A second question is why horror films and games seem to be increasingly converging on the creepy/uncanny/mysterious cluster of things, rather than on the overtly physically threatening cluster—assuming this is a real trend. Some hypotheses about the second question:
A: Horror games and movies are increasingly optimizing for dread instead of terror these days, maybe because it’s novel—pure terror feels overdone and out-of-fashion. Or because dread just lends itself to a more fun multi-hour viewing/playing experience, because it’s more of a ‘slow burn’. Or something else.
B: Horror games aren’t optimizing for dread to the exclusion of terror; rather, they’ve discovered that dread is a better way to maximize terror.
Why would B be true?
One just-so story you could tell is that humans have multiple responses to possible dangers, ranging from ‘do some Machiavellian scheming to undermine a political rival’ to ‘avoid eating that weird-smelling food’ to ‘be cautious near that precipice’ to ‘attack’ to ‘flee’. Different emotions correspond to different priors on ‘what reaction is likeliest to be warranted here?‘, and different movie genres optimize for different sets of emotions. And optimizing for a particular emotion usually involves steering clear of things that prime a person to experience a different emotion—people want a ‘purer’ experience.
So one possibility is: big muscular agents, lion-like agents, etc. are likelier to be dangerous (in reality) than a decrepit corpse or a creepy child or a mysterious frail woman; but the correct response to hulking masculine agents is much more mixed between ‘fight / confront’ and ‘run away / avoid’, whereas the correct response to situations that evoke disgust, anxiety, uncertainty, and dread is a lot more skewed toward ‘run away / avoid’. And an excess of jumpscare-ish, heart-pounding terror does tend to incline people more toward running away than toward fighting back, so it might be that both terror and dread are better optimized in tandem, while ‘fight back’ partly competes with terror.
On this view, ‘ratchet up the intensity of danger’ matters less for fear intensity than ‘eliminate likely responses to the danger other than being extra-alert or fleeing’.
… Maybe because movie/game-makers these days just find it really easy to max out our danger-intensity detectors regardless? Pretty much everything in horror movies is pretty deadly relative to the kind of thing you’d regularly encounter in the ancestral environment, and group sizes in horror contexts tend to be smaller than ancestral group sizes.
People who want to enjoy the emotions corresponding purely to the ‘fight’ response might be likelier to watch things like action movies. And indeed, action movies don’t make much use of jumpscares or terror (though they do like tension and adrenaline-pumping intensity).
Or perhaps there’s something more general going on, like:
Hypothesis C: Dread increases ‘general arousal / sensitivity to environmental stimuli’, and then terror can piggy-back off of that and get bigger scares.
Perhaps emotions like ‘disgust’ and ‘uncertainty’ also have this property, hence why horror movies often combine dread, disgust, and uncertainty with conventional terror. In contrast, hypothesis B seems to suggest that we should expect disgust and terror to mostly show up in disjoint sets of movies/games, because the correct response to ‘disease-ish things’ and the correct response to ‘physical attackers’ is very different.
A second question is why horror films and games seem to be increasingly converging on the creepy/uncanny/mysterious cluster of things, rather than on the overtly physically threatening cluster—assuming this is a real trend. Some hypotheses about the second question:
A: Horror games and movies are increasingly optimizing for dread instead of terror these days, maybe because it’s novel—pure terror feels overdone and out-of-fashion. Or because dread just lends itself to a more fun multi-hour viewing/playing experience, because it’s more of a ‘slow burn’. Or something else.
B: Horror games aren’t optimizing for dread to the exclusion of terror; rather, they’ve discovered that dread is a better way to maximize terror.
Why would B be true?
One just-so story you could tell is that humans have multiple responses to possible dangers, ranging from ‘do some Machiavellian scheming to undermine a political rival’ to ‘avoid eating that weird-smelling food’ to ‘be cautious near that precipice’ to ‘attack’ to ‘flee’. Different emotions correspond to different priors on ‘what reaction is likeliest to be warranted here?‘, and different movie genres optimize for different sets of emotions. And optimizing for a particular emotion usually involves steering clear of things that prime a person to experience a different emotion—people want a ‘purer’ experience.
So one possibility is: big muscular agents, lion-like agents, etc. are likelier to be dangerous (in reality) than a decrepit corpse or a creepy child or a mysterious frail woman; but the correct response to hulking masculine agents is much more mixed between ‘fight / confront’ and ‘run away / avoid’, whereas the correct response to situations that evoke disgust, anxiety, uncertainty, and dread is a lot more skewed toward ‘run away / avoid’. And an excess of jumpscare-ish, heart-pounding terror does tend to incline people more toward running away than toward fighting back, so it might be that both terror and dread are better optimized in tandem, while ‘fight back’ partly competes with terror.
On this view, ‘ratchet up the intensity of danger’ matters less for fear intensity than ‘eliminate likely responses to the danger other than being extra-alert or fleeing’.
… Maybe because movie/game-makers these days just find it really easy to max out our danger-intensity detectors regardless? Pretty much everything in horror movies is pretty deadly relative to the kind of thing you’d regularly encounter in the ancestral environment, and group sizes in horror contexts tend to be smaller than ancestral group sizes.
People who want to enjoy the emotions corresponding purely to the ‘fight’ response might be likelier to watch things like action movies. And indeed, action movies don’t make much use of jumpscares or terror (though they do like tension and adrenaline-pumping intensity).
Or perhaps there’s something more general going on, like:
Hypothesis C: Dread increases ‘general arousal / sensitivity to environmental stimuli’, and then terror can piggy-back off of that and get bigger scares.
Perhaps emotions like ‘disgust’ and ‘uncertainty’ also have this property, hence why horror movies often combine dread, disgust, and uncertainty with conventional terror. In contrast, hypothesis B seems to suggest that we should expect disgust and terror to mostly show up in disjoint sets of movies/games, because the correct response to ‘disease-ish things’ and the correct response to ‘physical attackers’ is very different.