In Anticipation of Silent Hill....

...comes to you lucky people a thoroughly researched, throrougly thought about blogging experience. Which I find to be highly interesting and hope you will too. I'm getting back to my psychology roots and I love it.

So without further ado, I will first discuss why horror movies scare us and then my hypothesis for why certain specific visual stimuli scares us.

For a little background, Mike and I have spent an oddly significant amount of our conversational time together talking about things that scare us. Earlier tonight he was telling me all about the video game "Silent Hill" which sounds very creepy and is now about to be released onto the big screen. We've also realized that most of the same things scare us, and I saw on IMDB that similar things are scary to lots of people. But I'll get into that later.

First....why do we find horror films so scary? Why did we refuse to look under our beds at night as children or tear open a closed shower curtain with anxiety? It actually is a lot deeper than just a fear of the unknown or a fear of Psycho.

See there are two fear response systems in our brains. One, the hippocampus, is responsible for our controlled, conscious reaction to frightening stimuli, say why we can watch horror films and keep from running out the door thinking that someone is after us. The other is the amygdala. This great piece of equipment is responsible for many aspects of human emotion, and it's all very interesting, but in particular for this blog entry it is responsible for autonomic fear response, or the "fight or flight" response that we've inherited by our ancestors.

In case you still don't know what I mean, I will give you an example: tonight Mike was telling me that wheelchairs squeakily moving by themselves were a bit scary and I told him not to tell me that, since I was going to be at work with wheelchairs all over the place. So, I went upstairs to get food earlier tonight, came back down, and saw a wheelchair. Immediately in my peripheral vision I saw a person standing, unmoving. In that split second I felt a rush of adrenaline, my heart started beating faster, and I had to swallow. It was only a janitor waiting for the elevator, but since we had discussed scary wheelchairs earlier I had that response. That was my amygdala at work.

So over time, this becomes a conditioned response. If something is substantial enough to overtake your limbic system or if you experience the same autonomic reaction a few times to something, it will eventually stick.

Another example, I used to drive from Geneseo to Rochester about 4 times a week. Invariably, I would see a policecar on the side of the road from time to time. I was most of the time speeding and would have that response when I saw the car, thinking I would get a ticket. Well after awhile if I saw any car on the side of the road it would elicit the same response as the cop car. I was conditioned to respond from the previous experiences and my heart would race if any car was sitting there.

So, therefore, and especially as a child because of the imprinting of basically...everything, if we saw something especially out of the ordinary it would stick with us, and give us an automatic lasting response. This was good in the past, but now with the trickery of Hollywood, this response gets initiated when we don't need it to be.

Even more interesting, humans are apparently "perceptually bound" meaning we respond most strongly to visual images. It makes sense, everyone I talk to would rather be deaf than blind. So movie images, especially ones that are meant to be scary, will have more of an impact than any other media.

Now, the article I read states that certain visual images such as animal attacks or physical deformities automatically arouse fear. This was quoted from a source from 1897 (!!!) which means that humans as a species must suffer fear from most of the same visual stimuli. I myself am horrified of physical deformities. I was so scared by the sister with the back problem in Pet Semetary that I wouldn't go to sleep that night.

I think another form of physical deformity is the strange movements in films we see these days. For example, the jerky movements like in House on Haunted Hill by the psychiatrist or fast head shaking like in that film and in Jacob's Ladder. Odd things on video camera is another popular thing to be afraid of these days. I've read a number of IMDB threads relating to the scariness of those movements. Why strange movements? Why that more than blood and gore? (At least for me, Slither was nothing compared to The Ring.)

I believe that in our fight or flight response, at one time we had to...fight, or take flight. When we knew what was coming at us it was easy to do one or another. But what do we make of something jerkily moving or something that isn't in our direct line of vision? It scares us because we can't have a normal reaction to it. You don't know what it's going to do because it is not behaving as it should be. I think of the little prarie dog-type animal that dances in a zig-zag motion to confuse its predators. It's adaptive to confuse by movement, and it's maladaptive to be on the other end of this confusion.

That ending paragraph is my hypothesis on the subject, everything else was documented in research already. I know this was long and intellectually....demanding, but I would appreciate any thoughts, comments, experiences with scariness, etc.

Thank you and goodnight.