Horror Psychology | Missing the Mark

I am currently neck-deep into my thesis on the psychology of horror and getting ready to start my doctoral program in Fall, hence the lack of posts of late. I try to keep tabs on the latest stuff coming out about the psychology of horror, which is not a lot, but I find myself ever disappointed by it. There are several things that seem to miss the mark of what horror does. Now I don’t know how many of the researchers are avid horror fans, and I seriously doubt that most of them consume as much horror in a year as I do in a week. However there seems to be a lack of critical thought with most of the current research, so I thought I would take the time to outline what is missing, as I feel that most of the current horror fans, myself included , feel alienated and even offended by what is inferred by some of this research. I will foot note my citation at the end of this for those that are interested.

I know I have ridden this pony since day one of this blog, but it is an important question, What is Horror?  I think it is one of the most important questions that needs to be answered. So important in fact my thesis, and very likely my dissertation are and will be spent answering this question. The reason this question is so important is that nearly all the research that is out there just assumes that there is a common understanding of what horror is and skip onto other things. Their reasoning is usually circular and goes something like “horror is what is depicted in horror film/stories/books/etc.” Slashers, thrillers, ghost stories, torture porn, demonic, and even occasionally sci-fi genre pieces are all lumped together as being the same things. Really? In none of the psychology of horror research that I have reviewed have researchers even bothered to define horror in their work.¹ Until this is defined we have a big problem. Most of the these studies are looking at why do people like horror films, and what makes horror fans tick, they don’t even bother to explore the emotion itself. They implicitly equate horror to various things such as, thrill/pleasure seeking, the ability to live out social roles (often called the cuddle theory of horror). Still other studies look at horror fans as lacking in empathy because of some particular physiological responses rate to violence or some other supposed mental or emotional deficit. These particular theories are often used to all but state that horror fans are closet sociopaths who get off on watching others pain, sex, (insert any other of human vice or suffering here), and while I am sure there are people out there, that does not describe me or any of the myriad of horror fans that I know. The research leaves an important question unasked: Why did you use horror and not some other genre. There are plenty of other genres that display wanton destruction, lust, and violence, why did you choose horror to investigate your questions of empathy, anxiety, psychopathy, etc? In the mountain of articles that I have read they never answer that. These authors do not seem to know what horror is or even have much experience with it,  at least they given no written indication of it anyway. For example, take a look at this article, The Lure of Horror, the author talks about why Stephen King’s novel It is frightening. The author states “…Perhaps clowns (e.g. as in Stephen King’s 1986 novel It) have the capacity to provoke fear because their make-up conceals their true facial emotions, thus thwarting our instinctual desire to read other people’s minds through their faces(it’s notable that many other horror baddies conceal their faces with masks)”. GIVE ME A BREAK! Anyone who has read the novel knows it has nothing to do with children’s proclivity toward coulrophobia. It rarely even appears as the Clown in the novel. And this is not just a one off, it happens multiple times in this article alone.  For another example you get explanations like the one provided by Marvin Zuckerman who is giving a discussion of stimuli habituation to media violence and thrill seeking, all under the banner of The Psychology of Horror Films, and yet not once has is it explained why horror is the target genre or address the kind of horror that I find the scariest, the quiet horror that never uses the violence and cheap thrills that is often stereotyped as horror.  Let me be clear it is not that I have a problem with definitions of horror including any of the aspects found in the above research papers, rather it is the assumptions made about what horror is without defining it as so. Psych research 101 is to define your constructs and give justification for your construct.

So what is horror then? Well my definition is ever evolving but I still think Lovecraft said it best, Fear of the Unknown. However I am not just talking about fear of what you can not see in the dark, although that is a part. It is the unknown that occurs when your most basic premises are violated and your ontological footing is crumbling beneath you; what you have always used to make meaning is life doesn’t work anymore. I am not saying I have hit on the universal definition of horror, nor that my definition wont change over time, but at least it is a position. I hope to raise the standard of work in horror psychology so that horror fans can find the thoughtful emotional-contemplation on the human condition and the strangeness and horror that surround us everyday in my research, rather than being seen as aberration of society and leaving them left horror struck. As horror fans or non-horror fans how do you feel about the way people think about your feelings of the genre? What do you think needs to spoken up about horror to those outside of it? Any other thoughts?

¹Tamborini, R., Stiff, J., & Heidel, C. (1990). Reacting to graphic horror: A model of empathy and emotional behavior. Communication Research, 17(5), 616.
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.
Houran, J., Kumar, V. K., Thalbourne, M. A., & Lavertue, N. E. (2002). Haunted by somatic tendencies: Spirit infestation as psychogenic illness. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 5(2), 119-133.

Jarrett, C. (2011). The lure of horror. Psychologist, 24(11), 812–815.

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

Types of Horror | Horror for Stephen King

As I have been writing this blog I have been trying flesh out a kind of taxonomy of horror. In my Internet roving I ran across this quote of Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s book about writing, where he outlines, rather loosely, his own taxonomy of the horror genre.

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…”
― Stephen King

He uses different words, but I think King’s ideas are similar to mine. Meaning is essential, and the part that scares me the most is the idea of everything being exactly the same and yet not. On the surface it is no different, yet the meaning of everything has been radically altered. This is similar to Freud’s Uncanny. That which is familiar yet is not.

Have you ever experienced a moment of Terror as Stephen King describes it?

Horror Psychology | To Live in Fear

One of my favorite movies of all time is the Shawshank Redemption, although not strictly a horror movie, it was written by Stephen King. At the end of the film there is a quote that I think should be considered on this blog. Redd says it as he is struggling to deal with the existential question of his life, outside of the prison that he had become so accustomed to.

Terrible thing, to live in fear. Brooks Hatlen knew it. Knew it

all too well. All I want is to be back where things make sense. Where I won’t have to be afraid all the time.

This particular quote has struck me in a new way. For the last little while I have been reading an insane amount of material about the psychology of horror as I prepare for my thesis. The question that seems to be asked by researchers every where is Why Horror? Inevitably it nearly always comes down to another question. What is wrong with people who enjoy the horror genre? It is assumed that those of us who like horror have something wrong with us, because why else would we subject oursevles to that kind of stimuli.

What do you think? Why do you think, for those of us that love the horror genre, we choose, in one sense of the phrase, to live in fear?

Horror Psychology | Altered Reality

One of the most interesting qualities that I love about horror is its ability to alter reality as we see it.

Image by GollyGForce

In horror stories, movies, and in the odd paranormal experience, we have experiences that can change the very way in which we view the world around us. We are forced to reevaluate what we consider real.

Now not all horror stories do this, some are more closely related to science fiction and fantasy and use horror elements to tell the authors story, examples of this would be Ridley Scott’s Alien or Peter Yate’s Krull. However I feel the stories that leave us the most frightened are the ones that take reality and twist it just a little bit; the ones that leave you wondering if it was really made up at all. There are some non-horror authors who are great  at this, Michael Crichton is a master of this kind of reality altering story telling, where science meets science fiction in an almost seamless way. In horror we have a myriad of examples and authors, Stephen King, Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft, and many more. Dark Tower junkies, like me, can probably all tell you when they had a Tower moment; when reality and the Tower blur in mind-bending and sometimes frightening ways.

It is this blend of our reality with the imaginary that make a horror story come to life. Freud, in his one venture into the realm of horror fiction, The Uncanny, talks about what makes something uncanny or horrifiying. He suggests that when we feel something as being horrifying it is because it is something we repressed that is being brought to life in front of us. It is both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The thing titillates our minds, because we think we recognize it, but part of our mind knows that we don’t want to recognize it, because it could be dangerous to our mental well being if we do, hence the repression. According to Freud,  these repressed ideas or thoughts are usually primal fears of death, physical mutilation and castration. In essence the way we view the world around us is altered, that which was repressed is brought forward to be dealt with in a dramatic way. In many ways this is exactly what psychotherapy was designed to do. This theory certainly does not describe everything about horror, and many have poked some holes in this theory with some well thought out arguments, however I feel that it does describe some horror events that leave us with an altered reality.

Over the next few weeks I will discuss some of the horror struck moments that I have had with various works of horror that have left me feeling like my reality was altered in some way.

Questions for you:

Have you ever had a moment when a horror story has shifted the way you view the world around you? What was it?

Do you agree or disagree with Freud’s explanation of horror and the Uncanny? Why?

Horror Short Stories | The Boogeyman

The Boogeyman is a short story by Stephen King, one of my favorite authors, and can be found in his horror short story collection, Night Shift. I read this story late last night and it really freaked me out.

This story is of particular interest because it takes place in an psychological setting with the main characters being the client and and an analyst who he is seeing for the first time. The story opens on Lester Billings, a hyper-masculine chauvinistic protagonist, talking to a therapist saying, ”I came to you because I want to tell my story…I can’t go to a priest because I’m not a Catholic. I can’t go to a lawyer because I haven’t done anything to consult a lawyer about. All I did was kill my kids. One at a time. Killed them all.” We come to find out that Lester did not actually murder his children, but he knows who the murderer is and the truth of it is much more frightening than infanticide.

The Boogeyman
Image By buddawiggi

Lesters children have all died at very young ages(2-3 yrs old), all deemed as accidental, and/or crib death (old vernacular for SIDS). But Lester’s children were haunted by something that lives in the closet. The Boogeyman. It comes for them when the child is alone in their own room, they cry out and plead with their parents, but Lester wont hear it, and wont let his wife go help because he doesnt want his children to become “sissies”, “Spoiled”, and other hyper-masculine, Eisenhowerian Era notions of how to make children “independent.” When they find the first child dead Lester noticed something odd and says ‘The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack. But I knew I left it shut, see.’   Each time the child tries to tell their father what is happening saying ‘Boogeyman, Daddy’. ‘Craws’ (claws). Even though neither parent has taught the child the word Boogeyman. After the events surrounding the death of the second child Lester is convinced there is something in the closet.  A third child is born to the family,and the family moves. The boogeyman doesnt come for some time, but it does come. At first Lester tries to protect his child by keeping him in the same room. But It knows that Lester knows and starts to play mindgames with him:

You’d wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you’d say, “It’s only the clock.” But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you’d close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it.
‘And always you’d be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat.’

Lester, afraid for his own skin,moves the child into his own room knowing it ‘would go for him, see. Because he was weaker.’ Needless to say the Boogyman comes and in the most gut wrenching part of the story, before the monster comes and finishes its work the child cries out “The boogeyman, Daddy. . . boogeyman.wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy.”‘  In the end Lester’s karma comes full circle, when the analyst is not who Lester thought he was.

This is an interesting horror story. The horror psychology in it is fascinating.The children are learning the word Boogeyman from somewhere, and since the parents aren’t telling it to them, that leaves only the monster to have given it to them. Why?

Lester is a protagonist that leaves a lot to be desired, and is not very likable, we feel both sorrow for his loss and loathing for his cowardice. Why didn’t he do something?

What do you think about these two questions?

I have two very young children, and I have often been awoken in the middle of the night with cries of fear from my two year old boy, and sometimes, with a hand pointed to the window, or a dark corner of the room, that word is on his lips: “Monster”. It never ceases to send chills down my spine.

I think what scares us the most about the boogeyman is the truth that come with it. We are all afraid of the dark. It’s True. We spend our whole lives convincing ourselves that there is nothing there, nothing to be afraid of. The truth is there is plenty of things out there in the dark to be afraid of. The truth is, the dark holds all of the unknown, all at once. Lovecraft himself said it best, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

I have never been comfortable with closets in the dark. My wife still thinks it’s funny that I shut all the closet doors at night. My biggest fear is that I will wake up in the middle of the night and find one open.Not much. Just a crack.