Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films

By Nina Nesseth

Nightmare Fuel by Nina Nesseth is a pop-science look at fear, how and why horror films get under our skin, and why we keep coming back for more.

Do you like scary movies?
Have you ever wondered why?

Nina Nesseth knows what scares you. She also knows why.

In Nightmare Fuel, Nesseth explores the strange and often unexpected science of fear through the lenses of psychology and physiology. How do horror films get under our skin? What about them keeps us up at night, even days later? And why do we keep coming back for more?

Horror films promise an experience: fear. From monsters that hide in plain sight to tension-building scores, every aspect of a horror film is crafted to make your skin crawl. But how exactly do filmmakers pull this off? The truth is, there’s more to it than just loud noises and creepy images.

With the affection of a true horror fan and the critical analysis of a scientist, Nesseth explains how audiences engage horror with both their brains and bodies, and teases apart the elements that make horror films tick. Nightmare Fuel covers everything from jump scares to creature features, serial killers to the undead, and the fears that stick around to those that fade over time.

With in-depth discussions and spotlight features of some of horror’s most popular films—from classics like The Exorcist to modern hits like Hereditary—and interviews with directors, film editors, composers, and horror academics, Nightmare Fuel is a deep dive into the science of fear, a celebration of the genre, and a survival guide for going to bed after the credits roll.

“An invaluable resource, a history of the horror genre, a love letter to the scary movie—it belongs on any horror reader’s bookshelf.” —Lisa Kröger, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Monster, She Wrote


At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250765222

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Do you like scary movies?"

That’s what the voice says on the other end of the line in the iconic opening of Scream (1996, dir. Wes Craven). What would your answer have been? I would have said yes. Chances are, you picked up this book because you’d say yes too. Hopefully, you are also practical enough to lock your doors before finding yourself in Casey’s (Drew Barrymore) situation, where a killer can just let themselves in without you noticing.

How did you feel the first time you watched that scene? Were you frustrated that Casey whiffed an easy piece of horror trivia? Confident that you would have gotten it right had you been in her shoes? Were you shocked that easily the most famous person on the movie poster was dead before the title card?

Were you scared?

If you felt any of those feelings, rest assured that you’re not the only one. It’s by design that you felt exactly the way you did.

Think about the last horror movie that you watched in theatres. Was it scary? It’s interesting, isn’t it, that whenever someone hears that you’ve seen a scary movie, their first question isn’t Was it good? Instead, it’s Was it scary?

The long history of horror movies proves that people like to be scared for entertainment (only further reinforced by the success of haunts and horror video games). A good chunk of people who claim to be horror-averse more likely just hate one style or type of horror. In my experience, all it takes is a conversation to reveal that someone who says they hate horror really means that they hate monster movies, but they actually love the entire Final Destination franchise. Or they hate splatter, gore, and body horror, but love a good haunted house or possession story. Horror is a genre as broad as the range of human fears, and it takes as many shapes. In the same way, horror fans come in many forms, from all-around aficionados to adoring fans of a single scary flavor. What binds us all is our love of the scare.

THE TROUBLE WITH DEFINING HORROR

Horror films have been around since the beginning of cinema and have a firm toehold in theatres today. With directors who are often forced to shoot around tiny budgets, horror has been a source of creative filmmaking—influencing practical and digital special effects, camera techniques, sound, editing, and narrative storytelling—across all genres. Despite this lush history, the horror genre is often dismissed as trash. And if a horror movie does break into the right critical circles and win awards, it is suddenly distanced from the genre. That’s what happened with Jaws (1977, dir. Steven Spielberg) and The Silence of the Lambs (1991, dir. Jonathan Demme). Even The Exorcist (1976, dir. William Friedkin), oft called the best horror film of all time, was never meant to be a horror film, according to its director. Is a little polishing all it really takes to relabel would-be horrors as prestige dramas? I could never wrap my brain around the inflexible thinking that (usually non-horror) filmmakers and critics grant to horror, as if it weren’t the genre that is most likely to break its own rules.

Not that we genre fans are much better when it comes to putting horror into boxes.

Let’s get real with each other: horror fans are notoriously picky about what gets to qualify as horror. Many people agree that 1960 was a great year for horror, with the introduction of classics such as Black Sunday (dir. Mario Bava), Peeping Tom (dir. Michael Powell), and of course, Hitchcock’s Psycho. But even given its undeniable influence on the genre, there are some who don’t think Psycho merits a space in the horror category because Norman Bates, despite his monstrous actions, does not fit some critics’ definitions of what makes a monster … because he isn’t supernatural in any way. (Noël Carroll, for instance, requires his monsters to be in violation of the natural order as determined by contemporary science. By this definition, if we strip away movie context, Norman Bates doesn’t have the right traits to make him a monster—but Superman does.) And there’s recently been an uptick in what some are calling elevated horror, whose bigger budgets and broader critical appeal make us question the borders of the genre. These films, such as Get Out (2017, dir. Jordan Peele), Hereditary (2018, dir. Ari Aster), It Follows (2014, dir. David Robert Mitchell), and The Witch (2015, dir. Robert Eggers), bring scares while appealing to highbrow sensibilities in their execution. Do they have any more merit as horror than budget scares? Not necessarily. I like to think of them as yet another shape that the horror film can take.

Do slashers fit your personal definition of horror? How about horror sci-fi? Or psychological thrillers? Does a movie need to have just a few horror elements to qualify, or does it have to tick every box on a trope checklist?

I get it, I really do: horror is a sprawling genre, with a sometimes-overwhelming number of subgenres. Drawing lines feels personal. I get it, but I won’t gatekeep. You might see some examples in this book that you don’t personally consider horror, but maybe someone else does. I’ve chosen horror moments that I think are great and that illustrate an argument.

That said, I think there are some essential facts of horror that we can all agree upon. Horror is often defined by its intent to scare, or, at the barest minimum, make audiences uncomfortable. But, more so than any other film genre, it is special in that it promises to deliver on that emotional response. It promises to make you feel fear, and a horror movie’s success hinges on the delivery of that promise. Sure, some dramas aim to make you feel sad or inspired, and comedies are hoping to tickle your funny bone, but you can still enjoy dramas that don’t make you cry and comedies where some of the jokes don’t quite hit your personal brand of humor. But you won’t hear many people leaving a theatre saying, Wow those scares didn’t land, but it sure was a great movie! If a horror movie isn’t scary, then what’s the point?

The truth is that so much orchestration goes into those scares. Horror taps into its audiences’ psychology and biology, and it uses these systems to inform the moments that give us the creeps. In return, as an audience, we collaborate with horror films to create tension and build our own fear. Horror demands that we are complicit. And our complicity, our participation with horror as a genre, has built up in us very specific expectations of what we’re going to see when we sit down to watch a horror film.

John Carpenter nailed it when he said, That’s what people want to see. They want to see the same movie again. In this case he was talking about sequels, but I think the sentiment translates well to the entire genre. Andrew Britton describes this phenomenon in more elaborate terms with reference to the Linda Blair–led slasher Hell Night (1981, dir. Tom DeSimone):

[E]very spectator knew exactly what the film was going to do at every point, even down to the order in which it would dispose of its various characters, and the screening was accompanied by something in the nature of a running commentary in which each dramatic move was excitedly broadcast some minutes before it was actually made. The film’s total predictability did not create boredom or disappointment. On the contrary, the predictability was clearly the main source of pleasure, and the only occasion for disappointment would have been a modulation of that formula, not the repetition of it. [The emphasis is mine.]

I’m fascinated.

The best scary movies are the ones that make you nervous about walking on staircases or turning out the lights. They’re the movies that have you peeping through your fingers at the screen and keep you up at night afterward.

I want to dissect every way horror films affect us: how the people who craft scares leverage science against their audiences; how we engage horror with our brains and bodies; and why we constantly come back for more scares when, logically, we should avoid the scenarios that we see on-screen, not happily expose ourselves to them.

While working on this book I had the happy opportunity to sit down and talk with people from all around the horror film community—horror film scholars and historians, directors, composers, and film editors—to pick apart their perspectives on the genre as creators and as consumers. One common thread appeared in nearly all of my conversations: creating horror involves elements of empathy, sympathy, and identification. The recognition that we feel while watching horror, itself a cognitive phenomenon of our brain firing chemical signals, was built out of the emotional storytelling of its creators.

I want to dig into the hows and whys of all of the bits and pieces that make horror work. What makes movies get under our skin? What makes the most effective monsters and scares? What essential roles do sounds and visuals play? Why do some films age well while others become, well, quaint over time?

As a horror fan myself, this investigation has deepened my appreciation for the tropes that pop up with regularity in this genre. As a scientist, it has helped me explain to myself why I’m so freaked out by what is just an image on a screen.

So, I’ll ask you again: Do you like scary movies?

Have you ever wondered why?

CHAPTER 1

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON HORROR

Nothing annoys me more than hearing people describe watching movies as a brainless activity—as if it involves somehow turning off your brain’s circuitry and relying solely on your eyeballs to coast through the movie’s run time. Plot twist: your brain is very much involved, engaged, and making the experience for you. Nothing makes this engagement more apparent than watching horror movies, where the filmmakers are crafting scares with your brain’s and body’s most likely reactions in mind.

Let’s start with a scene that appears in almost every horror flick ever made. Our protagonist is home alone at night, and the house is dark. They hear sounds they can’t explain, so they investigate. They go into a dark hallway and see a door at the end, slightly ajar. The room beyond is hidden by darkness. Is there something on the other side of the door? As the protagonist slowly makes their way forward, it’s so quiet that you can hear every breath and floorboard creak. The movie score is starting to creep up in volume. Your eyes scan every shadow and black corner of the hallway in case something might be hiding there, but it’s still too dark to be sure. We see something like apprehension on the protagonist’s face as they reach for the doorknob and jump back suddenly! to a musical sting as a cat streaks out of the room.

Of course! It was the cat making those strange sounds—because cats are nocturnal weirdos that get bored and race around the house at night, knocking things off of shelves and doing whatever it is that cats do. The protagonist is relieved, laughing off their paranoia as they bend down to scoop up their pet. But in the next shot, they stand up, cat in their arms, and we see that a monster has appeared right behind them.

There’s a lot to unpack in this scene. The elements of fear, horror, and shock are all there, and are definitely being experienced by the character on-screen. When it comes to you as a moviegoer, your mileage may vary in terms of how much you experience each while you watch the scene play out.

When we look at what gives any good horror movie its true horror vibe, we end up with two distinct elements: terror and horror. We often use these terms interchangeably, but they are very different. Terror is where tension lives. It’s that awful, creepy-crawly feeling, the anxiety and anticipation that builds toward a horrifying event or realization—basically, it’s the heebie-jeebies. Horror is how we react once that event actually occurs. We can thank Ann Radcliffe, mother of Gothic literature, for those definitions.

To tweak Radcliffe’s vocabulary a little bit, I’m going to roll terror and all of the other pre-horror emotions into one and call it fear. We know fear. We experience fear all of the time as a mechanism to protect us from a Bad Thing that might happen.

Horror is the result of the Bad Thing happening.

It’s not surprising to know that fear is a useful tool. It keeps us alive. If you’re feeling fear in a dangerous situation, you’re more likely to problem-solve, try to put space between yourself and that situation, or be more cautious and avoid getting into that dangerous situation in the first place.

Fear is such a useful tool that some fears stick around for generations. A great example of an evolved fear is a common one: fear of the dark. Tool use and technology have created a world where humans have no natural predators, but if we turn the clocks far enough back on our history, we quickly find that we weren’t always at the top of the food chain. A theory for why humans are afraid of the dark stems from this history: many predators, like large wild cats, prefer to attack at nighttime. This also happens to be when human eyesight is at its worst. Fundamentally, we lack a shiny layer of tissue at the back of our eyeballs called the tapetum lucidum, which reflects light and allows for better night vision. It’s also why many animals have glowing eyes in photos taken with a flash, whereas humans are prone instead to red eye, thanks to light bouncing off our blood vessel–rich retinas. Humans who were more fearful of the dark were more likely to stay somewhere safe during the night to avoid predation; whereas fearless humans might have been more likely to do something reckless, like venturing out at night with limited vision.

This fear may not be especially useful today, with our lack of predators and abundance of light, but it seems to have been conserved over generations. A small 2012 study performed by Colleen Carney at Ryerson University in Toronto subjected a group of good and poor sleepers to random bursts of white noise while they were either in a well-lit room or in the dark. In general, greater startle responses were recorded in the dark than in full light, and poor sleepers reported much more discomfort than their peers who have few problems snoozing. Discomfort is an important, if subjective, descriptor here: while it’s pretty common to hear people say that they’re afraid of the dark, it’s not typically a screaming sort of fear. What’s most commonly reported is a sense of uneasiness and foreboding when surrounded by darkness.

Filmmakers use this uneasy feeling to their advantage, often using dark color palettes and even darker corners to mask all sorts of ghouls, killers, demons, and other threats at the edges of the frame. If you’ve ever found yourself scanning the blackest parts of the screen for even a hint of something nefarious, it’s this evolved fear, coupled expertly with your basic understanding of horror movie tropes, at work.

The first thing to remember is that fear lives in your brain. We can experience more than one type of fear, and there is evidence for more than one kind of fear pathway in the brain. Many of them (but not all!) are grouped together in what’s known as the limbic system. There isn’t perfect consensus on which brain parts get to be included in the limbic system, but in general these areas are thought to be where the bulk of our emotions are processed.

Let’s go back to our horror protagonist, who’s just heard a strange noise. The limbic structures that we’re concerned with in this scenario include the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and the hippocampus.

The amygdala is an almond-shaped structure buried deep in each of the temporal lobes of your brain. The amygdalae are key to decoding many emotional responses, including the famed fight-or-flight response. It’s also linked to storing and processing fear-related information and fear memories. In 1994, researcher Ralph Adolphs and his team investigated disorders that caused lesions that affected the amygdala. What they found was that these people tended to have a tougher time recognizing and interpreting fearful expressions on other people’s faces. Interestingly, this same study found that the recognition of other emotions, like happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, and disgust, wasn’t affected. The amygdala is generally accepted as the primary brain center for fear processing, but even the amygdala might send signals along different circuits depending on whether the input is related to fear of pain, versus fear of a predator, versus fear of an attack by another human, and so on.

The hippocampus also plays a role in storing and retrieving memories, not to mention providing context to content. It is named for its shape, which looks like a seahorse’s curled-up tail (or, as I prefer to think of it, a jellyroll). The hippocampus and amygdala are the parts that will, consciously or unconsciously, compare the strange noise to memory and help our protagonist decide whether it might belong to a threat.

The hypothalamus is the link between your brain and your body’s hormones. It controls functions like thirst, appetite, fatigue, and more by producing signaling hormones that trigger other parts of the brain and body to release whatever other hormones are needed to suit a task—kind of like a hormonal relay system. The amygdala may be responsible for the famed fight-or-flight response, but it’s the hypothalamus that sends the signal to the amygdala that activates that response.

These three limbic structures aren’t the only parts of the brain in play in our protagonist’s scenario. As they make their way down the hallway, our protagonist tries to keep their fear in check before it gets the better of them. The ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is your brain’s go-to region for willpower or self-control. Trying to get a handle on curbing your feelings of fear or some other emotion? The VLPFC will help you out by inhibiting other regions like the amygdala. Meanwhile, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is actively taking stock of how much control you have over a situation and helps shape your stress response.

When the cat jumps out and startles our protagonist, this new input bypasses the limbic system completely and goes straight to reflex mode. The brainstem is responsible here; it skips a lot of the processing work that happens in the crinkly folds of the cerebral cortex. It’s responsible for a lot of automatic functions that you really shouldn’t have to think about, like breathing or keeping your heart beating or reflexively protecting yourself from something jumping out at you.

And then, of course, our protagonist has a monster to contend with.

THREAT

Every horror film worth its salt has some sort of threat, whether real or imagined. A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984, dir. Wes Craven) has Freddy Krueger. Friday the 13th (1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham) has Jason Voorhees (well, technically Jason Voorhees’s mom). The Blair Witch Project (1999, dirs. Eduardo Sánchez and Daniel Myrick) has, well, the Blair Witch. Luckily, human brains have built-in systems for dealing with threats. If we take the same scenario from the opening of this chapter, here’s the gist of what’s happening: from the very start of that scene, your brain is telling you that a threat might be present. Even if you logically know that you’re just watching a movie, your body is preparing for that threat, you know, just in case it’s real. As a viewer with your butt safely in a seat and outside of the action on-screen, you can recognize a scary situation and build up your own anticipation, which is half the fun of watching horror.

If you were in the protagonist’s shoes, though, you might actually feel afraid, and that’s not unusual. It would actually be useful for you to feel fear! After all, fear is a tool your brain uses to prepare you and your body to deal with a threat. If you aren’t feeling afraid yet, you are at the very least in an enhanced sensory state—vigilant, even. Your thinking brain takes a back seat to your senses. Everything you see, hear, smell, taste, or touch becomes crucial to identifying if potential threats are nearby.

The good news is, we’re really good at picking up on potential threats. Oft-cited research such as that done by Sandra Soares at the University of Aveiro has found that threatening images—such as images of snakes—can trigger a threat response even when the images are flashed so quickly that the viewer might not be consciously aware that they saw the threat at all. This is in line with what’s known as the Snake Detection Theory, demonstrated in research where participants (even infants!) could more readily point out snakes in images than flowers. This particular theory goes on to suggest that humans have evolved to selectively fear threats like snakes, much in the same way that humans have evolved to fear the dark, as a way to avoid the risks associated with something that we might not see until it’s too late. Snakebites might not be a major threat these days, but the evolved adaptation—the ability to visually pick out potential threats—can still be useful.

It’s worth mentioning that threat detection isn’t limited to snakes. In general, threats like guns or spiders are also quickly spied and recognized by humans. People who can pick up on threats quickly are more likely to survive. In part, you can thank your amygdala for putting you on high alert. The amygdala is wickedly sensitive to anything novel.

Humans are also extra receptive to things appearing in our peripheral vision. In fact, we may even be faster at reacting to threats that appear in our peripheral vision than to threats that appear right front of our faces. In one study, researchers measured brain area activation to images of fearful and neutral faces presented either in the peripheral or central visual fields, and they found that participants showed responses in their frontal lobes and deep right temporal lobes (including the amygdala) as early as 80 milliseconds after the fearful faces were shown in the peripheral vision. Compare that to fearful faces presented centrally: in this case, activity was sparked along a more classical visual pathway instead of in areas more directly tied to interpreting fear. Not only that, but this interpretation took nearly twice as long, about 140 to 190 milliseconds. We are not only processing stuff appearing in our peripheral vision before we’re really conscious of what we’re seeing, but we’re also more readily processing it as a threat.

Once the threat we’re fearing makes its appearance, we have a few ways in which we’re programmed to respond. You’ve probably heard of the fight-or-flight response before, a response famous for taking over your brain and body and getting you out of sticky situations, but fighting and fleeing aren’t the only Fs that help us deal with stress—and they aren’t even necessarily the first go-tos.

A few other Fs are often cited as common responses to threat: freeze, à la deer-in-headlights; fright, a.k.a. playing possum; and friend (also sometimes flirt or fawn), as in trying your darndest to engage and de-escalate the threat. Taken together, the Fs are sometimes referred to as the defense cascade model (although friend is often dropped).

The Fs explain a lot of the reactions we see in horror film characters. Sometimes it seems like a character on-screen is doing something incredibly stupid that you’d never do if you were in their situation, but even real people behave in sometimes unexpected ways when their brains are hijacked by

Reviews for Nightmare Fuel

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films by Nina Nesseth is that rare book that applies science to our popular culture without either dumbing down the science (or being overly pop science in nature) or being too technical for a large readership. In other words, this is a very pleasant surprise.So many books that I have read that are billed as "The Science of..." books are weak in both the science and the pop culture. Thankfully I didn't let all of those disappointments keep me from continuing to look for a book that would be satisfying in both areas. It certainly helps that Nesseth is a fan of horror films, but most other authors make the same claim, it just doesn't show up in their books.The science is in enough detail, whether psychology or neuroscience or any of the hybrids, to engage a reader who is into science. The thing that makes this exceptional is that even with that detail it is still accessible and interesting to the general fan of horror who has or wants only a very basic understanding of the science. That is, I think, due to the fact this is about the horror films first and the science second, so fans never feel like they are secondary to what they are reading.While the body of the book is great, the list of films mentioned as well as the bibliography offer wonderful resources. If you have been looking for more films to watch, there is a lengthy list of those mentioned in the text. If you'd like to read more about the science or the films, the bibliography offers many excellent options.If you have any interest whatsoever in either the psychology and neuroscience of fear and emotions in general or in horror films as a genre you will find a lot to enjoy in this book.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.