Horror Villains are Cats

The history of human predation and how it influences features of horror villains

About a week ago I was responding to some comments on a scientific article I had submitted for publication. In the article, I made a remark about how horror villains tap into a primal fear that evolved over millions of years of our ancestors being hunted by creatures with sharp teeth and large claws.

One of the reviewers commented on this and said that it seemed like a “just-so” story and that several alternative explanations existed. They mentioned that knives make for closer, more terrifying kills, and that a movie where the villains sprayed bullets from a distance would be “terribly boring.” The reviewer went on to say that given our deep-seated, perhaps evolutionary, fear of snakes and spiders, you would imagine more horror villains would have these traits. Although a few horror movies do have these creatures, possessing such elements (e.g., multiple appendages, 8 eyes, snake-like bodies), it is rare for the major horror antagonists to have them.

This particular reviewer actually gave good feedback and was overall positive about the article. However, I obviously disagreed with their comment about horror villains. So, I thought I’d expand on that comment a little more here (and probably in a scientific article soon, because it’s really interesting and I’ve got a lot to say about it.)

Let’s start with my argument that horror villains tap into evolutionarily old fears of predators, then we’ll look more closely at the reviewer’s comments.

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Man the Hunted

You’ve probably heard the phrase “man the hunter” before. The phrase comes from the name of a scientific symposium (and subsequent book) held at The University of Chicago in the 1960’s. Organized by acclaimed anthropologists Richard Lee and Irv DeVore, the symposium covered the lifestyles of hunter gatherers and how they could shed light on human ancestors, particularly those in the Pleistocene (the time period of about 2.5 million BC to 10,000 BC). The Pleistocene era is especially important in human evolution because a lot of our species’ unique features evolved during this time.

About four decades after the Man the Hunter symposium, Donna Hart and Robert Sussman published a book entitled “Man the Hunted.” Hart and Sussman argue that humans are no more hunters than they are hunted. In other words, yes we’ve evolved to be hunters, but we’ve also evolved as a species that was hunted. During the same time that all of the evolutionary changes were occurring that made us better hunters, we were also evolving features that helped us escape the hungry megafauna of the Pleistocene.

A Quick Primer on Carnivores

The word carnivore means flesh-eating, referring to the meat-eating diet of some animals. In zoology, carnivore refers to the order Carnivora, which refers only to placental mammals who specialize in meat eating. The modern day order of Carnivora includes just under 280 species. The terrestrial animals that make up Carnivora include dogs, bears, raccoons, martens, cats, hyenas, mongooses, and genets/civets. There are a few aquatic families too, including seals and walruses.

We’ll focus here on the terrestrial carnivores, and only on those large enough to prey on humans consistently: Hyenas, wolves, and big cats. We won’t focus much on bears since there’s not much evidence that bears have preyed on humans throughout history.

Because they specialize in eating meat, animals in the order Carnivora have some features in common, including sharp teeth attached to strong jaws, long, sharp claws, and forward facing eyes. They usually possess some enhanced senses, such as increased senses, such as better sense of smell (e.g., wolves) or low-light vision (e.g., cats). Behaviorally, most predators are either stealthy stalkers (e.g., cats) or coursers/pursuers (e.g., wolves). They also do the bulk of their hunting after the sun sets to maximize their stealth and the element of surprise.

These anatomical and behavioral traits have evolved in an arms race with prey animals, making the carnivores well-designed hunting machines.

While we do have some big carnivores today, such as tigers, lions, wolves, and bears, our stone-age ancestors has many more — and much larger — carnivores to worry about. Of all the carnivores, Felids (cats) in particular were a danger to human ancestors. Much of their evolution took place in the same timespan as human evolution, and humans have been on the Felid dinner menu for a very long time.

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Carnivores of Horror

So we’ve had a quick survey of carnivorous predators that have preyed upon humans and their ancestors for millions of years. We know that they are finely tuned predators, wielding sharp natural weaponry, enhanced senses, and either extreme speed or, more often in the case of human predators, stealth.

Now let’s take inventory of some of the more popular horror villains. We’ve got old-school monsters such as vampires and werewolves, but we have many more classic human-like villains including Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Ghostface, Freddy Krueger, Pennywise, and Leatherface.

Now let’s think about the weaponry these guys have.

Dracula: Oversized canine teeth.

Werewolf: Large claws and large teeth.

Michael Myers: Slicing knife.

Jason Voorhees: Machete.

Pennywise: Dagger-like teeth.

Freddy Krueger: Razor-claw glove.

Leatherface: Chainsaw with sharp metal teeth on its chain.

Ghostface: Hunting knife

While some of the horror villains do get creative with their kills, their signature weapon is always something big and sharp. This feels obvious to us — what else would they be holding?

Well, literally anything. Any blunt object would work. A crowbar, baseball bat, plank, golf club. Most of these guys are big enough, they could just use their bare hands. If they really wanted to be efficient, why not use a gun? Why on earth would you use a chainsaw to kill someone? It’s big, heavy, loud, and can run out of gas, rendering it useless. It’s literally the worst killing weapon out there. But it sure is scary.

And what about their behaviors? In addition to large, sharp killing weapons, nearly all great horror monsters are sneaky. You might not guess it from their size, but think back to the movies. Freddy sneaks up on you in your dreams. Michael pops out around corners when you’re least expecting it. Jason, despite his humongous size, always surprises his victims. Even Leatherface, with his rumbling chainsaw, gets the jump on people. In fact, the jump scare itself is part and parcel of horror. It relies on the fact that the villain is stealthy and an expert stalker.

Oh. and of course, we can’t forget: horror villains are nocturnal predators. They all hunt at night.

Horror villains are basically big cats.

Wes Craven understood this, too. When asked how he came up with Freddy’s claw glove, he said,

“I was also looking for a primal fear which is embedded in the subconscious of people of all cultures… [One of those] is the claw of an animal, like a saber-tooth tiger reaching with its tremendous hooks. I transposed it into a human hand.”

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A Response to Reviewer 2

I’m already at 1000 words, and there’s a lot more I want to say. For example, about why we love big scary horror villains and how this relates to the popularity of big cats. Or how interesting it is that the two types of predators who hunted us the most — felids and canids — are the two we domesticated most widely as pets, and how morbid curiosity probably played a role in that.

But, I’ll have to leave those for another time. As any good scientist knows, I can’t forget to respond to Reviewer 2.

1. Knives make for closer, more terrifying kills.

Yes, knives make for closer kills. Does that make it more terrifying? I’m not sure. This doesn’t necessarily seem right to me. I don’t think the kill itself is more terrifying when Myers sticks you with a kitchen knife. What it does make scarier (maybe) is the pursuit. Of course, the pursuit is literally what predators force. That itself is taps into human anti-predator behavior.

Let’s be charitable and say knife kills are more terrifying. We then have to ask, “why is this more terrifying?”

You can probably guess my response: Because they resemble the big teeth that preyed upon our ancestors for millions of years. In other words, if the reviewer is correct, it’s because he’s giving a proximate explanation, and I’m giving an ultimate explanation. See here for more on that distinction.

2. A movie where the villains sprayed bullets from a distance would be terribly boring.

I don’t really have much to say to this except, no it wouldn’t be? This is literally the plot of most action movies, which are by definition exciting and not boring. It also doesn’t take much imagination to envision yourself in a situation where someone has a gun and is hunting you vs a situation where someone has a knife and is hunting you. Which situation is scarier?

3. Given our deep-seated, perhaps evolutionary, fear of snakes and spiders, you would imagine more horror villains would have traits like multiple appendages, 8 eyes, or snake-like bodies.

This is a fair point, but possibly mistaken. There is a decent literature on how snakes have a premium on attention. And most primates learn to fear snakes very quickly. But a few things worth noting here.

First, snakes are not our predators. Snakebites can be deadly, but they happen when we accidentally come upon a snake. Snakes and spiders don’t hunt humans. That’s an important distinction.

The whole point of the sharp weaponry is to create what’s called a supernormal stimulus — something that mimics a natural feature that elicits some response. Large, sharp weapons are supernormal stimuli for teeth and claws. Eight legs on a horror monsters would not be supernormal; it would just be an eight-legged monster.

The bigger issue, perhaps, is that an 8-legged, multi-eyed, or snake-like bodied horror monster would just look absurd. It would be one of those campy horror movies from the 80s that inspire more laughs than screams. There needs to be an element of realism for it to be scary. You have to let people believe that this *could* be real. For reasons that have to do with how our mind works beyond the scope of this post, it’s easier to believe a seemingly unkillable man with a machete is out there than it is to believe a man with 8 legs is out there.

A final point worth noting is that my claim about horror monsters isn’t limited to the horror genre; it extends to any supernormal villain. Scary monsters are part of imaginary worlds across the world and throughout time. To that point, snakes and snake-like creatures fill the pages of ancient mythology and religious texts. Dragons, anyone?