The thrill of horror

Do you love the blood and gore of a great horror flick? What is that about?! Why we love abject fear and how the movies cashed in on it.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Are you a devotee of horror flicks? The more blood
and gore and shock the better. Okay, what is the
deal with that? Why do we want to scare the
living daylights out of ourselves? And when do the movies
get involved? I'm Patty Steele. Why we crave horror? Next
on the backstory. We're back with the backstory. What made

(00:24):
early Hollywood movie makers decide they could earn a few
bucks from our bloodlust? Well, you know the thrill of
spine dingling terror, sure you do, but what is it?
Psychologists say it's that crazy rush of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine,
which kind of energizes us and inspires the fight or

(00:46):
flight response, Except when you get it from watching a movie,
you also know you're safe, and that's the thrill without
the threat. They say. The reaction to horror flicks is
called excitation transfer. Okay, thank you psychologists. Your heart pounds
and you breathe really heavy, and as that wears off,

(01:07):
you feel intense relief, filling your brain with feel good chemicals.
About ten percent of us really crave that adrenaline rush,
and they tend to be more aggressive individuals. But folks
who avoid those movies have trouble differentiating between the thrill
and just plain fear. They say it's because some of

(01:28):
us have a harder time separating what's on screen from reality,
and they tend to be more empathetic types who don't
want to see others in pain, even if inside we
know it's fake. But how did early movie makers know
to cash in on all this? Okay, let's go back
to the dawn of motion pictures. Imagine you've never seen

(01:52):
people or animals even moving little and doing anything else
on a screen. It was mind blowing for them. The
first moving picture that survives was part photography, part animation
of a horse galloping for just a few seconds. That
was in eighteen eighty. Thomas Edison's first short flick in

(02:13):
eighteen ninety four was called The Sneeze, Literally just five
seconds of an Edison employee sneezing. Can you imagine everybody
wanted to see it? Wouldn't even have time for one
piece of popcorn. But by the eighteen nineties there were
a slew of films. Most were just movement with no

(02:34):
story attached, because people were pretty thrilled with that in
the beginning. But finally folks were getting bored. Come on,
they said, tell us a story. Along comes George Melius.
He was a French illusionist who had a lifelong fascination
with scary, suspenseful literature from as far back as ancient
Greece and Rome, but also more recent stories from everybody

(02:58):
like Edgar Allan, Poe, Jules Verse, and H. G. Wells,
as well as Mary Shelley, who of course wrote Frankenstein.
His eighteen ninety six film The House of the Devil
is considered the first horror film ever made, with images
coming from centuries of books and legends. It showed demons, ghosts, witches,

(03:19):
and a skeleton at a haunted castle, and it was
only three minutes long, but included some of the first
special effects ever, with people disappearing and a bat suddenly
turning into a person. Imagine what that looked like to
someone at a time when almost no one even had
electricity in their homes, there were still lighting their homes

(03:41):
with gas lamps. And along comes this. People loved and
sort of hated it. It made him nervous, sort of
like looking at a car wreck. More scary short films
flooded the market, and by the way, the word hard
didn't get used much, maybe too disturbing of a word, right,
so most of these were referred to as mysterious, magical, mythical,

(04:04):
or even as trick films. Whatever they were called, people
couldn't get enough. Meliaz had tapped into something timeless, our
need to feel that rush of adrenaline without the fear
of death. Over the years, the horror movies evolved into
a really gripping storytelling medium, and the envelope kept getting

(04:26):
pushed further toward the edge. Thomas Edison's movie company made
Frankenstein into a sixteen minute film in nineteen ten that
has some really chilling scenes and it disturbed people. By
the nineteen twenties and thirties, horror really took off. There
was Dracula, the Mummy, Doctor Jekyl, and mister Hyde and

(04:48):
yet another iteration of Frankenstein. And remember, after nineteen twenty
seven or so, they added talk, which meant screaming too.
But it was never enough to keep the adrenaline rush going.
Things had to get more shocking, and that set off
the morals police. They tried to get these films intensely censored.

(05:08):
In a lot of cases, depending on where they were running,
the movies were either banned outright or locally edited. It
wasn't until the nineteen fifties that the science fiction element
of horror kicked into high gear, with movies like The
Original Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Wore the Worlds
as well as Godzilla, and the nineteen sixties finally introduced

(05:31):
everything from zombie flicks to really edge of your seat
horror in Hitchcock movies like Psycho, as well as films
like Rosemary's Baby and The Haunting. Now director Martin Scorsese
calls The Haunting the scariest movie of all time. It's
all suspense, no blood, It's all about what you don't see,

(05:51):
and it is total goosebumps. By the seventies and onward,
slasher flicks like Texas Chainsaw, Massacre and Halloween All the
Halloween's even Carrie, moved horror into a more in your
face mode. But like them or not, horror movies feed
that craving for an adrenaline rush, and Halloween season is

(06:12):
the perfect time to indulge. I'm Patty Steele. The Backstory
is a production of iHeartMedia and Steel Trap Productions. Our
producer is Doug Fraser. Our executive producer is Steve Goldstein

(06:34):
of Amplified Media. We're out with new episodes twice a week.
Thanks for listening to the backstory, the pieces of history
you didn't know you needed to know.