Continuing our exploration of the realms of horror we move from the biological into the psychological elements of the horror experience.
photo by JustCallMe_♥Bethy♥_
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.
Horror Struck 