The Horror Formula

A science-based formula for creating horror

What really matters in a horror film?

A lot goes into making the perfect film. You have to get the sound, lighting, cinematography, editing, story, and acting just right.

And, if you want it to be a horror film, you have to get the “threat to the protagonist” right.

I’ve argued that horror is, at it’s core, about an imbalanced relationship between the antagonist and protagonist. Yes, it’s still important for the overall product that it has some jump scares. Yes, the spooky atmosphere matters. But the central feature of a horror film is a protagonist who is relatively helpless in the face of a threatening antagonist.

It’s worth reading my longer treatment of this first. But the short answer for why this matters is that this relationship creates a predator-prey interaction between the protagonist and antagonist. Predator-prey interactions are the most powerful fear-eliciting situations for an animal. Fear’s oldest and most valuable function is to keep you out of the jaws of something bigger and/or stronger than you.

In most cases in nature, prey are pretty helpless against predators. I don’t mean they don’t stand a chance at surviving. Prey animals have evolved sophisticated behaviors and physiological features to help them escape predators. But those features promote exactly that: Escape.

Prey are often helpless when directly confronted with a predator. The prey’s strategy relies heavily on early detection and escape, which is dictated to some extent by the environment. As a rule of thumb, predators want an interaction to take place and prey do not.

From “Space, Time, and Fear: Survival Computations along Defensive Circuits” by Mobbs et al., 2020.

So, if we could get an assessment of how formidable a protagonist (prey) is, how formidable an antagonist (predator) is, and how precarious the environment is, we might be able to quantify horror. Greater imbalance in favor of the antagonist = greater horror.

The Horror Formula

I’ve created a simple formula that calculates how much of a horror story a plot is. But first, a few caveats: