I’ve asked this before on social media to get a pulse for it. Psychological horror usually comes out on top.

If it’s true that most people find psychological horror to be the scariest sub-genre, it would be a difficult observation to explain under current frameworks of fear. Much of the work on defining fear, including my own, has focused on external threats like predatory creatures and dangerous environments.

The defensive behaviors that often come along with fear suggest that the emotion functions, in part, to get us away from danger. When we feel afraid, we typically try to hide, flee, or seek out allies to support us. This makes sense in the context of a predator, but less so with paranoia.

Fear is also highly conserved in animals. The neural circuits and brain regions involved in a fear response are quite similar across a variety of different animals, suggesting that it serves an important function and helps solve a recurrent, evolutionarily old problem.

Perhaps focusing on the universal aspect of fear can help us reason about it from a first-principles framework and better understand how it functions. Ralph Adolphs, one of the preeminent scholars on the science of fear, suggests something similar:

“a fruitful starting point is to begin with a primitive concept of fear that is shared across mammals (or even more broadly than that), and then investigate the variations on this theme.”

If we want to understand why psychological horror is so frightening, we need a better grasp on what makes something frightening in the first place. Most scholars with a background similar to mine begin their inquiry into the nature of fear by studying the behaviors of rats or the activation of the amygdala. However, my work attempts to explain fear by understanding scary stories.

This gives me a slightly different angle to work from than most scientists. In some ways, my angle is more observational and makes fewer assumptions. Neuroscientists and psychologists typically must make assumptions about what should be frightening in order to test questions about fear. If I want to know what parts of the brain light up when we are afraid, I must take a small set of highly controlled stimuli that I assume will elicit fear and expose people to those stimuli while I measure brain activation.

My approach is slightly different. I take what millions of people have already categorized as frightful and try to understand why those stories are categorized as such. What are the common features between Halloween, Saw, Dawn of the Dead, The Exorcist, and The Shining that make them terrifying?

Starting about a year ago, I began exploring a new definition of horror based on perceived formidability. This hypothesis was eventually refined and tested in an academic paper with Edgar Dubourg. We looked at nearly 600 films across several decades and found that films categorized as horror regularly had more formidable antagonists and less formidable protagonists.

While I think we got the foundation mostly correct, and it seems to explain horror better than other definitions, it doesn’t explain psychological horror very well. One answer to that is that psychological horror isn’t really horror (but that’s sort of a cop-out, isn’t it?). Another answer is that the basic computation isn’t exactly formidability, but something else that frequently loads onto it in stories.

I think I’ve discovered what that is.

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You might imagine we have a pretty good grasp on fear. If you search “fear” on Google Scholar, nearly 5 million results pop up. Thousands of researchers and philosophers have looked into the phenomena of fear over the centuries.

But do we truly know what fear is?

One of my favorite academic papers on fear is a moderated discussion on approaches to defining and investigating fear. In it, leading fear researcher Dean Mobbs interviews several top researchers who have spent their careers investigating fear. It includes viewpoints from neuroscience, animal behavior, cognitive science, and more.

The one thing that is immediately clear is that each of these researchers, despite having made major contributions on fear in their respective fields, have quite different ideas of what fear is and how we can conduct research to understand it.

Here are some of their comments on defining fear:

Ralph Adolphs:

Fear can only be defined based on observation of behavior in a natural environment, not neuroscience. In my view, fear is a psychological state with specific functional properties, conceptually distinct from conscious experience; it is a latent variable that provides a causal explanation of observed fear-related behaviors.

Michael Fanselow:

Fear is a neural–behavior system that evolved to protect animals against environmental threats to what John Garcia called the external milieu (as opposed to the internal milieu), with predation being the principal driving force behind that evolution (for example, as opposed to a toxin).

Lisa Feldman Barrett:

I hypothesize that every mental event, fear or otherwise, is constructed in an animal’s brain as a plan for assembling motor actions and the visceromotor actions that support them, as well as the expected sensory consequences of those actions. The function most frequently associated with fear is protection from threat. The corresponding definition of fear is an instance an animal’s brain constructs defensive actions for survival.

Joseph LeDoux:

Fear… is a conscious awareness that you are in harm’s way. Activation of subcortical circuits controlling behavioral and physiological responses that occur at the same time can intensify the experience by providing inputs to the cognitive circuits, but they do not determine the content of the experience. The experience itself, in my model, is the result of pattern completion of one’s personal fear schema, which gives rise to some variant of what you have come to know as one of the many varieties subsumed under the concept of ‘fear’ that you have built up by accumulating experiences over the course of your life.

Kerry Ressler:

‘Fear’ is the combination of defensive responses—physiological, behavioral and (perhaps in the case of humans) the conscious experience and interpretations of these responses—that are stimulated by specific stimuli.

Kay Tye:

Fear is an intensely negative internal state. It conducts orchestration of coordinated functions serving to arouse our peak performance for avoidance, escape or confrontation.

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Some of these researchers distinguish the conscious experience of fear from defensive behaviors, while others argue that fear is best understood as the amalgamation of behaviors and states associated with threat avoidance. In some cases threat is implied, and in others it’s directly stated. However, “threat” is never really defined.

So, is fear defined by defensive behaviors, a conscious experience, or both? Is it the outcome of a response, or is it the response itself? And if it is a response to threat (or the outcome of responses to threat), then what exactly is a “threat”?

My theory of fear comes from my perspective as a horror researcher. As a behavioral biologist trying to understand what makes scary stories “work” and what defines horror media, I have developed a theory of fear that is strongly influenced by researchers like LeDoux and Mobbs, but deviates in some important ways.

As an evolutionary scientist, my theory of fear also sits mostly at the computational level (a la Marr’s levels of analysis). In other words, I am interested in explaining what task or function fear is serving a biological creature.

I also am somewhat interested in the algorithmic level: the rules needed to achieve that function.

However, my theory leaves open the implementational level of explanation. That is to say, I am less interested in explaining the physical instantiation of fear (specific neural circuits, brain regions, etc.).

This is still very much a work in progress, so I welcome feedback. And as promised, my paid subscribers are some of the first to see my new ideas. I haven’t yet presented this elsewhere.

The model below is influenced heavily by Joseph LeDoux’s work on fear, as well as Paul Cisek’s approach to affordances. The idea also grew out of a paper I recently published with Edgar DuBourg, which I have written about before on my Substack. Bringing it full circle, that paper grew out of a Substack post I wrote. So, maybe this one will inspire an academic paper as well.

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I love coming across a new journal article that specifically focuses on morbid curiosity. During my PhD, I was pretty much the only researcher publishing on the topic. Now, there are several papers published each year tackling new and interesting questions related to the allure of the macabre.

I’ve long thought that there were two main routes to morbid curiosity. One is sensation-based. You enjoy the thrill of the hunt, so to speak, so media that portrays danger is a good way to get your kicks. You see this more often in teenagers and young adults, especially men.

The second route is the one my research has focused on more. This one is more epistemic. Stories of danger are great learning tools, and we are drawn to safe instances of learning about danger.

These two routes aren’t mutually exclusive; young people in particular may have both routes active, which leads to higher rates of morbid curiosity among teenagers and young adults.

In my dissertation, I speculated briefly on how this might be facilitated by the mechanisms proposed in Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (RST). RST is a biological theory of personality that explains behavior and emotions on the basis of systems that deal with sensitivity to reward, punishment, and conflicting goals.

The modern version of the RST proposes three systems: The fight-flight-freeze system (FFFS), the Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS).

A few dissertation excerpts below with my thinking about RST and the sensation-seeking pathway to morbid curiosity, ca. 2022:

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Side-facing eyes are advantageous if you are a prey animal because they allow you to have a panoramic view of your surroundings. It’s difficult to sneak up on something that can literally see nearly all around itself without moving its head. Deer, goats, sheep, cows, horses, rabbits, and most rodents have side-facing eyes to give them a leg up on predator detection.

Forward-facing eyes are good for predation because binocular vision allows for excellent depth perception, which helps with chasing and directing a pounce at fleeing prey. Big cats, canines, foxes, birds of prey, crocodiles, and most other things that would eat you if they could have forward-facing eyes.

Many arboreal animals also have forward-facing eyes. The binocular vision is a huge aid in judging distances between branches and helps coordinate grasping. Primates fall into this category of arboreal animals with forward-facing eyes, as do tree squirrels, sloths, and koalas.

Humans are a bit odd in that we have forward-facing eyes, like most primates, but we no longer inhabit the trees. It’s unclear exactly why human ancestors came down from the trees. Maybe forests became patchier. Maybe there was too much competition. Maybe there were simply more opportunities on the ground.

Whatever the reason, one thing seems likely: early humans were pretty vulnerable animals.

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If we are to imagine a single individual who is the perfect prototypical psychopath, we might imagine Anton Chigurh.

In fact, across hundreds of movies, forensic psychologists have named Anton Chigurh one of the realistic, if extreme, versions of a psychopath in film, saying that

…there are sufficient arguments and detailed information about his behavior in the film to obtain a diagnosis of active, primary, idiopathic psychopathy, incapacity for love, absence of shame or remorse, lack of psychological insight, inability to learn from past experience, cold-blooded attitude, ruthlessness, total determination, and lack of empathy. He seems to be affectively invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity.

While Chigurh may check all the boxes and represent the perfect psychopath, modern studies are beginning to challenge the notion of psychopathy as a unified psychological construct.

A recent network analysis paper looked at how measures from seven different psychopathy-related psychological instruments mapped onto sub-clinical psychopathy in 612 college students.

Network analysis allows researchers to see the interrelations and relative importance of subscales across a range of measures. It allows you to visualize and assess the “core” of several measures.

One of the most interesting things about this network analysis is that it suggests psychopathy is modular. The traits associated with psychopathy cluster together in meaningful ways, but they do not collapse into one indistinguishable mass. And perhaps most surprisingly, antisocial behavior and criminal tendencies are not nearly as central as many traditional theories of psychopathy would predict.

In forensic populations, criminality tends to dominate the picture because the samples themselves are partially defined by severe behavioral deviance. If you study incarcerated individuals or people selected for chronic antisocial behavior, then antisociality is naturally going to appear central to the construct.

Non-forensic samples like this one allow us to measure the interrelations between psychopathy-related traits outside of those selection pressures.

Looking at this network, there are three or four major regions.

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I had just been awarded a two-year grant to study how people make meaning out of witnessing violent interactions. As part of that project, I also organized a one-day conference that brought together scientists, philosophers, and artists who studied violence from very different angles.

That project ended up shaping much of what I’ve worked on since. It was also the intellectual seed for my research on morbid curiosity.

In working on this project, I stumbled upon a body of literature looking at the effects of exposure to extreme violence. Many of the studies involved field studies with members of violent militias that had been brought up as child soldiers; some of the harshest conditions one could imagine.

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But successful television horror is doing something different. In a recent interview, Blumhouse’s head of television, Melissa Aouate, described their strategy moving forward to focus on genre-blending shows like Wednesday and Stranger Things. Rather than relying on pure terror, the studio is exploring the wide range of sub-genres that horror can encompass. In fact, Blumhouse research suggests there are at least 24 different sub-genres of horror.

This shift makes sense. Many viewers still associate horror primarily with ghosts, slashers, and relentless dread. If someone believes they “hate horror,” they may avoid stories that could otherwise satisfy their appetite for mystery, danger, or the supernatural.

However, sub-genres are only useful to the extent they can be defined and then actioned on. To me, these sub-genres read more like themes or tonal variations rather than structural differences. They may not be the most refined guideposts for developing stories that align with a brand like Blumhouse but still reach audiences that might not otherwise be traditional horror hounds.

If you want to create a horror feeling show that doesn’t produce the terror that sometimes drives away large audiences, you need another measurement.

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Genres are a funny thing. Most don’t have a good definition or clear boundaries. Instead, they’re more of a “I know it when I see it” type of thing.

I’ve tried to rectify this when it comes to horror in a project than began as an idea on my Substack, was further refined into a sort of formula for horror, and ended up as a published academic article making an empirical case for this new definition of horror.

At the core of this new view of horror is protagonist vulnerability. In essence, a horror story might best be defined as a story where a vulnerable protagonist faces a much more formidable antagonist.

This gets us a more refined approach to defining the genre as a whole, and one that is grounded in our nature as biological organisms. But horror is a vast genre. In fact, it’s so broad that some have claimed horror is no longer a useful term with which to classify films. I’ve disagreed, arguing that horror is in fact the most informative genre when understood properly.

Once we understand horror as being a story about a highly vulnerable protagonist, we can begin to classify types of vulnerability that protagonist might face. I’d argue there are three good contenders for foundational vulnerability: Predator Formidability, Compromised Body, and Coalitional Instability. These three are also interesting because they rely on clearly evolved psychological mechanisms.

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Our ancestors would have come across a number of hostile people and animals throughout their lives. Quickly computing the odds of survival in the event of a conflict would have been an extremely va…

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Morbid Curiosity as an Adapted Motivation to Explore Ambiguous but Survival-Relevant Stimuli by David March was published in Psychological Review this week.

In it, the author operationalizes morbid curiosity as an

“automatically activated (though not necessarily nonconscious) attentional approach state toward ambiguous, but potentially survival-relevant stimuli with the integrated goals of (a) determining the nature of the stimuli (danger, opportunity, both, or neither) and (b) gathering immediate and future survival-relevant information.”

To me, this sounds a bit too broad for morbid curiosity. After all, many things unrelated to threat or danger can be survival-relevant (resources, threats, social partners). It sounds more like curiosity in general. The author clarifies a few lines later, saying that it is threat-ambiguous stimuli that trigger this state with the goal of identifying whether or not avoidance is necessary and if approach may be beneficial.

This sounds akin to what is going on in predator inspection. Here, we probably agree.

Setting up his theory as distinct, March argues that his conceptualization is anchored in an evolutionary rationale. I thought this was a strange argument, as my own work has very clearly anchored morbid curiosity in evolutionary rationale. This is crystal clear throughout my book (which, to be fair, March probably had not read before writing this paper).

So far, the distinction of this conceptualizes lies in the focus on resolving ambiguity or uncertainty. Interestingly, this reminded me of Frank McAndrew’s work on creepiness, which makes a very similar argument about ambiguity of threat. Unfortunately, the research on creepiness was not cited in the paper.

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The “science of horror” world is pretty small, so I’m usually up-to-date on what studies say. I don’t know of any studies looking at psychopathic traits and how well people sleep after horror films, nor any empirical st…

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A common answer to “what is horror about?” is that horror aims to horrify (produce a painful and intense fear, dread, or dismay in) its audience. Whereas other genres like romance or science fiction can be defined by their content, many argue that horror is defined by the feelings of the au…

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The most famous case of this probably came to mind immediately: Nazi Germany. Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men (1992) tells the story of Reserve Police Battalion 101: middle-aged, working-class men from Hamburg who, without prior inclination to violence, went on to massacre tens of thousands of Jewish civilians in Poland. Of course, many of the German soldiers were also ordinary men, drafted into a war that they may or may not have initially believed in. And yet, they took part in one of the most horrific acts of violence in memory.

Some of you may have thought of another well-known incident: the Rwandan Genocide. From April to July 1994, over 800,000 individuals were killed, mostly by neighbors, coworkers, and acquaintances wielding machetes. Many perpetrators were ordinary villagers responding to propaganda, fear, and social pressure.

These two cases alone warrant explanation, but I could go on and on with examples of how people with no prior history of violence can, in the right circumstances, be horribly violent. In fact, almost any battle, of which there have been tens of thousands throughout history, fits into this category.

How could a species so well known for its prosociality and cooperative nature also be so violent?

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It’s not as if this question hasn’t been asked before. It’s no coincidence that some of the most famous psychology experiments in history were 1) about aggression and violence, and 2) took place not long after WWII.

Most of these studies showed how easily people could descend into aggression. In the Robbers Cave Experiment, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif invited two groups of boys to what they believed was an ordinary summer camp. When the groups were introduced and placed in competition, cooperation gave way to hostility almost immediately. Taunts, raids, and full-on brawls broke out within days. Albert Bandura’s Bobo doll experiments demonstrated that aggression can be learned through observation. Children who watched an adult beat and shout at an inflatable doll later imitated the same behavior, often with creative embellishments.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale showed how easily people obey authority, even when it means harming others. Believing they were administering electric shocks to a stranger, many participants continued to escalate the voltage when instructed by an experimenter in a lab coat. Though the original findings are now mired in controversy, Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment also demonstrated how some people would behave aggressively when in the right context (or persuaded by the right person to do so).

The idea that evil could be situational was revolutionary. But as psychology evolved, attention turned to the people who seemed predisposed to aggression — those for whom cruelty appeared to be stable rather than situational. The most well-known example of this is psychopathy.

In modern psychology, psychopathy isn’t thought of as a single diagnosis so much as a constellation of traits aligned along two domains. One of those is emotional and interpersonal and includes traits like superficial charm, manipulativeness, lack of empathy, and shallow emotion. The other is behavioral: things like impulsivity, irresponsibility, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior.

Across multiple studies, psychopathy is strongly connected to aggressive and violent behavior. Those who score higher in psychopathy, using clinical or sub-clinical measures, are more likely to engage in violent behavior. Psychopathic traits are also highly heritable. Estimates range from 40-70%, depending on the specific measure used.

So let’s revisit our initial question: How could a species so well known for its prosociality and cooperative nature also be so violent? Is it because of relatively stable traits like psychopathy, or can anyone become violent? Maybe a bit of both.

I’d argue that like every other animal on earth, some humans are born with aggressive tendencies that make them more likely to commit violence, including violence many find immoral or reprehensible. I’d also argue that this tendency is influenced by social and contextual situations.

Most human traits work like that; that is, they are designed (genetically, via Natural Selection) to respond to specific input signals and produce certain behavioral outputs. They are facultative.

None of that is particularly controversial, but my conclusion for how humans can be so violent might be.

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You’ve got maybe two hours before bed. As you scroll through your options you land, inexplicably, on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

As you watch Leatherface chase terrified strangers through rural Texas, you take another bite of cold pasta, and the frustration in your chest loosens. You think to yourself, “I guess my day could have been worse.”

An experience like this might reasonably be interpreted as schadenfreude — taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune. However, something more interesting might be going on. Rather than leading you to feel joy at another’s misfortune, horror could be reality-checking the seriousness of life’s little difficulties. In fact, getting the creeps could help prevent trauma concept creep.

Concept Creep

Concept creep refers to the expansion of what counts as a particular thing. In an elegantly simple study published in Science, researchers demonstrated how frequency alone can influence what category we assign something to. They showed people a series of 1000 dots ranging from very purple to very blue and asked for each dot, “is this dot blue?” After 200 trials, they surreptitiously reduced the frequency of blue dots for the experimental group and asked the same question.

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I’ve been doing daily press interviews for the past week or so and have several planned all across the month of October, including …

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“My older cousin made me watch The Exorcist. I couldn’t sleep for days.”

“We snuck a copy of The Ring into a sleepover. I think we all cried.”

“It was Jaws with my dad. I didn’t swim in the ocean for five years.”

Your first horror movie can be a formative experience. You're told it will be scary, you brace yourself, and you endure it. Afterwards, you talk about it, laugh about it, and come out the other side a little bit changed. Sometimes a little bit (mentally) tougher. Sometimes a little more bonded to the people who watched it with you. Always remembering it.

Many people watch their first scary movie around the beginning of adolescence, which is sort of a weird developmental period. You can’t yet do adult things like drive or vote, but you’re not quite a kid anymore.

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I’m planning to write a new post on the science behind the sci-fi genre (similar to my post about the science behind the hor…

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