This article was taken from the March 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
We have a long-standing love affair with horror films, spooking ourselves out with the likes of The Exorcist, The Shining and A Nightmare On Elm Street. But why do horror films scare us? Notoriously terrifying thriller The Woman In Black hits screens this month, a remake of the 1983 novel about a menacing shadow that haunts a small town, as does A Dangerous Method --directed by David Cronenberg and starring Viggo Mortensen -- about the professional relationship between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
Time for a mashup: David Holmes, senior lecturer in psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University, who specialises in lifestyle and media psychology and nonverbal behaviour, explains the subliminal processes behind celluloid spookfests.
Sound
"In everyday life, music and sound are often used subliminally.
Horror films use the fundamentals. They tend to mimic dangerous, natural sounds that have an influence on us through their ability to play on primal fears and signify danger. For example, The Exorcist used recordings of angry bees and screaming people, then threw them together; people didn't know what it was but they reacted to it because such jarring sounds put us on edge."
As seen in: Psycho, The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Lighting (lack of) "We fear the dark -- that's probably why we sleep through most of it. Naturally we have a fear of the absence of being able to see, of being able to use our sense of sight and function properly. Robbed of vision, your brain goes into panic mode: it wants to know what's there, if anything dangerous is close to it and whether it needs to work out an escape route. The fact that it can't do those things is far more fear-invoking than the actual darkness."
As seen in: The Descent, Poltergeist, A Nightmare On Elm Street
Associative Images
"Even if it's masked, certain symbolism still strikes deep into the core of the subconscious, playing on imagery that we fear. For example, the Alien films, featuring scenes of creatures pumping eggs down human throats, depict a dominance of penetration. It aims, as screenwriter Dan O'Bannon said, to 'attack the audience sexually' without their realising it. Subliminal visual imagery is usually too subtle for us to be aware of, but our subconscious detects it, filtering it into our conscious brain."
As seen in: Alien, The Exorcist, Drag Me To Hell
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
