I’ve read a good number of horror novels, mostly modern classics like Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, The Exorcist, and The Haunting of Hill House. They are all frightening works of fiction, but I haven’t lost much sleep over them. It’s different with horror films. They really freak me out. But I like much of what they have to offer, so I’ll come up with any number of excuses to get my wife to watch them with me. That way I won’t have to stick it out alone.
At least I’m not alone in feeling like this. Most people find horror films more frightening than horror literature. This is presumably because horror films can audiovisually represent cues to danger, such as needly fangs, rotting flesh, and loud noises—and humans have evolved to be sensitive to such cues (Clasen, 2017). By contrast, horror literature has to rely on the reader’s readiness and ability to picture the monster and imagine what it sounds like. To be sure, some readers’ imaginations are plenty scary, but even the words of a great horror novel don’t literally seem to be jumping out at you, whereas the cinematic horror monster often does. For this reason, I don’t know of anyone who can imagine themselves into a startle. (Of course, the reader’s imagination might potentiate a startle, making you jump at shadows, but that’s different.)
Figure 1. Horror presents powerfully aversive stimuli that we often can’t help but react to. I find this shot of the demon-possessed Regan from The Exorcist quite aversive—so aversive that I waited to put it into the Word document until I was done writing. I didn’t want to have to look at it while finishing and editing this piece.
Horror films and literature are different beasts. Even so, film scholars (e.g., Neill, 1996; see also Tan, 1995) have influentially argued both media instill the same basic kind of fear: character-directed fear. In The Exorcist, when Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) searches her attic to find the source of the flitting and scratching noises that she keeps hearing from up there, both the reader of the novel and the viewer of the film adaptation are afraid for her. They don’t need to be afraid for themselves since they are not in the fiction, except perhaps in the metaphorical sense of being absorbed in it, and they are certainly not physically present in the attic alongside MacNeil. Only she is in danger, so it is only her for whom we fear. And so it’s supposed to be with all horror films. As Smuts (2014, p. 16) asserts, “It would be the height of irrationality to fear for oneself when watching a horror movie.”
This seemingly logical argument has been questioned by Julian Hanich (2014), who has argued that horror films may in fact quite frequently make viewers fear for themselves. I agree, and believe that this is one important reason why horror films are often scarier than horror literature. In my own case, when I find that a horror film is getting to be too much, it’s typically because it keeps battering me with well-timed jump scares and horrific imagery that lock me in a state of nerve-racked tenseness. This fear doesn’t seem tightly connected to the fictional characters’ well-being. It feels more like I’m simply watching and hearing things that I find inherently distressful.
Here is a thought experiment that should help make the point. Recall the scene of MacNeil searching through the attic in the film adaptation of The Exorcist. Now, imagine that she hadn’t actually gone up there herself, but had only made it to the top of the pull-down ladder before thinking better of it and heading down again. If the camera had then simply gone on to pan around the dark attic, is it then plausible that you, as a viewer of this imagined alternative scene, might still feel something like the tenseness you actually felt when MacNeil was up there? If it seems plausible, then that’s probably not because you’d be feeling fear for or with MacNeil since she would not be in any immediate danger. Instead, it might be because you’d be feeling tense about a potentially upcoming jump scare—the sudden intrusion into the frame and soundscape of whatever terrible creature was hiding in the attic. In this case, you’d be afraid for yourself—not that you might be attacked by the creature, of course, but that you might be about to see and hear something horrible. (This explains why audiences commonly close their eyes and hold their ears, but do not run away or attempt to intervene, in response to especially horrific film scenes. These are perfectly adequate coping measures when the threat is primarily audiovisual.)
Figure 2. Chris MacNeil searches the demon-haunted attic in The Exorcist.
Also indicating that cinematic fear isn’t necessarily for a fictional character, you could imagine any number of horrific killings of sympathetic characters in horror films that might also be frightening if the victim were a deeply immoral and wholly unrelatable character. In such scenes, it doesn’t seem right to say that whatever fear is experienced by the audience would be fear for, or even with, the victim. What we feel in such cases is self-directed fear, or horror—the horror of seeing and hearing horrific things. No doubt such self-directed fear is often mixed with character-directed fear, which may make it different to separate them in practice. But I think the conceptual distinction is clear enough.
Hanich (2014) is chiefly concerned with cinematic dread, which he identifies as an underappreciated form of self-directed, film-induced fear.
The paradigm case of dread presents a vulnerable character slowly and quietly entering a dark, forsaken place potentially harboring a threat. While the character might be informed about the threat or not (and hence behave either terrified or ignorant), it is highly probable that he or she will confront it anytime soon—even if the outcome is still uncertain […] Since we know from our encounter with previous horror films and thrillers (but also other genres and modes) how these scenes usually end, we are afraid of our potential confrontation with a shocking moment of startle and/or a horrified response to a horrific representation of disproportional immorality and disturbing brutality. In dread we therefore anticipate certain fearful affective outcomes of the scene we are scared of. In other words, “the . . . thing that we have to fear is fear itself” (to use Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous quote). (29-30)
Importantly, Hanich argues that cinematic dread is a so-called meta-emotion: an emotion about an emotion (see Jäger & Bartsch, 2006). Though meta-emotions are a special type of emotion, they are not exactly rare; we often feel a certain way about the way that we feel. For example, a married woman might feel sad that she no longer loves her husband. In other words, she feels sad that her feelings toward her husband have changed. Or, in my own case, I might feel frustrated that I’m so easily scared by horror films that I can’t watch them alone.
Likewise, on Hanich’s account, the anticipatory fear we feel when MacNeil is searching the attic is an emotion about another emotion. Specifically, it is a fear for the unpleasantness of what might be about to happen—the jump scare, or the murder, or whatever. In this way, the anticipatory dread targets (or, in the usual jargon, “takes as its intentional object”) the viewer’s own emotions. Cinematic dread can in this sense be said to be especially self-directed. In cinematic dread, not only is the concern for the well-being of the self, but the object of fear is also part of the self—it is the self’s subjective experience.
I agree with Hanich that horror films in such scenes make us afraid for ourselves. However, I think he gets the mechanism wrong, although I have sometimes expressed a similar view in conversation: “What I’m really afraid of when watching horror films are those unpleasant startles that I know I’m about to feel. I sense that they’re coming, and I dreadfully anticipate them.” People don’t seem puzzled when I tell them this, and quite a few have even said that they share my feelings. So, perhaps we can fear our own psychological reactions to horror, which would be a paradigm case of fearing for ourselves.
I am now convinced that this is a muddle. Cinematic dread is indeed a real emotion, and it is indeed a self-directed, anticipatory emotion, but it is not a meta-emotion. It is a just a run-of-the-mill, non-hyphenated emotion.
Consider this parallel scenario, which I take to be the real-life counterpart of cinematic dread: For a scientific experiment on fear conditioning, you’ve been strapped to an electric chair—not one that kills people, but one that can nonetheless deliver a painful shock. Now, the experimenter tells you that you are going to get shocked in exactly 15 seconds and starts a timer. Tick tock.
If you are like me, you’ll start to feel bad even before the shock comes. You’ll start to feel anticipatory fear. How should we characterize this fear? Is it a meta-emotion, a fear of the pain resulting from the shock that you’re about to receive? To me, that sounds like a strange and roundabout way of describing what’s happening. If I were in the chair, my anticipatory fear would be a fear of the actual shock. That shock would result in my feeling pain, yes, but it seems odd to say that it’s the pain I’m afraid of. It would be like saying, if a rabid dog was poised to attack you, that you’re not really afraid of the dog or of its bite, but of the pain of the dog’s bite. Speaking loosely, we sometimes conflate a threat and its unwelcome result in this way: “I’m afraid of dying” says the man when asked why he refuses to fly to his destination. What we take him to mean, of course, is that he’s afraid that the plane is going to crash, which might result in his death.
Figure 3. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of fear.
I believe cinematic dread works the same. It makes much more sense to say that you’re afraid of the anticipated jump scare—or, more precisely, the actual shocking event in the film to which the jump scare corresponds—than it does to say that you’re afraid of the unpleasantness of the jump scare. Incidentally, this interpretation appears to match that of famed horror director Alfred Hitchcock, who stated that “there is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” The “terror” to which Hitchcock refers is anticipatory dread, and what that dread anticipates is the “bang” rather than the unpleasant feelings that follow from the bang.
Even if you buy this argument, you might still ask why it seems intuitively plausible that audiences would fear the feeling of an upcoming jump scare, which would be a meta-emotion. I believe the reason is this: As Hanich argues, cinematic dread is indeed a very good example of a cinematic fear for the self. Therefore, when we characterize cinematic dread, the focus is on what ostensibly and manifestly happens to us as opposed to what happens in the fictional story, which is separate from us. We are not part of the fiction. The fallacy here is to suppose that any threat perceived in a work of fiction must by that very fact be a merely fictional threat, which need not be the case. So, for example, the hideous monster may well be fictional, but, crucially, it isn’t fictional that we find the filmic representation of its attack aversive. As a representation, it is designed to be aversive. At a basic level, then, anticipating aversive representations when watching horror films is no different from anticipating an aversive electric shock.
Whether or not I’m right about cinematic dread in particular, there’s much work to be done in parsing the kinds of fear that horror media can induce. For example, is it possible that horror literature can cause self-directed fear in readers, and if so, how? I have recently started working on this and similar questions with horror scholars Mathias Clasen and Coltan Scrivner from the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University. I hope readers of this short essay will feel motivated to follow our investigation.
References
Clasen, M. (2017). Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press.
Hanich, J. (2014). Judge dread: What we are afraid of when we are scared at the movies. Projections, 8(2), 26-49.
Jäger, C., & Bartsch, A. (2006). Meta-emotions. Grazer Philosophische Studien, 73(1), 179-204.
Neill, A. (1996). Empathy and (film) fiction. In D. Bordwell, & N. Carroll (Eds.), Post-theory: Reconstructing film studies (pp. 175-194). University of Wisconsin Press.
Smuts, A. (2014). Cognitive and philosophical approaches to horror. In H. M. Benshoff (Ed.), A companion to the horror film (pp. 3-20). Wiley Blackwell.
Tan, E. S. H. (1995). Film-induced affect as a witness emotion. Poetics, 23(1-2), 7-32.
Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen is a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University, Denmark. He’s a member of the Recreational Fear Lab, which carries out empirical research on the paradoxical lure of horror. He has published several academic articles on horror media.
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