Scare Tactics, Or, Biological Response Systems & How To Use Them For Evil

The basement is dark and smells vaguely of laundry and mildew. He is only five

years old, and he isn’t quite sure whether Freddy Krueger is just a made-up character

from a movie or a grotesque psychopath who attacks you in your most vulnerable of

states; in your dreams. He just needs to remove the laundry from the dryer in the far

corner of the basement, place it into the laundry basket, and get back upstairs. No big

deal.

He hesitates for a second as he listens carefully for movement — any movement. He

hears nothing but the steady purr of the furnace and the dull hum of his mother’s

television upstairs.

Freddy attacks in your dreams — not in real life, he reassures himself. But is this real

life? How could he tell?

He draws in a deep breath and sprints to the dryer. He yanks the door open and

shovels the clothes into the laundry basket not daring to chance a look behind him for

fear of seeing that charred face grinning at him malevolently. The instant the clothes

are in the basket, he charges across the basement and up the stairs. Halfway up, he

drinks in the soft, safe light of the kitchen and lies to himself that he is “home free.”

That’s when he hears it — a soft guttural growl.

His heart races and a chill bolts up his spine. Freddy has waited until precisely the

last moment to assure that little Aaron Tripp’s hopes would be at their highest just

before snatching him back down into the darkness.

Aaron abandons the laundry basket and without so much as a glance over his

shoulder, sprints up the last few stairs and into the safety of the kitchen. He turns back

and rests his hands on his knees, panting heavily.

What was that sound?

Where had it come from?

But he knows.

The sound — that growl — he had made it himself.

Horror can be an elusive genre to nail down, but after a lifetime of studying horror

films, I understand why that manufactured little mind trick I often played on myself was

so addictive. I had incidentally tapped into my automatic biological response systems,

and luckily for us horror writers, these instinctual triggers can be expertly leveraged —

for evil.

Fight or Flight?!

This autonomic chemical chain reaction is quite humbling and utterly fascinating. In

an age where humans convince themselves that they are incomparable to their animal

relatives there exists this evolutionary hardwiring in our DNA designed to trigger a state

of hyper-arousal to assess and respond to potential threats in a split-second. Heart rate

increases, digestion slows to a halt, pupils dilate, respiratory rates increase, and

sometimes — if you are genuinely terrified — you relieve yourself. It turns out we’re not

so different from animals after all.

The point, of course, is to flood the body with all the necessary hormones required to

either run your ass off or stand and fight with everything you’ve got. You are biologically

all-hands-on-deck until you neutralize the threat or — you die. Your body floods with a

cocktail of adrenaline, endorphins, serotonin, oxytocin, and 20-30 other hormones.

However, the real jackpot is dopamine, a neurotransmitter that is directly related to the

experience of pleasure. Whether you’re a drug fiend or thrill seeker, a sublime

dopamine buzz is the “dragon” every addict incessantly chases.

But the dope alone is not quite the whole story with horror fans. Another valuable

piece of the horror puzzle is a phenomenon called excitation-transfer theory. This

theory claims that excitement from one stimulus can cause an amplified response to a

second stimulus, even between unrelated emotions. If done correctly, with a steady

wax and wane of tension, the potency of that sweet highly addictive dopamine will be

multiplied, leaving the audience more and more affected by each round of scenes.

Now with all that said, let’s move on to how we can practically leverage these

responses to our advantage in our writing.

Relatable, Tense, & Happening to Someone Else

Remarkably, the same biological responses occur in human beings when watching

someone else experience something as when you experience it yourself. Sure, you

may argue that watching a person get hit by a train is not the same as experiencing

yourself getting hit by a train, but it does activate corresponding parts of the brain. We

writers use this psychological witchcraft consistently to bend audience emotions to our

will.

Once you convince your audience to suspend their disbelief, and they lose

themselves in the environment you’ve crafted, the body automatically triggers that fight

or flight response and locks the viewer into a state of attentive tunnel vision. Attention is

now laser-focused on every detail in the scene, and you have officially acquired full

access to manipulate their emotions with elegant malevolence.

Everything from the eerie scoring to the painstaking visuals to the calculated camera

movement supports the scene tension, but your storytelling is where the real suspense

breeds. If you’ve meticulously paced your story points and exposed critical character

flaws and insecurities along the way, the audience will be forced to flounder in

anticipation of the unknown.

With the audience now fully engaged, ratchet up the tension by exploiting failures in

your audience’s automatic prediction systems. Even when you’re having a low-stakes

casual conversation with someone, your brain is instinctually trying to predict what will

happen next. The better you can predict what another creature will do, the more

appropriately you can act/react to survive. For us writers, it can work as a biological

slight of hand. You convince the audience that the scary thing is around the corner

when, in reality, it has been right behind them the whole time — watching — basking in

their feeble attempts to predict their miserable fate.

The last ingredient is by far the most crucial one — it is happening to someone else.

We, humans, love to learn from other’s mistakes, and once the audience is willing to

cross the line from empathy to sympathy, they begin to have an internal dialogue

considering what they would do if they found themselves in these nasty circumstances.

Your job is to be ten steps ahead of this discourse so when an unfortunate character

makes the wrong prediction — which should align with your audience — and gets

snatched by the baddie, the audience gets to revel, “Good thing that wasn’t me. I would

surely be dead.” Conversely, when your protagonist finally does the opposite of what

your audience guesses and defeats the baddie, they concede, “I would not have

thought of that. I’d probably be dead.” This formula of rewarding the audience when

they’re wrong, and punishing them when they’re right will always make for an

entertaining bit of horror.

One Final Note

Mind your pacing so as not to become emotionally draining or exhausting. Allow the

audience to enjoy a dose of terror during the horror scenes and then nourish them with

story points until they let their guard down again. Time it as deliberately as an

orchestra. Linger too long in a moment or dangle the carrot too long with no reward and

you’ve lost them. They will start wondering whether or not they paid their utility bill or

remembered to pick up pickles at the grocery store. You have dropped the beat, and

you likely will not recover. Tighten your rhythm, sharpen your story, maintain relevance,

and allow the biological responses we’ve discussed to do some of the heavy-lifting for

you.

Then when they least expect it — shove them back into the darkness and slam the

door behind them.