Nightmare Fuel review: The psychology that underpins horror films

Nightmare Fuel

Nina Nesseth

Tor Nightfire

I HAVE friends who are so afraid of sharks that they won’t swim in the sea – no matter how enclosed the harbour, or full the beach. When I went cage diving with great whites last year, they were appalled. Yet at the same time, I noticed, they couldn’t wait to see the footage.

This illustrates the idiosyncratic and inexplicable nature of fear. While our desires tend to run along consistent lines – love, happiness, health and wealth – what frightens us is often intensely personal and even perverse.

So how do film-makers petrify their audiences? And why do we keep watching? Nina Nesseth sets out to find answers in Nightmare Fuel: The science of horror films. The science writer and scary movie buff unites her passions in this book, which is equally a popular science look at the psychology that underpins screen scares and a love letter to the horror genre.

The two, after all, have to be assessed together: as Nesseth points out in her introduction, the mark of a good horror film isn’t “was it good?”, but “was it scary?”.

Since director Georges Méliès depicted the devil in 1896’s The Devil’s Castle, credited as the first horror film, there is very little that hasn’t been played for scares, from the obviously threatening (serial killers, outer space) to the previously innocuous (clowns).

Given the breadth of the genre, Nesseth defines horror by its promise “to make you feel fear”. Through research, interviews and case studies, she explores the ways it delivers on this, from sound design and editing to simulated blood, starting with the impact of horror on the brain and body.

Humans evolved the ability to process and remember fear – along with responses such as fight, flight, freeze or vomit – because those who detect danger quickly are more likely to survive. We remain so alert that researchers have found that even subliminal images of snakes can activate a threat response.

Clearly fear mechanisms make good evolutionary sense. What doesn’t is why we enthusiastically trigger them. The essential paradox of horror films has been explained as “benign masochism”, akin to eating hot chillies or skydiving: the pleasure of venturing past our innate fears and cautions in search of new experiences and sensations.

But horror movies play on our psychology, too. As Nesseth writes, the scare is effective “because you know it’s coming”, making you complicit in your pleasurable anticipation, in your own terror.

Here, the science of scary movies goes beyond biological responses and cognitive processing to cunning storytelling. Terrifying an audience, whether by designing a compelling monster or channelling societal unease, requires a lot of knowledge about emotions and empathy, say Nesseth’s interviewees.

Nesseth also explores the perennial question of whether screen violence desensitises or even primes us for it in real life, but she draws no easy conclusions because the research is too patchy. Yet the decade-by-decade change she shows in what scares us is revealing about the concerns of the times.

She points to Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, as well as later pregnancy horrors released after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision on abortion. Then there are recent culturally informed films such as Jordan Peele’s Get Out (see more in Don’t Miss, right) and Ari Aster’s Midsommar. At the start of the covid-19 pandemic, there was a spike in streams of medical thriller Contagion. This year, (Alex Garland’s Men skewers toxic masculinity.

Horror films, Nesseth suggests, may be a way of processing reality at a seemingly safe remove. As she writes: “You can repeat to yourself, ‘It’s only a movie’.”