Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T21:32:34.302Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

44 - An Evolutionary Approach to Horror Media

from Part X - Evolution and the Media

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2020

By
Mathias Clasen  and
Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen
Edited by
Lance Workman ,
Will Reader  and
Jerome H. Barkow
Lance Workman
Affiliation:
University of South Wales
Will Reader
Affiliation:
Sheffield Hallam University
Jerome H. Barkow
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia
Get access

Summary

People generally try to avoid negative emotions such as fear, anxiety, and terror – and unsurprisingly so. These negative emotions evolved to motivate defensive avoidance behavior and are elicited by threatening stimuli. Common sense tells us that nobody desires to dwell on such stimuli, and yet a good chunk of the entertainment industry is devoted to manufacturing products designed to instill negative emotions in consumers. Horror cinema, horror literature, and horror video games are all thriving industries. Every season sees a new crop of novels, films, and video games depicting rotting monsters, moaning ghosts, and terrifying situations. Why do such media products draw large audiences? This chapter proposes to answer that question by invoking an evolutionary explanatory paradigm that builds on the evolutionary social sciences and encompasses sociological and historicist approaches to horror (Clasen, 2012, 2017).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior , pp. 538 - 547
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Barrett, D. (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose, 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C. (2005). Adaptations to predators and prey. In Buss, D. M., ed., The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Wiley, pp. 200–223.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C., & Broesch, J. (2012). Prepared social learning about dangerous animals in children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5), 499–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Boyd, B. (2009). On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.Google Scholar
Boyer, P., & Bergstrom, B. (2011). Threat-detection in child development: An evolutionary perspective. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1034–1041.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Boyer, P., & Liénard, P. (2006). Why ritualized behavior? Precaution systems and action parsing in developmental, pathological and cultural rituals. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(6), 595–613; discussion 613–650.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brymer, E., & Schweitzer, R. (2013). Extreme sports are good for your health: A phenomenological understanding of fear and anxiety in extreme sport. Journal of Health Psychology, 18(4), 477–487.Google Scholar
Cantor, J. (2004). “I’ll never have a clown in my house” – Why movie horror lives on. Poetics Today, 25(2), 283–304.Google Scholar
Carpenter, J., writer (2003). Audio commentary with writer/director John Carpenter [DVD], Halloween. Beverley Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment.Google Scholar
Carroll, J. (2006). The human revolution and the adaptive function of literature. Philosophy and Literature, 30(1), 33–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carroll, J. (2011). Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chess, S. (2011). Open-sourcing horror. Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 374–393.Google Scholar
ChildFund Alliance (2012). Small Voices, Big Dreams 2012: A Global Survey of Children’s Hopes, Aspirations and Fears. Richmond, VA: ChildFund Alliance.Google Scholar
Clasen, M. (2010). Vampire apocalypse: A biocultural critique of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Philosophy and Literature, 34(2), 313–328.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16(2), 222–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clasen, M. (2014). Evil monsters in horror fiction: An evolutionary perspective on form and function. In Pennington, J. & Packer, S. M., eds., A History of Evil in Popular Culture: What Hannibal Lecter, Stephen King, and Vampires Reveal about America. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Praeger, pp. 39–47.Google Scholar
Clasen, M. (2017). Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Clasen, M., & Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. (2016). A consilient approach to horror video games: Challenges and opportunities. Academic Quarter, 13, 128–143.Google Scholar
Cook, M., & Mineka, S. (1990). Selective associations in the observational conditioning of fear in rhesus monkeys. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 16(4), 372–389.Google Scholar
Correa, K. A., Stone, B. T., Stikic, M., Johnson, R. R., & Berka, C. (2015). Characterizing donation behavior from psychophysiological indices of narrative experience. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 9, 301.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davis, H., & Javor, A. (2004). Religion, death and horror movies: Some striking evolutionary parallels. Evolution and Cognition, 10(1), 11–18.Google Scholar
Dunbar, R. I. M. (2004). The Human Story: A New History of Mankind’s Evolution. London: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Duntley, J. D. (2005). Adaptations to dangers from other humans. In Buss, D. M., ed., The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. New York: Wiley, pp. 224–249.Google Scholar
Ekman, P. (1999). Basic emotions. In Dalgleish, T. & Power, M., eds., Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 45–60.Google Scholar
Gabriel, S., & Young, A. F. (2011). Becoming a vampire without being bitten: The narrative collective-assimilation hypothesis. Psychological Science, 22(8), 990–994.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Garner, T. A., & Grimshaw, M. N. (2011). A climate of fear: Considerations for designing a virtual acoustic ecology of fear. In AM ’11: Proceedings of the 6th Audio Mostly Conference: A Conference on Interaction with Sound. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 31–38.Google Scholar
Gottschall, J. (2012). The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.Google Scholar
Gross, J. J., & Levenson, R. W. (1995). Emotion elicitation using films. Cognition & Emotion, 9(1), 87–108.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gurven, M. (2012). Human survival and life history in evolutionary perspective. In Mitani, J. C., Call, J., Kappeler, P. M., Palombit, R. A., & Silk, J. B., eds., The Evolution of Primate Societies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 293–314.Google Scholar
Hart, D., & Sussman, R. W. (2009). Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, expanded ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Isbell, L. A. (2006). Snakes as agents of evolutionary change in primate brains. Journal of Human Evolution, 51(1), 1–35.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jones, D. (2002). Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
King, S. (1980). The Mist. In McCauley, K., ed., Dark Forces. London: Futura, pp. 419–551.Google Scholar
King, S. (2010). Full Dark, No Stars, 1st Scribner hardcover ed. New York: Scribner.Google Scholar
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J. (2016). Evil origins: A Darwinian genealogy of the popcultural villain. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 10(2), 109–122.Google Scholar
Kruuk, H. (2002). Hunter and Hunted: Relationships between Carnivores and People. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Krzywinska, T. (2002). Hands-on horror. In King, G. & Krzywinska, T., eds., ScreenPlay: Cinema/Videogames/Interfaces. London: Wallflower, pp. 206–223.Google Scholar
Laer, T. V., Ruyter, K. D., Visconti, L. M., & Wetzels, M. (2014). The extended transportation-imagery model: A meta-analysis of the antecedents and consequences of consumers’ narrative transportation. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(5), 797–817.Google Scholar
LoBue, V. (2010). And along came a spider: An attentional bias for the detection of spiders in young children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 107(1), 59–66.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
LoBue, V., & DeLoache, J. S. (2008). Detecting the snake in the grass: Attention to fear-relevant stimuli by adults and young children. Psychological Science, 19(3), 284–289.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lynch, T., & Martin, N. (2015). Nothing to fear? An analysis of college students’ fear experiences with video games. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 59(2), 298–317.Google Scholar
Mar, R. A., & Oatley, K. (2008). The function of fiction is the abstraction and simulation of social experience. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(3), 173–192.Google Scholar
Marks, I. M., & Nesse, R. M. (1994). Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology, 15(5–6), 247–261.Google Scholar
Matheson, R. (1954). I Am Legend. New York: Fawcett Publications.Google Scholar
Muris, P., Merckelbach, H., Ollendick, T. H., King, N. J., & Bogie, N. (2001). Children’s nighttime fears: Parent-child ratings of frequency, content, origins, coping behaviors and severity. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 39(1), 13–28.Google Scholar
Murphy, B. M. (2009). The Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. (2016). Adaptive memory: The evolutionary significance of survival processing. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 11(4), 496–511.Google Scholar
Nairne, J. S., Vanarsdall, J. E., Pandeirada, J. N., & Blunt, J. R. (2012). Adaptive memory: Enhanced location memory after survival processing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 38(2), 495–501.Google Scholar
National Safety Council (2011). Injury Facts, 2011 ed. Itasca, IL: National Safety Council.Google Scholar
Newman, K. (2011). Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen since the 1960s, revised and updated ed. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.Google Scholar
Öhman, A. (2008). Fear and anxiety: Overlaps and dissociations. In Lewis, M., Haviland-Jones, J. M., & Barrett, L. F., eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3rd ed. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 709–729.Google Scholar
Öhman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108(3), 483–522.Google Scholar
Öhman, A., Lundqvist, D., & Esteves, F. (2001). The face in the crowd revisited: A threat advantage with schematic stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3), 381–396.Google Scholar
Panksepp, J., & Biven, L. (2012). The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Penkunas, M. J., & Coss, R. G. (2013). Rapid detection of visually provocative animals by preschool children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(4), 522–536.Google Scholar
Pennington, J. (2009). The good, the bad, and Halloween: A sociocultural analysis of John Carpenter’s slasher. P.O.V., 28, 54–63.Google Scholar
Perron, B. (2009). Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.Google Scholar
Prince, S. (2004). Introduction: The dark genre and its paradoxes. In Prince, S., ed., The Horror Film. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–11.Google Scholar
Rockoff, A. (2002). Going to Pieces: The Rise and Fall of the Slasher Film, 1978–1986. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co.Google Scholar
Rouse III, R. (2009). Match made in hell: The inevitable success of the horror genre in video games. In Perron, B., ed., Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., pp. 15–25.Google Scholar
Ryle, G. (1946). Knowing how and knowing that: The presidential address. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 46(1), 1–16.Google Scholar
Scalise Sugiyama, M. (2001). Food, foragers, and folklore: The role of narrative in human subsistence. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(4), 221–240.Google Scholar
Scalise Sugiyama, M., & Sugiyama, L. S. (2011). “Once a child is lost, he dies”: Monster stories vis-a-vis the problem of errant children. In Slingerland, E. & Collard, M., eds., Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and the Humanities. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 351–371.Google Scholar
Skal, D. J. (2001). The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, rev. ed. New York: Faber and Faber.Google Scholar
Soares, S. C., Lindström, B., Esteves, F., & Öhman, A. (2014). The hidden snake in the grass: Superior detection of snakes in challenging attentional conditions. PLoS ONE, 9(12), e114724.Google Scholar
Špinka, M., Newberry, R. C., & Bekoff, M. (2001). Mammalian play: Training for the unexpected. Quarterly Review of Biology, 76(2), 141–168.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Steen, F. F., & Owens, S. A. (2001). Evolution’s pedagogy: An adaptationist model of pretense and entertainment. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1(4), 289–321.Google Scholar
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Does beauty build adapted minds? Toward an evolutionary theory of aesthetics, fiction, and the Arts. SubStance, 30(1–2), 6–27.Google Scholar
Woody, E. Z., & Szechtman, H. (2011). Adaptation to potential threat: The evolution, neurobiology, and psychopathology of the security motivation system. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1019–1033.Google Scholar
Yarish, B. (2013). Building a legend: The “skinny” on the Slender Man. The University of Winnipeg Graduate Students Research Colloquium 2013. http://winnspace.uwinnipeg.ca/handle/10680/433.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×