Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films by Nina Nesseth

Author:Nina Nesseth [Nesseth, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Performing Arts, Film, Genres, Horror, Social Science, Popular Culture
ISBN: 9781250765222
Google: oJc9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Tom Doherty
Published: 2022-07-26T20:45:09+00:00

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THE SCREAM

We can’t talk about sounds that scare without talking about the scream. And I’m not talking about Edvard Munch’s famous painting, although it does give a great visual: the subject’s eyes are wide and staring and his mouth is stretched open in an expression that can only be recognized as fear. If this painting had audio, you know exactly what sound that figure would be making.

No matter what language you speak, the sound of an adult screaming is universally understood as a vocalization of fear or alarm. Babies scream too, to express alarm like adults do, but also to alert their parents to needs like hunger or discomfort that they don’t yet have words to describe. Screams are not only loud and shrill; they’re also immediately recognizable as a distress signal.

Screams in horror movies tend to come in two flavors: the sudden and perfectly timed jump scare scream (an art perfected in YouTube screamer videos) that aims to startle the viewer, and the reactionary scream that aims to amplify feelings of fear by demonstrating a character’s horror.

Despite the universality of the scream, the science of screams still isn’t well understood.

In 2015, neuroscientist David Poeppel and his team launched an investigation to decipher what exactly is happening when we hear a human scream and what makes its sound so special. They created a catalogue of human screams both by downloading a collection of screams from movies and by bringing real people into the lab and recording their screams. These screams were added to a bank of sounds that also included spoken sentences, artificial sounds (like alarms and instrument sounds), and tones.

These sounds were then ranked by participants on the order of how scary they were on a scale from 1 (neutral) to 5 (alarming). Unsurprisingly, human screams stood out from the rest of the sound bank. The screams that freaked participants out the most were ones that fell into a range between 30 to 150 Hz. The scariest screams also showed the highest measures in a sound quality known as roughness. In sounds with high roughness, the amplitude or loudness is modulated very, very fast (between 30 and 150 times per second). Roughness makes scream sounds more detectable; it also makes scream sounds sound very unpleasant. This modulation places screams in the category of nonlinear sounds, sounds that distort when they are too loud and rough for the instrument projecting them—like a raw scream straining the limits of the human larynx.

Irregular, scratchy nonlinear sounds are often found in nature, usually in young animals whose cries need to attract their parents’ attention. Similarly, humans respond more to baby cries that contain nonlinearities than ones that don’t. Furthermore, studies focused on meerkats have shown that they don’t easily habituate to nonlinear sounds—they are meant to be alarming, abrasive, and hard to ignore. It makes sense—these sounds indicate the presence of a potential predator. Survival requires us to not get used to the kind of sound that might point to something

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