Fear is a universal human emotion, both powerful and primitive. Originating with our ancestors, fear was an emotional response to environmental stimuli that ultimately served to warn us to danger and prepare us to respond to it. Because it is inherently tied to something as important as survival, fear-based emotional responses can sometimes be easy to trigger. However, our responses to threat-imposing stimuli are often misunderstood to be limited to two options: Fight or Flight. This ignores the third possibility: Fright.
What is Fear and How is It Beneficial?
Fear is an intense emotional response to perceived threats. These threats could be real or imaginary, irrational (ie, caused by something that is not an appropriate cause of fear) or rational (ie, caused by something that is a reasonable cause of fear).
Evolutionarily speaking, fear is what enabled humanity to survive the threats of life, whether those threats were represented by wild beasts that might attack, by dangerous storms that could destroy your home or cause you physical harm, or by the mysterious unknown intentions of another human being. Recognizing the potential danger of a situation allowed for the situation to be avoided or planned for and overcome.
These two responses speak directly to the idea of “flight” and “fight” respectively. Researchers have also included other responses in their studies, including threat displays, defending, and making warning calls to other members of the pack, but I’d personally argue that these are generally subcategories of fight or flight. The final response, fright, is what happens when someone is approached by a fear-inducing stimulus and freezes up, unable to react or respond to the stimulus.
To understand why that might happen, we need to understand what happens to the body when it experiences fear.
What Does Fear Look Like, Biochemically Speaking?
The Amgydala is largely responsible for the fear responses, and each of the two amygdala in mammals plays a part of learning through fear. They help one properly adapt to stress and modulate one’s emotions. Each amygdala is also responsible for generating the hormones that influence fear, stress, and aggressive reactions. These hormones can include epinephrine (which regulates heart rate and metabolism; it also dilates blood vessels and air passages), norepinephrine (which also increases heart rate and blood flow), and cortisol (which increases blood sugar and circulation, as well).
However, the response to the fear is regulated by the hypothalamus, which is part of the limbic system. Once the occasion for fear has passed, the amygdala sends a signal to the prefrontal cortex, where the memories of the event will be processed for future knowledge; in this way, we learn how to respond to fears given repeated exposure. The amygdala and hippocampus are also involved in recording the event for future callback and learning.
What Causes Fear?
Fear can be caused by natural stimuli and conditioned stimuli. Natural stimuli are things that are generally common, easy to induce, and easy to understand. These fears are often linked to the idea of evolutionary preparedness, which is proposed to be a sort of genetic memory of certain dangers that pose a threat to a member of the species. For example, the fears of heights and snakes are very common; both pose real physical threats to the human body, and neither seem to need to be induced into a human in order for a human to feel, at the very least, some sense of discomfort.
Conditioned stimuli are often associated with irrational fears. A conditioned fear is one that a person has been taught to have. This could be due to a traumatic experience, repeated unpleasant experiences, or by observing someone else experiencing a particularly traumatic event. These irrational fears, if strong enough, might even become a phobia, which can be a crippling response to a fear-inducing stimulus (that fright response rearing its head). Other irrational fears can be of events that MAY happen, but won’t necessarily. These types of fears are usually associated with anxiety.
It may be worth noting that certain fears are impacted by cultural and historical contexts. Certain colors mean different things in different cultures, and so someone might have a fear of red in American culture, but some Asian cultures revere the color red and see it as a sign of good fortune and happiness.
How Can We Respond to Fear?
Most people are familiar with the concept of the “fight or flight” response to a threat. In this understanding, when faced with danger, one can either confront it or flee from it. However, this is an oversimplification that ignores a number of other responses.
As previously noted, there are a variety of ways one could “fight” a danger. One could straight-up confront the danger and attack it (for example, attacking a wolf before it attacks you). Another possibility is to make a threatening display, thereby inducing a “flight” response in the perceived danger (but as you are not fleeing and are taking direct action against the danger, one could argue this is merely a fight tactic). One could take up a defensive stance, but this is simply preparing to fight. Calling one’s allies could be for either a fight purpose (ie, gathering your forces to counter-attack) or a flight purpose (ie, telling everyone you’re about to die and they need to get out while they can).
Flight responses are a little more straightforward: you do what you can to run/escape the danger.
Check out this story about a time I had to face my own fear!
The last one, which I’ve called “fright” since it rhymes so well with “fight” and “flight”, occurs when one’s sensory processing systems are overloading by the perceived threat, thus disabling a person from reacting or responding in one of the other ways. Rather, the person freezes up, yielding their being to the mercy of whatever it is that is causing the fear.
It’s a reaction we see frequently but don’t talk about. How many movies have you seen where a character was stunned or shocked into a state of conscious paralysis, perhaps even wetting themselves, but being unable to move or do anything but stare at the monster that’s crawling toward them? Have you ever witnessed something that rendered you incapable of reacting?
This is a response that we see in animals, too. Some animals will freeze when they think a predator has gotten wind of them, waiting until the last moment to actually flee. I, for one, have seen all manner of animals do something like this, rabbits in particular.
How Does Our Knowledge of Fear Impact Our Understanding of Horror?
All of this is great information, but what does it matter to a Horror fan?
Well, ultimately, these forms of response are see not only in ourselves when watching horror, but should also be present in the characters of the movies we watch and books we read. Understanding how fear physically presents itself matters to an actor in a horror movie or to a writer of horror novels; if they cannot represent the way fear looks and feels, the audience will not be able to feel it themselves.
A wise creator can also utilize these reactions throughout their story to amplify the tension. A typical slasher movie may start out with a threat that the audience is aware of, and then as the main character starts to suspect something, their fear is treated as irrational, until more people start to get attacked, and suddenly there is a very real fear- one that we’ll certainly see someone freeze up at, another person try to run from, and another person try to confront it head-on. Depending on the movie, that confrontation may even be successful.
But all of it only makes us feel anything if it makes sense, and understanding how fear starts and ends- and everything that happens in between- is essential for any creator of horror.
Stay Shocked,
-Z
Now that you understand Fear, see how we define Horror!
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