This is a story about fear that begins with its absence. Are there people who truly don’t get scared, and what can they teach us about horror? I’m not talking about the sweaty bravado of “Us wasn’t that scary.” I’m talking about having a gun jammed into your temple and not feeling the adrenaline spill into your blood. Such people are rare. They probably don’t read Nightmare, or Clive Barker, or Koji Suzuki (although they still should), but they do exist.
About thirty years ago, a woman referred to as S.M. (for anonymity) was reported on in medical literature. She had lost a small portion of her brain—the amygdala—due to a rare illness, and no longer showed signs of fear. S.M. didn’t have a sense of personal space—she wouldn’t be bothered if someone were inches from her nose—and had been subject to an unusual number of muggings and other dangerous encounters. She didn’t have that little voice that tells you to run, or any real sense of danger, for that matter. Fear isn’t all fun and games—it serves a purpose. It keeps us safe.
But, if the amygdala lights up when Leatherface kicks down your door, then what about a creak in the attic, a fleeting shadow in your bathroom? The yet-to-be-seen threat: “. . . the black masses of the trees, and the waiting storm . . .” (Shirley Jackson, The Summer People).
When a threat is more distant or uncertain, anxiety emerges instead of fear. The two exist on a kind of continuum. The brain (and therefore the body) responds differently when the threat is less imminent. We can’t go around punching and screaming at every lamp flicker. Instead of going into fight mode—widening eyes, thumping heart—the brain activates a more evaluative pathway. Here, a next-door neighbor of the amygdala (technically known as the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis) is dialed up. The brain’s hammer is cocked back into a ready position, tabulating the potential danger, resting in dormancy until a decision is made.
Sometimes you get it right. Other times, when you’re lulled into a false comfort, only to find yourself in harm’s way, the chill factor becomes even more heightened. Who can forget that scene in Shirley Jackson’s Haunting of Hill House when Eleanor flings herself out of bed, saying, “God God—whose hand was I holding?”
The playful enticement of these neural pathways forms the basis for how we experience the genre of horror and dark fiction—the plucking of the brain’s taut strings allows the writer to compose a unique literary journey. In classic works where there is slowly rising tension and anticipation, there can be an endless range of final notes, each leaving a distinct, resonant impression on the reader—the inevitable murder, with a twist (Ray Bradbury, The October Game), bittersweet darkness (Sergio G. Sánchez, The Orphanage), or the relief of reclaimed safety (Thomas Harris, Silence of the Lambs).
Then what, after the horror has subsided, one way or the other? Your brain stores that memory quite effectively, so the next time you go to Mexico, you’ll stick to the beach instead of visiting those Mayan ruins. In fact, fear memories can become so ingrained that even the suggestion of the original horror might incite panic, and if enduring and disabling, could fall under the diagnostic label of post-traumatic stress disorder.
In fact, memory of fear is one of the best studied forms of memory in all of neuroscience. The fear organ (the amygdala) has another very convenient neighbor—the hippocampus. The hippocampus (from the Greek word kampos, meaning “sea monster” due to its appearance) is the brain’s organ for forming memories. This juxtaposition is not a biological accident: memory of fear is strongly hardwired for survival.
When we were kids, we were all afraid of the dark. But night after night, we experienced darkness and, for most of us, nothing bad happened. No matter how real our nightmares seemed, or how sure we were of a monster under the bed skirt, we woke each morning unharmed. Eventually, we learned to not be afraid, and at the level of the brain this was an active process known as fear extinction.
There are three important implications here, and writers should take note.
First, if the threat in your story doesn’t ever culminate in a realized harm, then you run the risk of the reader losing their fear response—one reason why sequels may eventually lose emotional appeal. In these cases, maintaining the novelty of the threat is essential to keeping the brain engaged. Second, fears are never truly forgotten—fear extinction only dials down their presence. This is a biological fact and explains why childhood fears, presumed to be reconciled as adults—the dark, clowns, dentists—are so commonly evoked to scare readers of any age. Third, the biology of fear extinction reveals the other side of the biological coin: safety. Without diving deep, the key takeaway is that the brain’s drive to safety is biologically rewarding. In neuroscience, when we talk about reward, we are often talking about dopamine (a “feel good” hormone), and dopamine shifts what is happening inside the amygdala as we move from danger to safety. This could be part of the gratification we feel at a “satisfying ending”—spurts of dopamine, like hits of a drug, when our protagonist achieves safety. This fictional rollercoaster, cycling from danger to safety, may be biologically addicting.
Two other concepts are relevant: fear generalization and fear conditioning. The former refers to how the brain forms an abstraction of threat. Anything that resembles what you once encountered as dangerous will be viewed with similar regard. Most of us haven’t had scary run-ins with lobsters in our past, and hence, aren’t primed to be scared of lobstrosoties (Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three)—we have to be shown why they are scary. Dum-a-chum? In contrast, who hasn’t come across someone toxic and manipulative in their life? They may even be your biological relatives! Thus: the immediate resonance of many a villain in psychological horror.
Fear conditioning is the brain’s linkage of non-scary things that were around when something dangerous happened. Those otherwise neutral things, places, and contexts become scary by association (think, the infamous shower scene in Psycho). Showers are all of a sudden scary, but it wasn’t the shower that killed Marion Crane.
The point is this: the experience of our beloved genre depends on the brain. For the reader to experience the desired emotions—fear, anxiety, stress, sometimes, disgust—the words written, and images described need to elicit neural activity in the pathways discussed. Sounds hard? Yes and no. If you write in the genre, you are probably doing it intuitively.
First and foremost, immersion is essential. If the reader is in the mind of the protagonist, and develops an empathetic connection to the events, neurobiology will follow. Sensory detail is important. Every pungent odor, icy shackle, and sizzle of a loose wire strokes different regions of the brain. The reader should care for the safety of the protagonist as if their own survival is on the line.
The composition of weighing uncertain threat and overt harm, balancing the push-and-pull of danger and safety, the creep of impending danger versus immediacy of the unexpected all form the colors of your story—the resolution, contrast, and brightness all in your hands as you craft the artistry of your work.
Circling back to S.M., scientists did discover one way to scare her.
Suffocation.
With her consent, inhalation of carbon dioxide made her feel breathless, and triggered fear and panic. It woke up a more primal pathway for fear, bypassing her missing amygdala. She described the experience as completely novel.
So, there are no exceptions to the rule. Fear is biologically inescapable. It is only up to you—the writer—to find the right strings to pull.
