Horror Psychology | Realms of Horror (Part 5: The Synthesis)

This is the conclusion of my Realms of Horror series. Here I will talk about how all the Realms can be brought together to better understand horror psychology as a holistic experience of all three realms.

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The synthesis

Noel Carroll is an aesthetic philosopher that has sought to undertake the development of a philosophy of horror and in his work hits on a blending of the three aforementioned elements of the horror experience. Key to Carroll’s argument is the use of the concept of disgust. About this emotion in relation to the experience of horror Carroll (1987) said the following:

The character’s affective reaction to the monstrous in horror stories is not merely a matter of fear, i.e., of being frightened by something that threatens danger. Rather, threat is compounded by revulsion, nausea, and disgust. The monster is so unwholesome that its very touch causes shudders. And this corresponds as well with the tendency in horror novels and stories to describe monsters in terms of, and associate them with, filth, decay, deterioration, slime, and so on (p.55)

In this quote we start to see how Carroll relates horror to the biological, however he does not leave it there. Carroll (1987) expounds further on disgust, explaining that this disgust largely comes from the idea of impurity, and citing Mary Douglas’s cultural study of impurity, we detect impurity when we believe something is a category error (Carroll, 1987, p. 55).  He says “we initially speculate that an object or being is impure if it is categorically interstitial, categorically contradictory, categorically incomplete, or formless” (Carroll, 1987, p. 55). Here we see the combination of the mental and cultural along with the previous mentioned biology. The mental and biological aspect blend is represented in the notion of mental categorization of the monsters and their ambiguity creating disgust; this is not all the different from the categorization techniques mentioned in the work of Pezzulo that was presented earlier.

In particular Pezzulo (2013) argues that because we are embodied, when something presents itself as ambiguous, such as the category errors monsters present to us (or being in the dark), we will follow our internal bodily feelings rather than sensory input. The mind treats internal feelings as more reliable, or at least more concrete, than the sensory ambiguity in front of us. The social zeitgeist gets weaved into the theory through the idea of what is considered impure. Carroll (1987), citing Douglas’ work, talks about how examples of impurity are culturally bound, such as the kosher laws laid down in the Old Testament determined what food was considered unclean because of the categorization error. I would add that this maps even more onto the model of a three part horror experience when one looks at how some of this changed over time. The taboo/disgust/morality of eating non-kosher things changed for the early Christian church (which was largely Jewish at the time) with Peter’s vision as recorded in the New Testament, in which he is commanded to eat unclean things, and even among some branches of the modern Judaism. What is horrific can change over time, in bodily sense and mental state.

To conclude I have demonstrated that there is evidence to point to the fact that the emotional experience of horror is a holistic mind-body experience. But what comes along with this understanding? The answer to that question lies in exploring the whole of the emotional experience of horror fans. This paper has focused on the ideas of horror as they pertain to horror in the artistic sense, however I believe that there are ramification for dealing with real world horror. The key to this idea is integration. It appears to me, but remains to be proven experimentally, that horror fans are better able to synthesize their experiences better than most. They view the horror experience in its fullest context, and recognize it for what it is, not a deviant social experience, or isolating a panic response in the experience of the body, or sequestering the anxiety all in the mind. They are opened up to a larger world of experience.

What remains to be seen is if this ability of horror fans is something they have developed or something that was innate. If it is, as I intuit through my own experience as a horror fan, it is a developed trait that can be grown by exposure to artistic horror then it is something can be cultivated in others through exposure. If the theory pans out then there are definite therapeutic aspects that might be developed by exploring the full holistic experience of horror, in treating things like chronic anxiety, panic disorders, or any other disorder in which strong emotions of fear, anxiety, or dread get isolated into one realm or another.

 

Well that concludes this series of posts. Any thoughts or comments?

References

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 222–229.

Crane, J. L. (1994). Terror and everyday life. Thousand Oaks: Sage publications.

Dubuc, B. (2002). The evolutionary layers of the human brain. Retrieved from http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/d/d_05/d_05_cr/d_05_cr_her/d_05_cr_her.html

Hoffner, C. A., & Levine, K. J. (2005). Enjoyment of Mediated Fright and Violence: A Meta-Analysis. Media Psychology, 7(2), 207–237.

Lovecraft, H. P. (2011). H.P. Lovecraft Complete Fiction. Barnes & Noble.

Maddrey, J. (Producer), & Monument, A. (Director). (2009). Nightmares in red, white and blue: The evolution of American horror film. [DVD]. USA: Lux Digital Pictures.

Morgan, J. (1998). Toward an Organic Theory of the Gothic: Conceptualizing Horror. Journal of Popular Culture, 32(3), 59.

Mundorf, N., Weaver, J., & Zillmann, D. (1989). Effects of gender roles and self perceptions on affective reactions to horror films. Sex Roles, 20, 655-673.

Pezzulo, G. (2013). Why do you fear the bogeyman? An embodied predictive coding model of perceptual inference. Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience, Dec, not paginated.

Straube, T., Preissler, S., Lipka, J., Hewig, J., Mentzel, H.-J., & Miltner, W. H. R. (2010). Neural representation of anxiety and personality during exposure to anxiety-provoking and neutral scenes from scary movies. Human Brain Mapping, 31(1), 36–47.

Tamborini, R., Stiff, J., & Heidel, C. (1990). Reacting to graphic horror: A model of empathy and emotional behavior. Communication Research, 17(5), 616.

Zillmann, D., Weaver, J. B., Mundorf, N., & Aust, C. F. (1986). Effects of an opposite-gender companion’s affect to horror on distress, delight, and attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(3), 586–594.

Horror Psychology| Realms of Horror (Part 4: The Social)

In this fourth installment about the realms of horror we will look at the social aspects of the horror experience

photo by Elena Gatti

 

Horror in the Social

The third realm of the horror experience that I will talk about in this paper is horror as it is experienced in the social realm. There are many aspects of the social realm that affect the experience of horror, far too many to discuss them all here(for further treatment on horror in the social I would refer the reader to studies like Clasen,2012; Zillmann, Weaver, Mundorf, & Aust,1986; and Mundorf, Weaver, & Zillmann, 1989, for a good primer). We react as social beings to a horror experience, and here I will show an exemplar of how the social zeitgeist affects what kinds of things are considered horrific to members of a society at large.

Like many of the monsters that make up its stories, horror has had many faces over time. It started with the gothic novels and weird tales of horror’s early days, then moved into the iconographic B horror movies made famous by Universal Studios; from there it was on to giant, irradiated, this-that-and-the-other that brought us through the 1950’s. The 60’s and 70’s brought us Hitchcock, Jaws, the advent of Stephen King with Carrie and the subsequent film, and the Exorcist. Then the game changed. The 80’s brought with it the Slasher sub-genre, in the forms of Halloween, Nightmare on Elm St. and Friday the 13^th. Horror became “excessive”, and with this shift “older forms of horrific imagery and storytelling [had] vanished” (Crane, 1994). Gone are the days when Karloff’s iconic Frankenstein’s monster or giant puppet ants could scare audiences. Horror aficionados seemed to have developed a taste for blood and gore, and wanted more of it, and 30 years later this thirst has not been slaked.

The inevitable question is, Why? Why do horror audiences seek to experience something that in all rights should be unpleasant? Critics of the genre were quick to assume the worst; condemning horror audiences “along these lines, either you identify with the slasher—you’d like to have a razor sharp, foot-long machete in your hand as well—or you identify with the worthless victim whose spectacular dismemberment becomes the death you too merit” (Crane, 1994, p.3). This argument essentially boils down to that there is a mental deficiency of one kind or another in horror fans, and has been taken up by many researchers as the quintessential answer (cf. Hoffner & Levine, 2005; Straube et. al, 2010; Tamborini, Stiff and Heidel, 1990; Tudor, 1997). All of these researchers have utilized an operational definition of horror based on it violence alone. This seems fair enough given the trend in horror film and literature, but it is never explained why other genres that depict violence seem to get a social stamp of approval and horror does not.

One researcher in particular, Jonathan Crane, looks into this very question, and attempts to explore the need for the brinkmanship portrayal of violence in the genre. In regards to the social acceptance of horror violence, Crane (1994) said “It is not violence per se that render the contemporary horror film a distasteful read. It is the nihilistic content in which the violence occurs that makes the horror film irredeemable. Violence in the contemporary shocker is never redemptive, revelatory, logical, or climactic (it does not resolve conflicts)” (p.4).  While this answer explains the social stigma of horror and it unacceptability it still does not answer why people would want to experience this.  Crane’s argument is that horror is an answer to our zeitgeist. The nihilism espoused in horror violence is a response to the way the future is presented to us. The future is presented as the “end times…heralded by a diverse set of calamitous phenomena” and that “the future belongs to nothing and no one. The only possible future is one lived by resigned individuals whose sole link to one another is the sure knowledge that we are all equally damned.” (Crane, 1994, p.6)  He makes the argument that when the possibility of being shot while at your local school or fast-food restaurant are all too real, or that the very food you eat is going to kill you; then it is no wonder why films of yester-year are not scary any more. With this in mind Crane (1994) sums up his argument by stating:

“Only the contemporary horror film comes close to the terror of everyday life. The horrific constructs available do not offer any possibilities beyond that of being able to confront terror. The engagement with such images is neither cathartic nor reassuring; it is simply demonstrates that one’s sight if nothing else, still clearly registers the world. Watching a horror film is a reality check” (emphasis in original p. 8).

While I do not share the nihilistic view point of Crane, he is however an exemplar of the kind of thinking towards horror that again invokes Capra’s (2014) argument for an understanding of the system. Horror does not occur in a vacuum, and to understand the horror experience we need to understand the environment it came from. Just as the giant irradiated ants from Them have ceased to be frightening to us today,but they were scary in the 50’s, because the social zeitgeist is not the same, shows how social context is important to the horror experience.

Thus far it has been demonstrated that there are distinct elements to the horror experience, however each of the above areas and their respective examples try to explain horror as contained in one area, it is my position however, that the horror experience is in reality a synthesis of these three. This synthesis of the mind, body, and social realms not only brings the horror experience into an emotional focus, but this synthesis can bring a greater level of understanding about oneself and the world around them. Interestingly this synthesis in relation to horror has been argued for, for some time, but has not really been explored by psychologists, rather it has been by literature critics and philosophers. The next section will outline an exemplar of these ideas of synthesis.

Horror Psychology | Realms of Horror (Part 3: The Psychological)

Continuing our exploration of the realms of horror we move from the biological into the psychological elements of the horror experience.

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Horror of the Mind

Famous horror director John Carpenter placed horror stories into two camps, the division turning on a central axis of the location of evil. There is the horror out there, in the dark, the Other; that is where evil lies. The other camp is that evil is in here, in our hearts, we have me the enemy and he is us (Maddrey & Monument, 2009). Carpenter’s ideas map well on to the ideas presented so far in this series. The “horror out there” is arguably the horror that is found in horror of the body. It is something outside of us that seeks to violate the body. The “horror in here” tells a very different story. What if it is our very minds that are monstrous or Other to us? What happens when your mind works against you? In horror this is often manifest in the psychotic murderers, example such as Jack in The Shining, Norman in Psycho, or the many instantiations of the eponymous Jekyll and Hyde are typical. (Sound familiar? see Horror of Personality)So how does this reflect in the experience of horror? Well it could be understood in a very similar way to the internal struggles of the aforementioned characters, with the struggle taking place in our own minds to what we believe is true about the world around us.

In a recent article, Pezzulo (2013) put forward an interesting idea about why we are more afraid of the presence of a “bogeyman” when it is dark and usually after some kind of scary movie or other experience that brought us into a nervous state. Pezzulo argues that it has to do with the way our mind makes decisions about what to believe based on perceptual inferences. He argues, in particular, this has to do with the fact that we are embodied, which has some ramification for the argument of this series of posts, but will not be taken up until part 5, but in regards to the mental aspect it involves the confusion of old stimuli with new stimuli, and thus creating a faulty belief. In other words our minds are working against us.

Pezzulo (2013) gives the following hypothetical situation to illustrate his point. Imagine you are in bed and you hear a strange sound at your window. For simplicity’s sake there are two possible causes that enter your mind; either it’s the wind or it’s a thief/murder/etc. The more logical answer is probably that the wind is blowing the branches against the window. This seems straight forward, and under normal circumstance is going to be the scenario that your mind is going to believe, but  the author further complicates the scenario further to show his point. Imagine that before bed you watched a horror movie about a shark, or had minor car accident. This will leave the body in a heightened or aroused state. So when you hear the sound at the window your mind now has more pieces of evidence to weigh. The sound is now paired with the heightened bodily arousal and the mind erroneously pairs this arousal with the sound. This pairing creates the belief and experienced reality of a bogeyman a much greater possibility. To explain why this happens Pezzulo(2013) states:

Why use your high heart rate as evidence for the wind-versus-thief competition, given that it is due to the car accident or the horror movie? Although this specific example might seem straightforward, even in this simple case, establishing the right causal structure of a given problem is hard. One reason is that the interoceptive flow can have a long duration, and body states tend to change more slowly than sensory events. Evidence has indicated that subjective emotional responses tend to persist longer than the emotional stimulation periods (Garrett & Maddock, 2001). Similarly, a horror movie can generate an arousal state that persists after the end of the movie, and this makes more complex the attribution of a body state that you sense now to an event (the horror movie) that ended hours before. In general, estimating the right causal relations between hypotheses and sources of evidence is far from trivial; it can be considered a central problem of cognitive development and cognitive processing (Tenenbaum, Kemp, Griffiths, & Goodman, 2011).(p.5)

The most unsettling implication that Pezzulo puts forward for horror psychology is what happens when the all one has to go on is the emotional evidence as the only qualifier for something to exist in our minds. The bogey man in particular is a cross-cultural phenomenon whose single marker of presence in all cultures is the sense of terror that it creates, and nearly everyone has been exposed to the idea. So when a child (or adult) suddenly finds themselves terrified and there are no other stimuli, like sounds or shadows that could be ascribed to other things like the wind, only the emotion, the mind is left with Bogey Man as the only viable option. This is why checking in the closet and under the bed really don’t settle the fear of the child, as the emotional fear is still there and has no knowable external cause. In other words if there is nothing under the bed or in the closet and I am still feeling this dread then the only reason is that he is still here. For all intents and purposes of the child’s psychological reality the bogey man is real.

Pezzulo (2013) defends this theory with the use of Baysian analysis, which is beyond the scope of this post to explain and would refer the reader to the original source for a more in depth treatment. From this we can now draw the line back to the overall experience of horror. From the personal story I shared at the beginning we can see how I was affected by this very phenomenon described above. There was nothing fundamentally scary about my cat jumping off my TV it had happened dozens of times before, under normal circumstance I would not have given it a second thought. But, because of the emotional state the movie had left me in I was emotionally primed to read a more fantastic scenario into the event than the actual physical events justified.