Exploring the terrain of terror

Halloween nears. Darkness falls early, and bare trees cast moving shadows on a moonlit night. Suddenly we find ourselves craving hot apple cider, a fire in the hearth, and a bloody good horror film on the tube.

Scary movies and Halloween go together like a disembodied hand in glove. But why do we love them so? What is it that makes us revel in being scared out of our wits, when fear is such an unpleasant emotion?

These are among the many questions being seriously examined by Professor Jason Reiss and the 18 students in his First Year Seminar, “Psychology and Horror.”

One of 28 seminar sections offered to Wheaton’s freshmen this fall, the course is intended to introduce students to college-level study through a hot topic. As the class explores the horror genre—watching and analyzing classic and contemporary horror movies—they are finding a creaky door opening to many questions about the human psyche, from the connections between sex and violence to the question of evil to the “neuroscience of zombies.”

“I want to show that you can take a fun topic and treat it as a subject for serious study,” says Reiss, who began developing the theme after searching for a late-night horror film on the Internet last spring. As a new father, he had become tired of a steady diet of G-rated fare, and found himself craving something more grown up.

"I suddenly felt, ‘I’ve just got to see some blood and gore,’” he recalls. “It was like I needed a fix.”

Being a psychologist and a student of human nature, Reiss began wondering about that.

“I started thinking about psychological drives,” he says. “I started thinking about Freud, who is all about sex and aggression—as are horror films. Are horror films fulfilling needs that we can’t work out in the real world, because they’re not allowed? That’s very Freudian.”

Or perhaps, he wondered, our obsession with horror is akin to an addiction?

“If so, how is it similar to and different from a drug addiction? I also started thinking about gender and how women are depicted in horror films. And I began to realize that this was a really rich topic.”

His students agree. “Learning about psychology through horror is very interesting,” says Karl Mader ’13. “Fear is the strongest emotion tied to memory, so it makes perfect sense to learn this way, even though the approach may be somewhat unorthodox.”

Reiss’s first question to his freshmen this fall was: What exactly is horror?

The students found the term hard to define, but they observed that horror situations commonly involve the unknown, the dark, a feeling of loss of control, a sense of being trapped, and the innocent turning evil. Fear is at the heart of it all.

Their discussion led to an exploration of fear and human emotion, including a trip to the lab for an exercise on Galvanic Skin Response, one of the physiological measures used in a polygraph (lie detector) test.

After watching two Dracula films, Nosferatu (1922) and Shadow of a Vampire (2000), the class began to discuss the ties between sex and violence in horror mythology.

Reiss notes that our cultural concept of horror has changed with time. For example, the vampire story was not always eroticized. In 1897, when Bram Stoker wrote the book Dracula, the idea of three rapacious women ravaging a man was terrifying to Victorian readers.

The horror film has also evolved through the decades. The “B” movies of the 1950s—with titles such as I Married a Monster from Outer Space and Attack of the Giant Leeches—implicitly reflected a dominant theme of the era: the dread of the “Red Menace” posed by Communism. In such films, notes Reiss, “suddenly we’re not individual people. We’re just clones, or pod people.... In some ways, we’re working out our demons through the horror film.”

Throughout the semester, the class will continue to explore psychology through such horror gems as Alien, Halloween and Night of the Living Dead. They are planning two trips to the cinema to see current films, and will also host guest lecturers. Professor Josh Stenger (English) will speak on blaxploitation in the horror film, and librarian Mason Brown will talk about the horror graphic novel.

“I picked a topic that I wanted to learn about,” says Reiss. “I’m not an expert in horror, and I’m learning along with my students. I think they know that their ideas are just as legitimate as mine. We’re just exploring the terrain.”

Perhaps they should keep an eye on what’s coming up behind them. Mwa-ha-ha-haaaa.