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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
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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

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