Horror fiction has been a part of pop culture since the 18th century when it presented itself as Gothic horror, but the concept of mythical creatures and monsters is no modern day invention (Mullan para. 3). In fact, stories of horror and mythical creatures date back to the earliest of civilizations, like the Utukku of 2400 BCE Syria and its vampire like tendencies, believed to walk the earth dead but unburied, or the later borrowed Hebrew tale of Lilith, believed to hate the children of Adam and feed on their blood (Lebling para. 7-8). Mathias Clasen, from the Center of Evolutionary Psychology at University of California Santa Barbara, wrote about the biocultural approach to horror and explains that “This timeless, cross-cultural appeal of
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In 2004 Hank Davis and Andrea Javor at the University of Guelph tested this theory. They took three of the evolutionary cognitive themes I've presented so far- predation, contagion, and violations of the person category- and had 182 participants rate 40 horror films on their successful portrayal of these features(Jarrett para. 8). The horror films that scored the highest were the ones that performed best at the box office and those were the films that tapped into our evolved cognitive fears and exploited topics and images we already feared. World War Z did a phenomenal job of incorporating all three of Clasen’s evolutionary cognitive themes. The zombies in Brook’s fictional oral history prey on the humans, one survivor of the Great panic tells her story of when a zombie had her “collar...clenched between his teeth.” (Brooks 30). This is an example of a predatory threat. The Zombie infection is contagious with contact and many people learned this the hard way during the beginning of the infection. Many governments began to crack down on citizens in an attempt to keep the infection from further spreading. The fear of contagion was so evident in these societies that they put the lives of many healthy innocent people at risk during the mass killings of zombies, like the bombing in Rajasthan, India. The Indian military gave orders to blow the pass over the Saw Mill River to …show more content…
Brain imaging Technology is just starting to develop to study neural correlations of the horror experiences (Jarrett para. 10). Whether it’s the Utukku vampire of Syria or the modern day Dracula, horror fiction has a biological history and mirrors our own cognitive selves and fears. The ultimate horror story has yet to be told, but if psychologists and writers worked together, they could possibly develop even scarier material. Where there is imagination there is psychology, and like Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Where there is no imagination there is no
In 2004 Hank Davis and Andrea Javor at the University of Guelph tested this theory. They took three of the evolutionary cognitive themes I've presented so far- predation, contagion, and violations of the person category- and had 182 participants rate 40 horror films on their successful portrayal of these features(Jarrett para. 8). The horror films that scored the highest were the ones that performed best at the box office and those were the films that tapped into our evolved cognitive fears and exploited topics and images we already feared. World War Z did a phenomenal job of incorporating all three of Clasen’s evolutionary cognitive themes. The zombies in Brook’s fictional oral history prey on the humans, one survivor of the Great panic tells her story of when a zombie had her “collar...clenched between his teeth.” (Brooks 30). This is an example of a predatory threat. The Zombie infection is contagious with contact and many people learned this the hard way during the beginning of the infection. Many governments began to crack down on citizens in an attempt to keep the infection from further spreading. The fear of contagion was so evident in these societies that they put the lives of many healthy innocent people at risk during the mass killings of zombies, like the bombing in Rajasthan, India. The Indian military gave orders to blow the pass over the Saw Mill River to …show more content…
Brain imaging Technology is just starting to develop to study neural correlations of the horror experiences (Jarrett para. 10). Whether it’s the Utukku vampire of Syria or the modern day Dracula, horror fiction has a biological history and mirrors our own cognitive selves and fears. The ultimate horror story has yet to be told, but if psychologists and writers worked together, they could possibly develop even scarier material. Where there is imagination there is psychology, and like Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Where there is no imagination there is no