Evolution, Cognition, and Horror
A Précis of Why Horror Seduces (2017)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.37083Keywords:
Evolutionary Literary Studies, Literary Darwinism, Film Studies, Horror, Cognitive ScienceAbstract
Why are people attracted to scary entertainment, to stories and leisure activities designed to evoke negative emotion? How does such entertainment work, and why does it work? Why do we respond with genuine fear to flickering light on a screen? Why do our stories brim with danger and horror and monsters, sometimes far-fetched and utterly implausible monsters? The culmination of that research, so far, is my 2017 monograph Why Horror Seduces. In this article, I will introduce that work, which is the first book-length study of horror from an evolutionary perspective. After a brief introduction to the subject matter, I explain the main theoretical assumptions of the book. I then give a few examples of evolutionary horror theory in analytical and interpretative practice and offer some considerations on the adaptive function of horror. Finally, I reflect on the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary work and point the way toward future studies.
References
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Asma, Stephen T. 2015. “Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror”. Social Research: An International Quarterly 81(4): 941–68.
Bahna, Vladimír. 2015. “Explaining Vampirism: Two Divergent Attractors of Dead Human Concepts”. Journal of Cognition and Culture 15(3-4): 285–98. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342151
Barrett, Deirdre. 2010. Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran their Evolutionary Purpose. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. https://doi.org/10.1656/058.010.0121
Barrett, H. Clark. 2005. “Adaptations to Predators and Prey”. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss, 200–223. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470939376.ch7
Barrett, Justin L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2012-0011
Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall. 2010. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press.
Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Boyer, Pascal, and Brian Bergstrom. 2011. “Threat-Detection in Child Development: An Evolutionary Perspective”. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 35(4): 1034–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.08.010
Cantor, Joanne. 2009. “Fright Reactions to Mass Media”. In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, eds Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 287–303. Mahwah, NJ and London: LEA.
Carroll, Joseph. 1995. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
Carroll, Joseph. 2006. “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature”. Philosophy and Literature 30(1): 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2006.0005
Carroll, Joseph. 2010. “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism”. New Literary History 41(1): 53–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.0.0144
Carroll, Joseph. 2011. Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Carroll, Joseph. 2012. “An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick”. Critical Inquiry 38(2): 405–410. https://doi.org/10.1086/662751
Carroll, Joseph, Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, Alexandra Regina Kratschmer, Luseadra McKerracher, Felix Riede et al. 2017. “Biocultural Theory: The Current State of Knowledge”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 11(1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000058
Carroll, Joseph, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson and Daniel J. Kruger. 2012. Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002419_9
Carroll, Joseph, John A. Johnson, Catherine Salmon, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Mathias Clasen and Emelie Jonsson. 2017. “A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs about Human Nature, Culture, and Science”. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 1(1): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.1.1.2
Carroll, Noe?l. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.
Cherry, Brigid. 2009. Horror. London: Routledge.
Clasen, Mathias. 2012a. “Attention, Predation, Counterintuition: Why Dracula Won’t Die”. Style 46(3): 378–98.
Clasen, Mathias. 2012b. “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories”. Review of General Psychology 16(2): 222–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027918
Clasen, Mathias. 2017. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190666507.001.0001
Clasen, M., Andersen, M., and U. Schjoedt. 2019. “Adrenaline Junkies and White-Knucklers: A Quantitative Study of Fear Management in Haunted House Visitors”. Poetics 73: 61–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.01.002
Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., and J. Johnson. 2018. “Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey on the Psychology of Scary Media”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences online ahead of print. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ebs0000152
Curtis, V., and A. Biran. 2001. “Dirt, Disgust, and Disease. Is Hygiene in Our Genes?” Perspectives in Biological Medicine 44(1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2001.0001
Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer. 2016–. Stranger Things. Netflix.
Feinstein, Justin S., Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio and Daniel Tranel. 2011. “The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear”. Current Biology 21(1): 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042
Friedkin, William. 1973. The Exorcist. USA: Warner Bros., Hoya Productions.
Gilmore, David D. 2003. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203226
Goodheart, Eugene. 2009. Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852910x494484
Gottschall, Jonathan. 2010. “Literature, Science, and a New Humanities”. In Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, 457–68. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Grodal, Torben Kragh. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371314.001.0001
Gross, James J., and Robert W. Levenson. 1995. “Emotion Elicitation Using Films”. Cognition and Emotion 9(1): 87–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939508408966
Haselton, Martie G., and Daniel Nettle. 2006. “The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases”. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(1): 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3
Hoffner, Cynthia A., and Kenneth J. Levine. 2005. “Enjoyment of Mediated Fright and Violence: A Meta-Analysis”. Media Psychology 7(2): 207–237. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532785xmep0702_5
King, Stephen. 1981. It. New York: New American Library.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens. 2016. “Evil Origins: A Darwinian Genealogy of the Popcultural Villain”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 10(2): 109–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057
Kramnick, Jonathan. 2011. “Against Literary Darwinism”. Critical Inquiry 37(2): 315–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/657295
LeDoux, Joseph E. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Lyons, Izzy. 2018. “Horror Fiction Sales at Four-Year High after a Glut of Supernatural Series and Films”. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/14/horrorfictionsales-four-year-high-glut-supernatural-series-films/ (accessed 29 July 2018).
Marks, Isaac M., and Randolph M. Nesse. 1994. “Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety Disorders”. Ethology and Sociobiology 15(5-6): 247–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(94)90002-7
McAndrew, Francis T., and Sara S. Koehnke. 2016. “On the Nature of Creepiness”. New Ideas in Psychology 43: 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.03.003
McCort, Jessica R. 2016. “Why Horror? (Or, The Importance of Being Frightened)”. In Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Jessica R. McCort, 3–36. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496806444.003.0001
Muschietti, Andy. 2017. It. California: Warner Bros.
Nesse, Randolph M. 2006. “The Smoke Detector Principle”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 935(1): 75–85.
New, Joshua, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. 2007. “Category-Specific Attention for Animals Reflects Ancestral Priorities, Not Expertise”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(42): 16598–603. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0703913104
Nordlund, Marcus. 2007. Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Öhman, Arne, and Susan Mineka. 2001. “Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning”. Psychological Review 108(3): 483–522. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.108.3.483
Peele, Jordan. 2017. Get Out. California: Universal Pictures.
Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.
Poole, Steven. 2016. “The Great Clown Panic of 2016: ‘A Volatile Mix of Fear and Contagion’”. The Guardian, 31 October. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/31/the-great-clown-panic-of-2016-a-volatile-mix-of-fear-and-contagion (accessed 31 July 2018).
Ponder, Stacy. 2017. “It’s Never Been a Better Time to Love Horror Games”. Kotaku, 24 October. https://kotaku.com/its-never-been-a-better-time-to-love-horror-games-1819802531 (accessed 29 July 2018).
Saler, Benson, and Charles A. Ziegler. 2005. “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the Mind”. Philosophy and Literature 29(1): 218–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2005.0011
Sanchez, Eduardo, and Daniel Myrick. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. USA: Haxan Films.
Scott, Ridley. 1979. Alien. USA, Great Britain: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions Ltd.
Smith, Murray. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790648.003.0002
Stoker, Bram. [1897] 1997. Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism. 1st edn, A Norton critical edition. New York: W.W. Norton. Originally published in 1897.
The Numbers. 2018. “Box Office Performance History for Horror Movies”. The Numbers. https://www.the-numbers.com/market/genre/Horror (accessed 7 July 2018).
Thompson, Stith. 1946. The Folktale. New York: The Dryden Press.
Tinbergen, Niko. 1948. “Social Releasers and the Experimental Method Required for their Study”. Wilson Bulletin 60(1): 6–51.
Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 2001. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts”. SubStance 30(1-2): 6–27.
Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 2008. “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables”. In Handbook of Emotions, eds Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 114–37. New York: Guilford. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355617711000506
Tybur, Joshua M., Debra Lieberman, Robert Kurzban and Peter DeScioli. 2013. “Disgust: Evolved Function and Structure”. Psychological Review 120(1): 65–84. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030778
Wengrow, D. 2014. The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.34148
Yorzinski, Jessica L., Michael J. Penkunas, Michael L. Platt and Richard G. Coss. 2014. “Dangerous Animals Capture and Maintain Attention in Humans”. Evolutionary Psychology 12(3): 534–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491401200304
Zheng, Jie, Kristopher L. Anderson, Stephanie L. Leal, Avgusta Shestyuk, Gultekin Gulsen, Lilit Mnatsakanyan, Sumeet Vadera, Frank P. K. Hsu, Michael A. Yassa, Robert T. Knight and Jack J. Lin. 2017. “Amygdala-Hippocampal Dynamics during Salient Information Processing”. Nature Communications 8: 14413. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14413
Asma, Stephen T. 2009. On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. New York: Oxford University Press.
Asma, Stephen T. 2015. “Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror”. Social Research: An International Quarterly 81(4): 941–68.
Bahna, Vladimír. 2015. “Explaining Vampirism: Two Divergent Attractors of Dead Human Concepts”. Journal of Cognition and Culture 15(3-4): 285–98. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342151
Barrett, Deirdre. 2010. Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran their Evolutionary Purpose. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. https://doi.org/10.1656/058.010.0121
Barrett, H. Clark. 2005. “Adaptations to Predators and Prey”. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, ed. David M. Buss, 200–223. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470939376.ch7
Barrett, Justin L. 2004. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2012-0011
Boyd, Brian, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall. 2010. Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader. New York: Columbia University Press.
Boyer, Pascal. 2001. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books.
Boyer, Pascal, and Brian Bergstrom. 2011. “Threat-Detection in Child Development: An Evolutionary Perspective”. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 35(4): 1034–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.08.010
Cantor, Joanne. 2009. “Fright Reactions to Mass Media”. In Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research, eds Jennings Bryant and Mary Beth Oliver, 287–303. Mahwah, NJ and London: LEA.
Carroll, Joseph. 1995. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.
Carroll, Joseph. 2006. “The Human Revolution and the Adaptive Function of Literature”. Philosophy and Literature 30(1): 33–49. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2006.0005
Carroll, Joseph. 2010. “Three Scenarios for Literary Darwinism”. New Literary History 41(1): 53–67. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.0.0144
Carroll, Joseph. 2011. Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Carroll, Joseph. 2012. “An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick”. Critical Inquiry 38(2): 405–410. https://doi.org/10.1086/662751
Carroll, Joseph, Mathias Clasen, Emelie Jonsson, Alexandra Regina Kratschmer, Luseadra McKerracher, Felix Riede et al. 2017. “Biocultural Theory: The Current State of Knowledge”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 11(1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000058
Carroll, Joseph, Jonathan Gottschall, John A. Johnson and Daniel J. Kruger. 2012. Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002419_9
Carroll, Joseph, John A. Johnson, Catherine Salmon, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Mathias Clasen and Emelie Jonsson. 2017. “A Cross-Disciplinary Survey of Beliefs about Human Nature, Culture, and Science”. Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 1(1): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.26613/esic.1.1.2
Carroll, Noe?l. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror, or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.
Cherry, Brigid. 2009. Horror. London: Routledge.
Clasen, Mathias. 2012a. “Attention, Predation, Counterintuition: Why Dracula Won’t Die”. Style 46(3): 378–98.
Clasen, Mathias. 2012b. “Monsters Evolve: A Biocultural Approach to Horror Stories”. Review of General Psychology 16(2): 222–29. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027918
Clasen, Mathias. 2017. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190666507.001.0001
Clasen, M., Andersen, M., and U. Schjoedt. 2019. “Adrenaline Junkies and White-Knucklers: A Quantitative Study of Fear Management in Haunted House Visitors”. Poetics 73: 61–91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.01.002
Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., and J. Johnson. 2018. “Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey on the Psychology of Scary Media”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences online ahead of print. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ebs0000152
Curtis, V., and A. Biran. 2001. “Dirt, Disgust, and Disease. Is Hygiene in Our Genes?” Perspectives in Biological Medicine 44(1): 17–31. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2001.0001
Duffer, Matt, and Ross Duffer. 2016–. Stranger Things. Netflix.
Feinstein, Justin S., Ralph Adolphs, Antonio Damasio and Daniel Tranel. 2011. “The Human Amygdala and the Induction and Experience of Fear”. Current Biology 21(1): 34–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2010.11.042
Friedkin, William. 1973. The Exorcist. USA: Warner Bros., Hoya Productions.
Gilmore, David D. 2003. Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812203226
Goodheart, Eugene. 2009. Darwinian Misadventures in the Humanities. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852910x494484
Gottschall, Jonathan. 2010. “Literature, Science, and a New Humanities”. In Evolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader, ed. Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll and Jonathan Gottschall, 457–68. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gottschall, Jonathan. 2012. The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Grodal, Torben Kragh. 2009. Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195371314.001.0001
Gross, James J., and Robert W. Levenson. 1995. “Emotion Elicitation Using Films”. Cognition and Emotion 9(1): 87–108. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939508408966
Haselton, Martie G., and Daniel Nettle. 2006. “The Paranoid Optimist: An Integrative Evolutionary Model of Cognitive Biases”. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(1): 47–66. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3
Hoffner, Cynthia A., and Kenneth J. Levine. 2005. “Enjoyment of Mediated Fright and Violence: A Meta-Analysis”. Media Psychology 7(2): 207–237. https://doi.org/10.1207/s1532785xmep0702_5
King, Stephen. 1981. It. New York: New American Library.
Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, Jens. 2016. “Evil Origins: A Darwinian Genealogy of the Popcultural Villain”. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 10(2): 109–122. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057
Kramnick, Jonathan. 2011. “Against Literary Darwinism”. Critical Inquiry 37(2): 315–47. https://doi.org/10.1086/657295
LeDoux, Joseph E. 1996. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Lyons, Izzy. 2018. “Horror Fiction Sales at Four-Year High after a Glut of Supernatural Series and Films”. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/14/horrorfictionsales-four-year-high-glut-supernatural-series-films/ (accessed 29 July 2018).
Marks, Isaac M., and Randolph M. Nesse. 1994. “Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety Disorders”. Ethology and Sociobiology 15(5-6): 247–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(94)90002-7
McAndrew, Francis T., and Sara S. Koehnke. 2016. “On the Nature of Creepiness”. New Ideas in Psychology 43: 10–15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.03.003
McCort, Jessica R. 2016. “Why Horror? (Or, The Importance of Being Frightened)”. In Reading in the Dark: Horror in Children’s Literature and Culture, ed. Jessica R. McCort, 3–36. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. https://doi.org/10.14325/mississippi/9781496806444.003.0001
Muschietti, Andy. 2017. It. California: Warner Bros.
Nesse, Randolph M. 2006. “The Smoke Detector Principle”. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 935(1): 75–85.
New, Joshua, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. 2007. “Category-Specific Attention for Animals Reflects Ancestral Priorities, Not Expertise”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104(42): 16598–603. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0703913104
Nordlund, Marcus. 2007. Shakespeare and the Nature of Love: Literature, Culture, Evolution. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Öhman, Arne, and Susan Mineka. 2001. “Fears, Phobias, and Preparedness: Toward an Evolved Module of Fear and Fear Learning”. Psychological Review 108(3): 483–522. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.108.3.483
Peele, Jordan. 2017. Get Out. California: Universal Pictures.
Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.
Poole, Steven. 2016. “The Great Clown Panic of 2016: ‘A Volatile Mix of Fear and Contagion’”. The Guardian, 31 October. https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/oct/31/the-great-clown-panic-of-2016-a-volatile-mix-of-fear-and-contagion (accessed 31 July 2018).
Ponder, Stacy. 2017. “It’s Never Been a Better Time to Love Horror Games”. Kotaku, 24 October. https://kotaku.com/its-never-been-a-better-time-to-love-horror-games-1819802531 (accessed 29 July 2018).
Saler, Benson, and Charles A. Ziegler. 2005. “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the Mind”. Philosophy and Literature 29(1): 218–27. https://doi.org/10.1353/phl.2005.0011
Sanchez, Eduardo, and Daniel Myrick. 1999. The Blair Witch Project. USA: Haxan Films.
Scott, Ridley. 1979. Alien. USA, Great Britain: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, Brandywine Productions, Twentieth Century-Fox Productions Ltd.
Smith, Murray. 2017. Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790648.003.0002
Stoker, Bram. [1897] 1997. Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism. 1st edn, A Norton critical edition. New York: W.W. Norton. Originally published in 1897.
The Numbers. 2018. “Box Office Performance History for Horror Movies”. The Numbers. https://www.the-numbers.com/market/genre/Horror (accessed 7 July 2018).
Thompson, Stith. 1946. The Folktale. New York: The Dryden Press.
Tinbergen, Niko. 1948. “Social Releasers and the Experimental Method Required for their Study”. Wilson Bulletin 60(1): 6–51.
Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 2001. “Does Beauty Build Adapted Minds? Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Aesthetics, Fiction, and the Arts”. SubStance 30(1-2): 6–27.
Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. 2008. “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables”. In Handbook of Emotions, eds Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones and Lisa Feldman Barrett, 114–37. New York: Guilford. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1355617711000506
Tybur, Joshua M., Debra Lieberman, Robert Kurzban and Peter DeScioli. 2013. “Disgust: Evolved Function and Structure”. Psychological Review 120(1): 65–84. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030778
Wengrow, D. 2014. The Origins of Monsters: Image and Cognition in the First Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.34148
Yorzinski, Jessica L., Michael J. Penkunas, Michael L. Platt and Richard G. Coss. 2014. “Dangerous Animals Capture and Maintain Attention in Humans”. Evolutionary Psychology 12(3): 534–48. https://doi.org/10.1177/147470491401200304
Zheng, Jie, Kristopher L. Anderson, Stephanie L. Leal, Avgusta Shestyuk, Gultekin Gulsen, Lilit Mnatsakanyan, Sumeet Vadera, Frank P. K. Hsu, Michael A. Yassa, Robert T. Knight and Jack J. Lin. 2017. “Amygdala-Hippocampal Dynamics during Salient Information Processing”. Nature Communications 8: 14413. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms14413
Published
2019-10-16
Issue
Section
Précis
How to Cite
Clasen, M. (2019). Evolution, Cognition, and Horror: A Précis of Why Horror Seduces (2017). Journal of Cognitive Historiography, 4(2), 242-256. https://doi.org/10.1558/jch.37083
