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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I can imagine that scenario was scary enough in itself, and the screaming probably made it even scarier.

This got me thinking about screams. What are they for? Why do they sound like they do? And why are they the face (or sound) of horror?

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Screaming bookends a human life. It’s the first behavior we display, and, for the unlucky among us, it may also be the last. A scream is perhaps the most difficult sound to ignore, and has undoubtedly been structured over evolutionary time to travel a long distance, cut through background noise, and hijack the attention of anyone it reaches.

Many animals have alarm calls. One of the key functions is to alert other members that a threat has been detected, in part to warn others around you and in part to recruit help to the caller. Many social animals use specific alarm calls for specific predators. For example, vervet monkeys have distinct calls for snakes, leopards, and eagles that elicit protection behaviors specific to those predators.

Human screams aren’t so specialized. While we may scream out of fear, anger, or surprise, we don’t have distinct screams for different categories of threat in the way that some other social mammals do. It’s possible that our ability to communicate information through language rendered distinct alarm calls unnecessary. However, the scream itself still serves a useful function due to its specific acoustic qualities and deeper evolutionary roots that act as a powerful, instinctual signal.

In this way, human screams are perhaps a little more selfish than the alarm calls of vervet monkeys, marmots, and other social creatures. Our alarm calls say less about what others should do to protect themselves and instead focus more on the distress of the screamer.

Emotional intensity seems to be the common denominator in human screams. A bigger surprise, scarier threat, and more frustrating situation are more likely to provoke a scream. It seems to me that this connects to some of my thoughts about vulnerability or helplessness as the core of fear.

So, why do we scream?

Out of Fear: When something is more dangerous, you become more vulnerable and helpless. Consequently, your likelihood of screaming goes up.

Out of Surprise: When something suddenly surprises you, like a jump scare in a horror movie, you scream because it has caught you off-guard. Being caught unprepared for an event makes you vulnerable.

Out of Anger: Even frustration follows this pattern. You try again and again to bend something to your will, and your repeated failures signal one thing: your helplessness in effecting change. This is probably why babies cry so much. Everything is a monumental challenge when you’re an infant.

Out of Joy?: It’s less common that humans scream out of joy, but it does happen. I think this is probably due to surprise rather than happiness per se. When we scream out in joy, it’s usually because something good suddenly happened that we did not expect to happen — we see a loved one unexpectedly, match our numbers to the lottery drawing, or have an expensive gift unveiled to us. The first input to the human mind in this instance is “schema change/surprise,” which can trigger a scream. It’s moments later that we make sense of the surprise and tag it as fortuitous.

Perhaps, then, screams don’t specify emotions or specific threats, but instead signify vulnerability. We are often vulnerable due to fear, hence the association between the two, but we can also feel vulnerable in the face of a surprise (good, bad, or neutral) and due to frustration with a situation we cannot change.

The prototypical “fear face” may be a precursor to a scream. Your mouth is widened, ready to let out a screeching alarm call to those not within your line of sight. And, as with the scream, it may signal vulnerability rather than fear per se.

We identify the fear face and screaming with horror, but we may be confused about the causation. While it’s often assumed that these three things are fused together by fear, they may instead be wed by vulnerability.

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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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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what defines horror, and that has inevitably shaped how I watch new films.

I watched Until Dawn last night, and a few points stood out to me. I haven’t played the game, so I’m not commenting on whether it’s a faithful adaptation of the game (it’s probably not). I’m also not commenting on the acting or dialogue. I’m only discussing the core elements of the film that make it a pretty solid horror story.

Spoilers below.

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I recently read an op-ed in Creepy Catalog claiming that Saw isn’t a horror film, but is actually a psychological thriller. The author claims it’s closer to David Fincher’s Seven than it is to Hostel.

His central claim is that Saw functions as a thriller due to the mystery/puzzle element at the core of the film:

“Each of the films offers a mystery to be solved, while they serve as pieces of a larger puzzle. The first movie sets this all up, though, posing the crucial question: Why is Jigsaw doing what he’s doing? It’s not like certain horror franchises where someone puts on a hockey mask or a mold of William Shatner’s face and murders people because they’re – checks notes – simply evil. There’s a purpose to what he does and it’s about finding out his motivations here.”

He backs up his claim by quoting Saw director James Wan, who said in an interview,

“I found it really kind of lazy. Leigh [Whannell] and I took three years to write the script, to make this crafted thriller, but it seemed like everyone was focusing on the trap aspect of it.”

Even the Saw producer and Godfather of horror, Jason Blum, had this to say:

“The original Saw was really a detective thriller that happened to have two elements you don’t see in a traditional detective thriller: a huge twist and a gruesome premise.”

The author closes his argument by saying, “Put the traps to the side and take a look at the story to see what it’s really about.”

I agree! Let’s break down the story using the Horror Formula and see where it falls.

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If you haven’t ordered your copy of Morbidly Curious yet, Barnes & Noble is having a 25% off sale for all book preorders July 8-11.

You can use the code PREORDER25 to get the discount.

This means you can get M…

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Roger Ebert, perhaps the most well-known movie critic of his generation, said,

“It’s always the same: The girl is at home alone, menacing attacker, the ringing telephone, the wide, frightened eyes. I think there’s something terribly wrong when an image like that becomes the building block for an entire movie genre.”

Ebert continued his rant, claiming that these films “hate women.” His peer, film critic Gene Siskel, agreed, claiming that the popularity of the final girl was a “primordial response of some very sick people.”

Why is it so often a young woman who’s chosen to play the hunted in a horror film? Why not have someone stronger, better prepared, and harder to kill?

Many critics and film scholars point to misogyny or bizarre psychoanalytical explanations when trying to explain the enduring appeal of the Final Girl. In a recent paper, Edgar Dubourg and I offer a new explanation rooted in psychology and evolutionary logic, and supported by several studies on hundreds of films.

The premise of the paper may sound familiar to some of my readers; it’s based on a Substack post I wrote a few months back.

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In my new book, Morbidly Curious, I have a whole chapter on how kids are morbidly curious—perhaps more than adults. I open the chapter with a story…

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