Modern Horror and Our Minds: How Fear Shapes Movies

Written by Alexander Giampietro

Modern horror movies have the effect of inflicting fear upon the audience that strikes them to the core. Through a psychological lens, this phenomenon is deeply rooted in the core of how we think.

During a showing of a horror film, a door appears on the screen as the camera pans in on the main character approaching it. Carl Sandburg, an American poet, once wrote that “an open door says ‘come in,’ a closed one says ‘who are you?’” 

The audience in the theater knows that what is on the other side of the door can’t hurt them, so why is there hesitation? 

Why is the audience tensing up for the moment the door opens? 

The moment passes, the door opens and there’s nothing on the other side. That’s when the audience realizes it was just a door and, more importantly, one that’s on a screen, proving that it is not real. 

Modern horror today uses a lot of themes and tactics such as fears based on reality, that are meant to trigger our instinctual fight-or-flight response. 

During the slasher era of the 1970s and ‘90s, many filmmakers started implementing ideas of real-life fears which would be twisted and personified. This is the beginning of a period I like to define as modern horror – when the cheesy Universal monsters and classic spooky tropes began to become less popular and the method of playing on popular fears became the standard. By highlighting some examples producers have used over the decades, this will be a dissection of how modern horror movies from the late 1970s to the 2000s pray on the fears we live with every day.

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The Slasher

“Halloween,” released in 1978, paved the way for this era of horror movies. The term “slasher movie” was coined after the release of “Psycho” in 1960, due to the common theme of a pursuer chasing after the main characters with blades. 

This style of horror prays on the human fear of the intruder and the grotesque reality that there are people capable of doing such things as murder and kidnapping, which becomes a natural instinctual fear of the safe becoming unsafe. John Carpenter, the director of the original “Halloween,” has stated in multiple interviews that Michael Myers' design was meant to be as "soulless" as possible. The design of Myers’ mask and suit was intended to rob the slasher of his immediately identifiable human characteristics. 

With that, his physical attributes were distorted, with his unusually tall height and wide frame to make him feel only vaguely human. This robs the audience of any sense of humanity when they see the character and the later films don’t refer to Myers as a person anymore and more of an entity. The lack of humanity is what makes slashers like Myers capable of inducing fear into the audience of the film. Arianna Andreski, a counselor and therapist for the Cleveland Clinic, shared some of her insights relating to the fear of the movies during the slasher era.

”Michael Myers plays on that fear of stalking, that there is a person capable of doing something like that,” Andreski said. “It’s what you imagine when you're going to sleep and look out your window, and that kind of feeling sticks with people.” 

The “Other”

In the mid-2000s horror, the slasher era began to fade due to the rise of the World Wide Web and the devastating attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 – a tragedy felt around the world.

While the world lived in fear, filmmakers took advantage of the fact many individuals began to distrust their neighbors. 

Differences between individuals began to simmer and the anxiety of people that looked or acted different began to rise. While xenophobic in nature, it was often for the purpose of personal safety and out of fear of others – the acknowledgment that tragedies, like 9/11, can happen anywhere. 

The fear of difference and lack of understanding of other beings led to the rise of this xenophobic frame of mind where different characteristics from that of our own meant danger.   

What this did was open the doors to filmmakers and allow them to prey on the human fear of the “other.” The “other” is simply another living creature we don’t completely understand and, through that lens, Andreski began speaking about a movie she’s personally scared of: “The Grudge.”

“‘The Grudge’ was something that was hard for me to stomach because I didn’t know what it was, and it had a kid,” Andreski said. “The reason it all disturbs me so much is because I can’t fathom a child being capable of that, I don’t understand it and it doesn’t make sense.”

This how or why is what defines the fear of the “other.”

The Grudge’s appearance also plays a factor in that. The apparition’s appearance is that of a pale woman of Asian descent with her face covered by her long, greasy hair, similar to the Onryo creature from “The Ring.” This appearance played on people’s xenophobia and, through her nature as a ghost, she appears to be something that isn’t quite human. Unlike the slasher era, “The Grudge” is not registered as human to our minds in the context of fear. It’s a ghost of the past with its child beside it, something that shouldn’t exist by reality and science. Adding the fact that it appears to be a mother and child that are haunting the people, it's much more disturbing that something that looks like a child is capable of vile acts such as possession and murder. Our brains cannot grasp the existence of a ghost, and a murderous one at that, as our minds cannot grasp something we do not fully understand, and that is the root of the fear we feel. Filmmakers feed on the fear of not trusting your neighbor to introduce us to concepts we don’t fully understand. That is the horror of it, that lack of understanding is where the fear begins to introduce itself. 

Andreski then explained that the root of these phenomena has to do with the limbic system of the brain. 

The limbic system was one of the first parts of the human brain to develop. It’s what allows us to feel fear – it triggers the animal instincts that are within every single one of us. 

But as humans evolved, more portions of the brain began to take shape. This is what allows us to understand what is real and what is not. “A lot of other animals can be scared by stuff that is clearly not real to us. They lack the parts of the brain we have that allow us to discern what is real and what’s on the movie screen,” Andreski said. “So when a movie implements certain film techniques that make us feel scared, it’s the limbic system that is targeted through deeply rooted fears.”When you contextualize all of this, with the limbic system in mind, the fears we feel when we watch these films are mind games filmmakers use to induce these responses. 

Through our minds triggering these fight-or-flight responses, movies begin to blend fiction with reality in our own minds, whether it be something we don’t quite fully understand or an intruder trying to bring us harm.

These instinctual triggers are unavoidable – that’s the reason behind the “other” and the slasher. Both tap into primal fear rather than rationalization; filmmakers simply had to activate that instinct and let it play out on screen.