large carnivorous mammal. Around 2.5 million years ago, , including sabre-toothed cats and giant hyenas.
There is little doubt that our ancestors were on the menu 鈥� or that in many cases, a grisly demise would take place in the dead of night. In 1970, the 3.5-million-year-old skull of an Australopithecus child was discovered in Swartkrans cave in South Africa; it had a pair of circular puncture wounds matching the bite of a leopard. Fossil human bones have also been found with tooth and claw marks from other nocturnal or crepuscular creatures, such as lions, hyenas, crocodiles and even, in one case, an eagle.
We don鈥檛 know how many of our ancestors were attacked or killed by predators, but we do know that modern hunter-gatherers continue to suffer high levels of predation. Among adult males of the Ach茅 tribe, who live in the jungles of Paraguay, almost 1 in 10 are killed by jaguars, usually at night.
This long evolutionary horror story has left deep scars in human cognition. Evolution has endowed us with a threat-detection system that is acutely sensitive to the mortal dangers our ancestors faced: snakes, spiders and, especially, large carnivores. Once triggered, the system initiates a sequence of physiological and emotional responses that prepare the body for escape or combat. The pupils dilate, the heart pounds, blood rushes to the muscles and blood sugar levels rise. We experience this response as fear.
鈥淥ur long evolutionary horror story has left deep scars in human cognition鈥�
The system is on a hair trigger, as the evolutionary cost of a false alarm is far lower than the cost of failing to respond. And so the merest hint of anything resembling a threat jolts it into action, even in modern city dwellers 鈥� a hosepipe in the grass, a centipede in the bath, the rustling of vegetation in the dark, and, of course, fictional monsters. 鈥淗orror stories send us back in time to the days when the setting sun signified danger and real monsters could be gathering just outside the circle of light cast by the fire,鈥� says Clasen.
Our imagination takes us beyond realistic monsters to include zombies, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. But the underlying fear they evoke is the same: the mortal terror of predation. Whatever it is, it鈥檚 watching us from invisible shadows, inscrutable, waiting to strike according to a schedule beyond our comprehension. We won鈥檛 know what hit us until it is far too late.
What none of this explains is why people enjoy horror 鈥� or at least endure it. 鈥淭hat is the question,鈥� says Clasen.
One idea, put forward in the 1980s, is that horror films provide cover for horny teenagers to get close to one another in the dark. But that can鈥檛 be the whole story.
One of the best pointers to a better answer comes from a woman known as SM, who is famously unable to feel fear due to brain damage (麻豆传媒, 9 March, p 36). A couple of years ago, the researchers working on her case showed her clips from a series of horror movies. She showed no sign of fear, but .
That suggests that horror films are not merely scary: beneath the fear lurk other, more rewarding, emotions. That also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, says Clasen. Although all humans have a general-purpose threat-detection system, our ancestors would have had to learn which specific things to fear in their environment. The legacy of this is that it is easier for city dwellers to acquire phobias of dogs, spiders and snakes than of genuine threats such as traffic and saturated fats. Those who found that learning process rewarding would be more likely to survive and pass on their genes. As a result, we also have an evolved tendency to perversely enjoy exercising our innate fear of predatory beasts, especially in an environment that we know is safe. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 the pull; it鈥檚 human nature,鈥� says Clasen.
Stephen King, the master of horror, pondered this long ago in Danse Macabre, his analysis of the genre. He even took a stab at an explanation: 鈥淲e make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.鈥�
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淔right night鈥�
