Some people can’t get enough of scary movies. They’ve seen scores of scary films –over and over. They catch horror flicks on opening night. They have DVD collections at home.
Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead watching a scary movie. They freak me out, leaving me unsettled for days — the images a record player in my mind. In fact, I have a hard enough time sitting through the scarier scenes of “Sons of Anarchy.” (I watch it with my boyfriend, and sometimes need to leave the room.)
With Halloween upon us — the prime season for horror films — I was curious to find out why some people savor scary movies. And others, like me, can’t stand them.
The Excitation Transfer Process
According to Glenn Sparks, one reason for the appeal is how you feel after the movie.
Glenn Sparks
This is called the excitation transfer process. Sparks’s research found that when people watch frightening films, their heart rate, blood pressure and respiration increases.
After the film is over, this physiological arousal lingers, Sparks said. (We’re just not aware of it.) That means that any positive emotions you experience – like having fun with friends – are intensified, he said. Instead of focusing on the fright you felt during the film, you recall having a great time. And you’ll want to come back for more, he said.
However, if your experience was negative, you might not. For instance, let’s say you were on a date that wasn’t going well or you got into a car accident on your way home, Sparks said. Again, because your lingering arousal heightens any emotions you experience, the negative feelings might sway you to skip a scary flick in the future.
Other Reasons
Glenn Sparks
Joanne Cantor, Ph.D, director of the Center for Communication Research at University
of Wisconsin, claims that some people may like scary movies because they enjoy the adrenaline rush of being scared while being safe. Cantor said , “Some people like anything that gets their minds off their own problems”.
If you want to enjoy a horror flick, but don’t know how, Eduardo Andrade, a professor
Professor Eduardo Andrade
of marketing at the University of California, Berkley, who co-authored the 2007 studywith Cohen, suggests learning to detach yourself from the film’s events. By understanding that the films are acted out, and that all of the blood, guts, and gore are only special effects, you might be able to enjoy them a bit more. “No one’s arm is being sawed off. It’s a special effect. People are not being maimed. These are actors,” Andrade told LiveScience, referring to the movie Saw.
The Shining is a 1980 British-American psychological horror film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick,
In the film, Jack Torrance, a writer and recovering alcoholic, takes a job as an off-season caretaker at the isolated Overlook Hotel, where Danny, the son, has a mysterious power known as “The Shining” that shows him things from the past and future of the hotel.
The father, Jack Torrance was convinced by a ghost to kill his family, Jack goes completely insane and the only thing that can save Danny and his mother is “The Shining”.
So is the fear you feel when you watch someone being chased by an axe-wielding murderer any different from the fear you might feel if you were actually being chased by an axe-wielding murderer?
The answer is no, at least not from where Glenn Sparks sits. Sparks, a professor of communication at Purdue University, studies the effects of horror films on viewers’ physiology. When people watch horrific images, their heartbeat increases as much as 15 beats per minute, Sparks tells WebMD.
Their palms sweat, their skin temperature drops several degrees, their muscles tense, and their blood pressure spikes.
Before we try to explain the psychological attraction to horror lets try to establish what the allure of horror is. Psychologist Dr. Glenn D. Walters identifies three primary factors of the horror film allure. Tension – created through mystery, suspense, gore, terror, or shock. This is pretty straight forward elements of horror, the craft and technique of filmmaking. Unrealism-despite the graphic nature of recent horror films, we all know at some level that what we are watching is not real. Movies are edited from multiple camera angles with soundtracks and sometimes horror is tempered and made palatable with black humor – a sly wink that what you’re seeing on screen isn’t real. This also explains why we all remember that scary movie we saw when we were way too young but looks hokey now. Children have a harder time separating reality and fiction especially when its on a movie screen. According to Walters, movies that bring high levels of tension, are relevant in universal, cultural, subgroup and personal ways while maintaining an air of unrealism will have greater horror appeal.
The first Descriptions of supernatural events appear in several of the silent shorts that created by the film pioneer Georges Méliès in the late 1890s.
• F. W. Murnau made the first vampire-themed movie at 1922; the name of the film is Nosferatu.
• In the 70s and 80s John Carpenter created Halloween (1978), Sean Cunningham made Friday the 13th (1980), Wes Craven directed A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984), all of them were very success movies .
• In 1996, the movie Scream written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven. It received several awards and award nominations. The soundtrack by Marco Beltrami was also acclaimed, and was cited as “one of the most intriguing horror scores composed in years”.
• In 2004, James Wan directed a famous film – Saw. Compared to its low budget, Saw performed very well at the box office, grossing more than $100 million worldwide and becoming, at the time, one of the most profitable horror films since 1996.
• Annabelle Is the last horror film that released, that movie is one of the highest grossing horror films of all time. (2014)
Every horror movie has various frightening elements. It can be killers, ghosts, monsters, animals or even dolls.
Which type of horror movies do you find the scariest?
Well, there are lots of of kinds of horror movies,
and the most popular subgenres are:
Body horror– The horror caused from the destruction of the body in the movie.Body horror include unnatural movements or anatomically incorrect placement of the limb to create ‘monsters’.
Science fiction Horror- mash-up of science fiction and horror, usually science fiction is used to precipitate the horror, Like in the movie “Alien”.
Zombie film – Zombie films include reanimated corpses or mindless human that feed off of the living.
Supernatural: Can include ghosts, monsters, dark forces, zombies, or
pretty much any creepy thing that can’t be found in the real world.
Psychological Horror:driven by characters’ fears and focused more on psychological dread than on murders and gores.
Of course, there are more types of horror movies like:
1. Because Danny Lloyd , the kid who played Danny in The Shining, was so young he didn’t know he was making a horror film. He thought it was going to be a drama.
2. It took about a year to get the iconic shot in where blood pours out of the elevator in The Shining right, but only three days to film ( ;.
3. Candyman–The Candyman, played by Tony Todd, had to put real bees into his mouth to film the movie’s climax.
4. In the Scream series, Ghostface is voiced by Roger L. Jackson. The director, Wes Craven, intentionally hid Jackson on the set of all three original movies, so that his voice would be scarier to the actors hearing it. During the scenes where the characters were being taunted on the phone, Jackson was hidden on set, actually making the calls.
5. The original title thought of for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was ‘Head Cheese.’
6.The Texas Chainsaw Massacre- As if this movie wasn’t gruesome enough, the human skeleton featured during the end scenes was actually real. It had been sourced from India, apparently.
7. In order to film the premonition scene in Final Destination 3, the actors had to ride the actual roller coaster 26 times.
8. Interview With A Vampire- The actors behind the vampires had to be suspended upside down so that the blood would rush to their heads before they went into make-up. This was so make-up artists could trace their veins and make them stand out to give that now-famous creepy look. We’re not sure union reps would be happy with that these days.
9. Freddy Krueger was originally going to be a child molester, but that was thought to be too dark for the movie.
10. The Ring– Did you know that you can actually watch the full cursed tape? The footage at the start and end of the movie can be slowed down so you can actually view the whole thing. But do you dare?
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction,film, and video games (as a narrative) which relies on the characters’ fears and emotional instability to build tension.
Psychological horror aims to create discomfort by exposing common or universal psychological and emotional vulnerabilities and fears, such as the shadowy parts of the human psyche that most people repress or deny referred to in Jungian psychology as the archetypal shadow characteristics: suspicion, distrust, self-doubt and paranoia of others, themselves and the world. Thus, elements of psychological horror focus on mental conflict. These become important as the characters face perverse situations, often involving the supernatural, immorality and conspiracies. While other horror media emphasize fantastical situations such as attacks by monsters, psychological horror tends to keep the monsters hidden and to involve situations more grounded in artistic realism.
Plot twists are an often used device. Characters commonly face internal battles with subconscious desires such as romantic lust and the desire for petty revenge. In contrast, splatter fiction focuses on bizarre, alien evil to which the average viewer cannot easily relate.
Psychological horror films differ from the traditional horror film, where the source of the fear is typically something material, such as creatures, monsters or aliens, as well as the splatter film, which derives its effects from gore and graphic violence, in that tension is built through atmosphere, eerie sounds and exploitation of the viewer’s and the character’s psychological fears.
The Black Cat (1934) and Cat People (1942) have been cited as early psychological horror films.
Roman Polanski directed two films which are considered quintessential psychological horror: Repulsion (1965) and Rosemary’s Baby. Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining is another particularly well-known example of the genre. The Changeling (1980) directed by Peter Medak is another good example of a psychological haunting story.
The subgenre is a staple in Asian countries. Japanese horror films, commonly
Psycho
referred to as “J-horror”, have been noted to be generally of a psychological horror nature. Notable examples are Ring (1998) and the Ju-on series. Another influential category is theKorean horror films, commonly referred to as “K-horror”. Notabl
e examples are A Tale of Two Sisters (2003), Hansel and Gretel (2007) and Whispering Corridors (1998). A landmark film from the Philippines, Kisapmata (1981), is an example of psychological horror.
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, fictional science-based depictions of phenomena that are not fully accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception and time travel, along with futuristic elements such as spacecraft, robots, cyborgs, interstellar space travel or other technologies.
Science fiction films have often been used to focus on political or social issues, and to explore philosophical issues like the human condition.
In many cases, tropes derived from written science fiction may be used by filmmakers ignorant of or at best indifferent to the standards of scientific plausibility and plot logic to which written science fiction is traditionally held.
The genre has existed since the early years of silent cinema, when Georges Melies’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) employed trick photography effects.
The next major example in the genre was the 1927 film Metropolis – being the first feature length science fiction movie.
From the 1930s to the 1950s, the genre consisted mainly of low-budget B-movies. After Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey, the science fiction film genre was taken more seriously.
In the late 1970s, big-budget science fiction films filled with special effects became popular with audiences after the success of Star Wars and paved the way for the blockbuster hits of subsequent decades.
Some people can’t get enough of scary movies. They’ve seen scores of scary films –over and over. They catch horror flicks on opening night. They have DVD collections at home.
If you want to enjoy a horror flick, but don’t know how, Eduardo Andrade, a professor
So is the fear you feel when you watch someone being chased by an axe-wielding murderer any different from the fear you might feel if you were actually being chased by an axe-wielding murderer?
Before we try to explain the psychological attraction to horror lets try to establish what the allure of horror is.
pretty much any creepy thing that can’t be found in the real world.
Psychological horror is a subgenre of horror fiction,film, and video games (as a narrative) which relies on the characters’ fears and emotional instability to build tension.
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