Designing Horror in the Twentieth Century: Techniques for Terror
Right before the turn of the twentieth century Georges Méliès created something that would shape film forever. Le Manoir du Diable (1896), or “The Devil’s Castle” is considered to be the first horror story ever put to film (Solomon, 2012). The twentieth century was instrumental to the horror genre as a whole, and with each decade audiences were introduced to new films that showcased different techniques meant to terrify them (Norman p.59). Psychology and horror go hand in hand and horror is the film genre that plays on psychological themes the most (Goodwin, 2013).
This paper will examine different techniques in horror filmmaking and how these techniques are used to provoke a psychological response of terror from viewers. First, it will examine the psychology behind the emotion of terror to try to gain a broader perspective of how human beings react to viewing horror films. Then, it will examine examples of horror techniques through various decades in the twentieth century via iconic films in that century and discuss how horror filmmakers play with psychological techniques to produce a fear response in the audience.
Two psychological techniques will be discussed that became the most widely used techniques in the twentieth century. These techniques are perspective and subconscious manipulation. These were employed in a variety of ways, and filmmakers used different camera and storytelling techniques to play on these psychological ones.
The Psychology of Fear:
In his 2018 paper, Personality Types and the Enjoyment of Horror Movies, Jonathan Norman states, “it has been demonstrated that infants can spot snakes on a screen quicker and easier than flowers and other objects,” this shows that from birth humans are programmed to react to certain stimuli in order to protect themselves (p.59).
Fear is a human emotion just like happiness, sadness and passion. Just like all other emotions, fear can be irrational or justified depending on the situation. Psychologically speaking, fear can manifest itself even if the person experiencing the fear knows that the fear is not going to harm them. This is because fear, like all other emotions is an evolved practice in the human psyche. It is human nature to fear. Fear is the utmost way that humans protect themselves from danger and death (Norman, 2018).
According to Charles A. Gramlich in the Salem Press Encyclopedia of Health, 2018, all emotions consist of three different bodily responses. These responses are behavioral, autonomic and hormonal. In a state of intense emotion, these responses work together to produce a response to that emotion. For example, when someone is afraid, they may experience the physical symptoms of sweating, opening of the mouth, trembling, or reflexive crying. These behavioral responses combine with stress related hormones that are produced and other involuntary behaviors caused by the central nervous system, create the feeling of fear.
The condition of anxiety can explain why some people seek out horror movies while others avoid them. Anxiety usually goes hand in hand with fear, because once the body experiences a fear response, anxiety begins working as fear recall. This explains why the fear response does not always prevent people from going to horror movies. More accurately, anxiety causes some people to avoid horror films because of a negative experience or a non-existent experience that they perceive will be negative. On the other side of the spectrum, a lack of anxiety based on a positive, or a not overtly negative experience can prevent avoidance (Gramlich, 2018).
Fear and anger tend to be more difficult to elicit from audiences than other emotions like happiness and sadness (Zupan & Babbage, 2015). All films evoke emotion in one way or another, even if that emotion is boredom, excitement or any other emotion that a filmmaker is not explicitly trying to evoke. Most of the time though, people will seek out films that play on their emotions. If they want to laugh, they watch a comedy. If they want to cry, they watch a drama. If they want to be afraid, they watch a horror movie. Emotional response to fear is more varied than physical response. Some people enjoy being afraid while others avoid it at all costs (Norman, 2018).
Interestingly enough, film is one of the only genres of story-telling that can force an audience into feeling a certain way. In a narrative writing, they can simply stop reading. In an oral retelling, they can tell the storyteller to stop telling the story. In a film, they are trapped in the story and in a way they are forced to continue watching it because it is happening visually in front of them and it forces them to put themselves in the story and in the place of the character. It is this phenomenon of character identification that increases a film’s ability to terrify (Zupan & Babbage, 2015).
Setting up a camera subjectively can produce feelings of fear and dread in film viewers (Goodwin, 2013). In the same realm of thought, reaction shots can leave the audience in the dark to what a character is reacting to. This produces a sense of dread, because people fear the unknown (Hearn, 2018).
Understanding the basic concepts of the psychology of fear is an important step to understanding techniques behind horror films, because it gives a broader sense of what psychological techniques filmmakers are employing in films, and how film techniques relate to these psychological ones.
Camera Perspectives:
In Psycho (1960) and Rear Window (1954), Alfred Hitchcock introduced the idea of the gaze of the killer. When the main antagonist of the horror film stares directly into the camera, it is a way of the filmmaker to bring the audience into the story even more by showing that the killer is recognizing that the audience is there. The killer is seeing all of the people watching the film, literally or just from a perspective point of view (Brower, 2016).
A new perspective with a new camera technique, gazing into a camera became the new norm for horror movies. It was used throughout the twentieth century and continues to be used today. People were used to being addressed through a camera (television news) but being addressed by a character in the story added a new depth to horror films (Brower, 2016). This technique took something that was familiar to audiences but used this to create a new feeling of uneasiness in viewers. They were used to seeing the gaze, but in a formal sense. People were used to being addressed through a camera (television news) but being addressed by a character in the story added a new depth to horror films (Brower, 2016).
Psycho (1960) also uses realism to create an atmosphere of uneasiness. It reinforces the fact that Psycho (1960) is not just a fiction piece. Psycho (1960) creates a world of realism and puts the audience in the body of the camera that is moving through the world. The opening scene of the movie gives birth to the world, and makes the audience a passenger in a story that could be real and could happen to them. Hitchcock humanizes the camera, giving it thoughts and feelings, then introduces the audience to the camera as it takes the role of Norman Bates, and its true yearning is revealed (Rothman, 2012). This technique of humanizing the camera was expanded and improved in the next decade with the invention of the Steadicam.
The creators of Halloween found it difficult to use the Steadicam. Steadicam technology gives point-of-view shots life, and it instills its humanizing aspects within the shot, but it is difficult to find the balance between humanizing and an unsteady, shaking perspective (Bird, 2017). It improved the ability to bring life to the camera, and make the camera, and in turn the audience, truly as much of as a character in the narrative as the actors, but it was difficult to employ.
Using point-of-view shots that emulate the point of view of the killer, separates the audience completely from the killer, and helps to void them of empathy for the killer. Instead, the audience had empathy for the victim (Goodwin, 2013). This technique can be used to put audiences in the perspective of the killer, as well as make the killer a more menacing force.
In the next decade, The Shining (1980) also employed the Steadicam, or Panaglide technology. Panaglide technology, in particular the wheelchair dolly, allowed for a smooth tracking shot that had a distinct and particularly eerie quality to it (Bird, 2017). This used the technology in a completely different way, because it wasn’t trying to emulate a human character and humanize the camera, instead it was giving otherworldly characteristics to the camera, and using it to embody a spirit-like entity. It was also used the same way that it was in the decades before, allowing for shots to take on human-like characteristics. It gave the shots personality, and the audience could feel barely perceptible footsteps as the operator moved (Bird 2017).
In The Blair Witch Project (1999), the opposite of the Steadicam was used to introduce realism. Technology offers a different perspective when it comes to what looks ‘real’. In the nineteen-nineties camcorder technology was well established, and so the ‘human’ quality that they had originally craved from the Steadicam, became the opposite. The Steadicam could not add as much realism to a film as footage that was shot by an amateur that the audience could relate to (Sayad, 2016).
In The Blair Witch Project (1999) filmmakers employed this amateur style of shooting to not only introduce the shaky element, but to also give audiences anxiety, and force them to check off screen for something that they might just be missing. Because of the cameras slow reflexes it forces the audience to have the same slow reflexes, and it brings them into the story even more by forcing them to look off-screen (McDowell, 2001). McDowell (2001) also describes another technique, the use of the subjective camera:
The use of subjective camera is a staple in the horror film. Horror films often use subjective images both to delay the shock of the monster image until the climax and to stave off the inevitable revelation of the inadequate budget for monster effects. Oddly, conventional use of subjective camera forces the audience to take on the role of the stalking monster. In Blair Witch, the subjective camera locates the audience not in the monster's position. but in that of the victim's, thereby increasing audience identification and anxiety. The serial elimination of the cast is reminiscent of "body count" films, but without the gore (p. 141).
In this style of horror, the shakiness that comes from the amateur nature of the footage allowed the audience to relate in this way rather than trying to relate with perspective. They could more easily get inside the minds of the characters in The Blair Witch Project (1999) because most people had used camcorders (Sayad, 2016).
Allowing the camera to act as a character in the story was a technique employed throughout the twentieth century. It humanized the camera and allowed audiences to relate to the camera in some way. This can be seen throughout films in the sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties, and its continued use into the twenty-first century has allowed it to improve and expand as technology does.
Manipulation of the Subconscious:
In Rear Window Hitchcock introduced technique that involved audiences more heavily, he used subconscious worries of people of the time period, and a new technology (television) to introduce another element of realism. Rear Window is often looked at as the depiction of voyeurism caused by the increase in televisions in the home. This self-reflection of life provided another subject for people to relate to (Brower, 2016).
Brower (2016) makes an interesting observation when he compares the main character’s fascination with the different stories of his neighbors, to buttons on a crude remote control, when he states:
The set of Rear Window resembles a crude anticipation of the remote control, with Jeff going back and forth from one story to another. Jeff’s habits are similar to those of someone watching television. Jeff uses the windows as an escape from his troubles. Twice after squabbles with Lisa, the night she leaves angrily and the night she goes off, hurt, to prepare dinner, Jeff seems sincerely troubled by their fights. But within moments, a cloud of guiltiness crosses over his face and his eyes sneak to the window. Like a television viewer, he eats while watching the windows. Stella chides him for falling asleep in front of the windows just as a wife might chide a husband for falling asleep in front of the television… (p. 90)
This technique is another way of tapping into people’s subconscious minds and introducing familiar ideas but introducing familiar ideas in a way that isn’t traditional, so that it becomes off-putting. By challenging the ideas of normalcy, horror movies can create a version of reality that people can immersive themselves in, and then when things happen that do not normally happen in reality, it becomes even more real.
A great example of this technique is employed in Halloween when Michael Myers kills his sister. The audience is kept in the dark to the killers true identity, but they make the assumption that it is a man, because that is the reality that they are used to, when it is revealed that it was a six year old boy in a Halloween costume, this plays with the audiences version of reality. The same applies when Michael Meyers dresses as a ghost by putting a sheet over his head. Audiences are used to seeing this type of costume, they are terrified that now there might be a killer underneath rather than a teenager.
Halloween also employed this technique more explicitly and more widely when the atmosphere is developed, Deacon (2012) writes:
Halloween was “the first film to bring horror to the suburbs,” and in doing so, Carpenter shattered the illusion of safety in suburbia, and of home being out of harm’s way. Instead, Carpenter inverts this belief and makes the suburbs the least safe place he can… (p. 06)
This shows that rather than these techniques being accidents, directors are actively employing them where they can. Mental illness is another example, if not a more controversial, of taking something that people recognize and distorting it into something that gives audiences fear. In The Shining (1980) Stigma around mental illness can be attributed to film because of its negative portrayal of mental illness. Mental illness in the horror genre employs a technique called ‘psychosis by osmosis’ which allows filmmakers to give audiences anxiety, fear, and other forms of mental reaction.
Some of the most effective film techniques are the ones which allow the viewer to relate to a character in the film, and these tend to produce the most horror (Goodwin, 2013). If audiences can relate to the situation, and then it is transformed into something unconventional that they audience can then relate to.
Conclusion:
Joanne Hearne (2018) makes an interesting point about lines of sight n filmmaking in Lines of Sight in the Western, when she says:
…it was made for our eyes and is organized around our patterns of ocular attention, especially lines of sight, both in its apparatus of exhibition involving machines, celluloid, and light and also in its grammar of visual storytelling. Lines of sight orient us to human actions, social relations, spatial relations, and relations to that imagined environment, or landscape, that we call setting (p. 97).
Film techniques illustrate a deep connection and a deep understanding of viewer psychology, physiology and their relationship to ‘Great Horror’. Filmmakers know how to scare people and they employ techniques that allow them to play with audiences and manipulate how they view the film, and how they react to it.
The twentieth century was instrumental in manipulating the horror genre, and movies like Psycho (1960), Rear Window (1954), Halloween (1978), The Shining (1980) and The Blair Witch Project (1999) defined the genre and opened the genre up to new and innovative techniques that allow filmmakers to play with psychology and further its relationship with film.
For the first time, filming techniques played an increased role in the films. Steadicam technology furthered the use of these techniques in film. Both camera techniques, such a Steadicam, and shot framing, as well as subconscious manipulation, such as relatability and anxiety, were used to increase the fear that films provided. These techniques have continued to be used into the twenty first century, because they use the power of psychology to tap into an audiences fear response.
References:
Bird, K. (2017). "Dancing, Flying Camera Jockeys": Invisible Labor, Craft Discourse, and Embodied Steadicam and Panaglide Technique from 1972 to 1985. The Velvet Light Trap,80, 48-65.
Brower, S. (2016). Channeling Rear Window. Journal of Popular Film and Television.
Deacon, A. (2015). The Horrors of John Carpenter’s Halloween. Film Matters,6(3), 6-10.
Goodwin, J. (2013). The Horror of Stigma: Psychosis and Mental Health Care Environments in Twenty-First-Century Horror Film (Part I). Perspectives in Psychiatric Care,50(3), 201-209.
Hearne, J. (2018). Lines of Sight in the Western. Western American Literature,53(1), 97-112.
Norman, J. (2018). Personality Types and the Enjoyment of Horror Movies. Journal of Soc. & Psy. Sci.,11. Retrieved December 10, 2018.
Rothman, W. (2012). Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Solomon, M. (2012). Review: George Méliès. University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved December 10, 2018.
Zupan, B., & Babbage, D. R. (2016). Film clips and narrative text as subjective emotion elicitation techniques. The Journal of Social Psychology,157(2), 194-210.