TheoFantastique

A few years ago I broadened the academic lenses through which I study religion. This involved a biocultural approach which includes disciplines like social psychology, the cognitive science of religion, and evolutionary psychology. Since an important emphasis of this blog is to look at the intersection of religion, genre, and pop culture, I was pleased to stumble across Mathias Clasen’s book Why Horror Seduces (Oxford University Press, 2017), where the author draws upon the evolutionary social sciences in order to better understand why people enjoy horror. I was finally able to connect with Clasen so that we could discuss various facets of his research in this new field of study.

TheoFantastique: Mathias, welcome to TheoFantastique. How did a professor of literature and media come to an academic interest in the study of horror, and to adopt an evolutionary psychology framework for analysis of the genre?

Mathias Clasen: Well, my scholarly interest in horror predates my academic appointment. So does my interest in approaching horror from an evolutionary perspective. My interest in horror goes back to my late teens, when I developed a passion for the genre—in literature primarily, but also in cinema. When I enrolled as an English student at Aarhus University in 2001, I was able to pursue that passion in a scholarly way. There is so much horror and Gothic material even in canonical English-language literature. As an undergrad, I discovered evolutionary psychology and started wondering about its potential to shed light on the genre that fascinated me so. I wrote a non-fiction book about horror (in Danish), which came out in 2004. In that book, which I called Homo Timidus (“fearful man”), I made a preliminary and very rudimentary attempt at constructing an evolutionary theory of horror. I later realized that there was a dynamic and hospitable community of evolutionarily-minded literary scholars, who were in the habit of attending the annual conference of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES). In 2008, I attended my first HBES meeting in Philadelphia, where I met many of the pioneers of evolutionary literary study, such as Joseph Carroll, Judith Saunders, Jonathan Gottschall, and Brian Boyd. That conference was a formative experience for me. I went on to write a PhD thesis (“Monsters and Horror Stories: A Biocultural Approach”) on evolutionary horror theory and criticism. After postdoc and assistant professor employment, I made tenure in 2017. At that point, I’d been working with horror and evolution for more than a decade. So maybe the real question is, how did an evolutionarily-minded horror geek—somebody whose favorite author is Stephen King, who can quote at length from Dracula, and who secretly dreams of getting a tattoo of Darwin’s “I think”-doodle—ever make associate professor at an esteemed institution of higher learning?

TheoFantastique: Scholars have utilized a number of other approaches to horror, but few have used evolutionary psychology? Why do you think this is?

Mathias Clasen: I think there are several reasons for this. One is that most horror scholars know very little about the sciences of human nature. Today’s world of scholarship is hyper-specialized. Scholars spend years, decades, acquiring expertise in a very narrow subject. Many don’t feel the need to look across disciplinary boundaries—and if they do, they look to history, maybe, but not all the way to the social and natural sciences. I can understand why, but it’s a real shame, because there’s so much to be gained from responsible interdisciplinary horror scholarship in general, and from applying evolutionary psychology to horror in particular. So one reason is ignorance. Another is ideological resistance—to evolutionary psychology, to the notion of an evolved human nature, and to science itself. Many of those horror scholars who do know something about the sciences of human nature are deeply suspicious of them. They think evolutionary psychology means pseudo-scientific validation of the status quo, bigotry, genetic determinism, neo-eugenics, what have you. It’s a bizarre misunderstanding. Of course there are evolutionary psychologists who are bad people. Of course there are evolutionary psychologists who are fond of the status quo, or who are bigots, or determinists, or whatever. Of course there are evolutionary psychology papers that draw ideological conclusions from shaky empirical foundations and that can be used by bad people to defend their bad ideas. But the science itself is value-neutral (and researchers have shown that evolutionary psychologists tend to be just as left-leaning as the average social scientist). I do think that with time, it will become more and more difficult to dismiss evolutionary psychology as pseudo-science. It will become more and more outrageous to attempt to dislocate humans from their deep biological ancestry. The reason is, simply, the accumulating evidence for an adapted and evolved human nature. So, if horror scholars come to realize that evolutionary psychology can actually help them make sense of their subject, then we’ll see more horror scholars adopt an evolutionary approach. It’ll take time, though, because an evolutionary approach to horror is in conflict with several of the dominant paradigms in literary study, such as Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis and the kind of historicist theory that is underpinned by blank slate-thinking.

TheoFantastique: Can you summarize evolutionary psychology and how you apply it to an understanding of the appeal of horror?

Mathias Clasen: Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the field of psychology—a meta-theory, if you will. Its aim is to make sense of human thinking, feeling, and behavior as products of an evolutionary process of natural (and sexual) selection. So, an evolutionary psychologist may take an interest in a particular human trait—language, say, or moral reasoning, or the emotion of fear—and try to figure out how and why that trait evolved over thousands of generations (by making hypotheses about function and then testing those hypotheses against data—genetic, behavioral, biometric, endocrine, comparative, archeological, paleoanthropological, neuroimaging, and so on). Mainstream evolutionary psychology has yet to make real sense of many of the things that scholars in the humanities are interested in—the imagination and fiction, for example. But those phenomena aren’t outside the scope of evolutionary investigation, and evolutionarily-minded scholars in the humanities are making rapid progress in understanding the function of the imagination and the crucial role storytelling has played in human evolution (as a tool for cognitive orientation, emotional and moral calibration, social bonding, and so on).

Likewise, the peculiar phenomenon of horror can be explained from an evolutionary perspective. At first glance it’s really weird that humans are attracted to a kind of entertainment that’s designed to make them feel bad, but of course horror doesn’t just elicit negative emotions like fear and dread and disgust (although the elicitation of those emotions is the genre’s distinguishing characteristic)—horror fans also expect to feel anticipation and joy and surprise when they seek out horror. One active hypothesis is that horror provides an imaginative context in which humans can engage with fear (and other negative emotions) outside of its biological niche. Fear and disgust evolved as defensive tools (to protect us from assault, accident, and infection), but through horror we can investigate the shapes and shades of those emotions in perfect safety. Human (like many other species) evolved to find pleasure in playful activities because such activities let them prepare for the threats of the natural and the social world. We learn about the world through play, including imaginative play, and horror specifically lets us learn about the dangers and horrors of the world. So, an evolutionary approach tells us about the evolved function of horror, but it can also inform interpretative critiques of specific works of horror, as I’ve tried to show in my work (for example on Dracula and King’s The Shining).

TheoFantastique: In Part 2 of your book you discuss “Evolutionary Perspectives on American Horror.” Can you share a few of the insights that you gained in your research about evolutionary psychology as it relates to examples from horror films?

Mathias Clasen: Yes, the book is in three parts—one theoretical, where I roll out the evolutionary theory of horror; one interpretive, where I offer evolutionary readings of a bunch of canonical American works of horror literature and cinema; and one cross-medial, where I expand the scope to include interactive horror media and make some guesses about the future of horror. The horror films that I discuss in the second part are Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Spielberg’s Jaws, Carpenter’s Halloween, and Sánchez and Myrick’s The Blair Witch Project. (I originally wanted to include more films, such as Friedkin’s The Exorcist, Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, but I also wanted to keep the length of the book down, so those films will have to wait for another book.) My approach to those films is biocultural. I look at how the films are structured to tap into evolved psychological dispositions—universal facets of human nature—but also at how they are lodged within the cultural context of their production. To give an example, Romero’s classic zombie flick seems to consciously engage with topical concerns, such as a Vietnam-era anxiety over social collapse and conflict, but it also taps into a deeply conserved fear of being attacked by predatory creatures and a fear of being infested with a dangerous disease (Romero’s ghouls are predatory and infectious). That’s a potent cocktail. The point is, we can’t leave out either of these factors. Traditional horror critics have focused on the topical stuff, but that can’t explain why the zombie figure continues to thrill, disgust, and delight people. That’s where the “bio-” part of bioculturalism comes in.

TheoFantastique: Are you continuing this line of research in your own work, and what do you see as far as potential for further exploration in this area as it contributes to horror studies?

Mathias Clasen: I am. The evolutionary approach to horror is still wet behind the ears, although folks like Torben Grodal have made pioneering efforts in the field. In recent years I’ve divided my own efforts between theoretical and interpretive work, on the one hand, and empirical and quantitative work on the other. For example, I’m engaged in some really cool projects that investigate cognition and behavior among haunted house visitors, and I was part of a project to delineate the personality of horror fans. But there is so much still left to be done—theoretical refinement; empirical validation; hypothesis-testing; analysis and interpretation of specific horror works and subgenres; cross-cultural analysis; trans-media analysis, and so on. The field has a bright future, I think, and I fervently hope that other scholars will join the effort to make sense of horror from an evolutionary perspective. Now is the right time to join. The field is established enough so that there’s a solid foundation on which to build, but there’s still a heck of a lot of building needs to be done, so an ambitious and open-minded scholar has every opportunity to leave a mark on this particular edifice.

TheoFantastique: Mathias, thank you for making time in a busy academic schedule to discuss your book and your ongoing research. I look forward to watching the unfolding insights you and others discover.