[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud, just for fun, without having done any scholarship on the topic at all.]
It seems like a lot of horror games/movies are converging on things like ‘old people’, ‘diseased-looking people’, ‘psychologically ill people’, ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘dolls’, etc. as particularly scary.
Why would that be, from an evolutionary perspective? If horror is about fear, and fear is about protecting the fearful from threats, why would weird / uncanny / out-of-evolutionary-distribution threats have a bigger impact than e.g. ‘lots of human warriors coming to attack you’ or ‘a big predator-looking thing stalking you’, which are closer to the biggest things you’d want to worry about in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness? Why are shambling, decrepit things more of a horror staple than big bulky things with claws?
(I mean, both are popular, so maybe this isn’t a real phenomenon. I at least subjectively feel as though those uncanny things are scarier than super-lions or super-snakes.)
Maybe we should distinguish between two clusters of fear-ish emotions:
Terror. This is closer to the fight-or-flight response of ‘act quick because you’re in imminent danger’. It’s a panicky ‘go go go go go!!’ type of feeling, like when a jumpscare happens or when you’re running from a monster in a game.
Dread. This is more like feeling freaked out or creeped out, and it can occur alongside terror, or it can occur separately. It seems to be triggered less by ‘imminent danger’ than by ambiguous warning signs of danger.
So, a first question is why uncanny, mysterious, ‘unnatural’ phenomena often cause the most dread, even though they thereby become less similar to phenomena that actually posed the largest dangers to us ancestrally. (E.g., big hulking people with giant spears or snakes/dragons or werewolves correlate more with ‘things dangerous to our ancestors’ than decrepit zombies. Sure, creepiness maybe requires that the threat be ‘ambiguous’, but then why isn’t an ambiguous shadow of a maybe-snake or maybe-hulking-monster creepier than an obviously-frail/sickly monster?)
Plausibly part of the answer is that more mysterious, inexplicable phenomena are harder to control, and dread is the brain’s way of saying something like ‘this situation looks hard to control in a way that makes me want to avoid situations like this’.
Terror-inspiring things like jumpscares have relatively simple triggers corresponding to a relatively simple response—usually fleeing. Dread-inspiring things like ‘the local wildlife has gotten eerily quiet’ have subtler and more context-sensitive triggers corresponding to responses like ‘don’t necessarily rush into any hasty action, but do pay extra close attention to your environment, and if you can do something to get away from the stimuli that are giving you these unpleasant uneasy feelings, maybe prioritize doing that’.
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.
[Epistemic status: Thinking out loud, just for fun, without having done any scholarship on the topic at all.]
It seems like a lot of horror games/movies are converging on things like ‘old people’, ‘diseased-looking people’, ‘psychologically ill people’, ‘women’, ‘children’, ‘dolls’, etc. as particularly scary.
Why would that be, from an evolutionary perspective? If horror is about fear, and fear is about protecting the fearful from threats, why would weird / uncanny / out-of-evolutionary-distribution threats have a bigger impact than e.g. ‘lots of human warriors coming to attack you’ or ‘a big predator-looking thing stalking you’, which are closer to the biggest things you’d want to worry about in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness? Why are shambling, decrepit things more of a horror staple than big bulky things with claws?
(I mean, both are popular, so maybe this isn’t a real phenomenon. I at least subjectively feel as though those uncanny things are scarier than super-lions or super-snakes.)
Maybe we should distinguish between two clusters of fear-ish emotions:
Terror. This is closer to the fight-or-flight response of ‘act quick because you’re in imminent danger’. It’s a panicky ‘go go go go go!!’ type of feeling, like when a jumpscare happens or when you’re running from a monster in a game.
Dread. This is more like feeling freaked out or creeped out, and it can occur alongside terror, or it can occur separately. It seems to be triggered less by ‘imminent danger’ than by ambiguous warning signs of danger.
So, a first question is why uncanny, mysterious, ‘unnatural’ phenomena often cause the most dread, even though they thereby become less similar to phenomena that actually posed the largest dangers to us ancestrally. (E.g., big hulking people with giant spears or snakes/dragons or werewolves correlate more with ‘things dangerous to our ancestors’ than decrepit zombies. Sure, creepiness maybe requires that the threat be ‘ambiguous’, but then why isn’t an ambiguous shadow of a maybe-snake or maybe-hulking-monster creepier than an obviously-frail/sickly monster?)
Plausibly part of the answer is that more mysterious, inexplicable phenomena are harder to control, and dread is the brain’s way of saying something like ‘this situation looks hard to control in a way that makes me want to avoid situations like this’.
Terror-inspiring things like jumpscares have relatively simple triggers corresponding to a relatively simple response—usually fleeing. Dread-inspiring things like ‘the local wildlife has gotten eerily quiet’ have subtler and more context-sensitive triggers corresponding to responses like ‘don’t necessarily rush into any hasty action, but do pay extra close attention to your environment, and if you can do something to get away from the stimuli that are giving you these unpleasant uneasy feelings, maybe prioritize doing that’.
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.