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Home / Nina Nesseth’s Nightmare Fuel Is a Scientific and Heartfelt Love Letter to Horror
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Nina Nesseth’s Nightmare Fuel Is a Scientific and Heartfelt Love Letter to Horror

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Published on October 11, 2022

Nina Nesseth’s Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Movies digs into the science of how horror works and why certain horror movie tropes have reliably scared us for over a century. It would be a great read any time of year, but obviously it’s a perfect October book. And I can report some immediate results from reading it: I just watched Saw for the first time (I know, I know) and it was so much fun tracking my responses to the film, and knowing, at least a little, why my brain was responding the way it was.

Nina Nesseth is the co-author of The Science of Orphan Black: The Official Companion, and a science communicator whose background is in human biology—which becomes clear immediately because she’s very skilled at taking complex scientific facts and theories and explaining them in language even I can understand. I’m one of those people who was reading way above my grade level by first grade, but who, at the best times, could barely pull a C in science classes. (Maybe I’d get a B- if we were studying a cute mammal, but even that was kind of miraculous.) I took the most basic Chemistry class my high school offered, only because I had to have it to graduate; I never took Physics. So when I say I enjoyed a book that is largely about brain chemistry please understand first, that I’m surprised (and depressingly proud of myself) but second, and more important, that it’s entirely a testament to Nesseth. Throughout the book she explains theories and research in a way that makes them understandable, but she also doesn’t oversimplify things—she will painstakingly walk you through the various forms of the COMT gene and the GLRA1 gene to help you understand the human startle response—and, as a bonus, fainting goats. I had no idea what either of those things were before, and now I could almost explain why one particular variant of one of them makes some people jump higher than others during the nurse station scene in Exorcist III.

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Nightmare Fuel

Nightmare Fuel

Nesseth ties all of her explanations into scenes from a startling variety of horror movies. Each chapter features spotlights on how different films scare us, from moody classic like Cat People to brutal works like Hostel and Turistas, from body horror like Cronenberg’s whole deal, to quote-unquote elevated horror like Hereditary. (n.b.: I don’t agree with the elevated horror nonsense. We’ll get to my own personal gatekeeping bugbear in a few paragraphs.) She also dots the book with interviews with film critics, podcast hosts, directors, editors, and effects artists to bring in more perspectives on how horror works, so for instance Jamie Kirkpatrick, editor of My Friend Dahmer, talks about how the cuts between Danny Torrance on his trike and the empty echoing hallways of the Overlook Hotel build the tension we feel when we watch The Shining, and the co-hosts of the podcast Scarred for Life talk about which movies, um, scarred them for life.

Nesseth opens the book by diving straight into the grey matter. She explains how the human brain processes fear, breaking down the five main responses:

  • Freeze
  • Fight
  • Flight
  • Fright (tonic immobility)
  • Friend/fawn

She relates each response to specific horror films, like Jurassic Park, Halloween, and Martyrs, looking at how effective the characters’ responses turn out to be, e.g. Sally Hardesty’s flight response works out pretty well for her in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Michelle doesn’t have much choice but to befriend Howard in 10 Cloverfield Lane. But Nesseth takes this a step further to consider whether the characters’ responses would work in our world (If science ever brings the T-Rex back, don’t bother freezing—they’ll be able to smell you) and looking at how startle responses are used against audiences during jumpscares.

Having given us this look at our inner workings, she zooms out for a macro view of the genre in a chapter on the history of horror that puts horror films in conversation with events that shaped them, like nuclear radiation, cults, STDs, war, etc. She talks about movie monsters like the Xenomorph and The Thing by relating them to real-life predators, and she explores the ways camera work and soundtracks exploit our eyes’ and ears’ processing systems. (Nesseth spends a lot of time on my nemesis A Quiet Place and almost—almost—makes me appreciate it with her account of her intense theater experience: “The power of silence, and the audience’s collective motivation to participate in that silence, was palpable.”)

But rather than simply presenting facts, or even just analyzing films, Nesseth aims to make horror films a more proactive experience. She takes us through a long section on how the brain process memory, looking at Joseph LeDoux’s “two-system model of fear memories”, the idea of “flashbulb memory”and the evolution of PTSD treatment. This in turns leads to a couple of examples of psychology experiments that attempted to create phobias in children that previously hadn’t had them—pretty horrific in itself. But at the close of this section she offers multiple methods for training yourself out of your fear response, giving examples of fictional characters doing this in films, and examples from IRL cognitive studies. She spotlights two movies in this section: Jaws, with a discussion of how sharks became a common fear for people because they saw the movie, with anecdotes from people who were afraid to swim even in the ends of pools, let along the ocean) and Last House on the Left, which based its ad campaign on the idea that reminding yourself “It’s only a movie” could make it less scary—which, given how the brain processes fear, might actually work.

Nesseth is an immediately engaging writer, and an ideal guide for her sometimes squicky topics. Early on in a chapter called “Blood, Gore, and Body Horror” she explains the reason that Body Horror works on us:

The human body is an ideal site for horror: the body is personal, and even on a good day it’s kinda gross. Fluids and squishy tissues aside, our bodies are the tools that allow us to exist in the world and experience it for all its pleasures and pains. But despite our marvelous complexity, at the end of the day, a human is just a fragile meat tube…

grounding us in the basics, before walking us through different types of violence. What Cronenberg does is body horror, sure, and The Human Centipede, of course, but so is transforming into a werewolf, and so is pregnancy. And, really, what is possession but the spiritual equivalent of body horror? The demons don’t care about the limits of Regan’s body in the Exorcist films, or Nell Sweetzer’s in The Last Exorcism, and neither do the Deadites in any of the various Evil Dead movies. In all of these films, the scares are based in the same primal fear—losing our autonomy. She walks us through each element in the same matter-of-fact way, pulling the definitions of “body horror”, “torture porn”, and “extremity” out like so many tendons in a writhing arm. A highlight for me was when her explanation of why some people faint at the sight of blood leads straight into a brief history of movie blood chemistry. (Thanks, 3M.) Also, if you have a thing about eyeballs, this is your chapter. (Sorry if I just triggered your eyeball thing.)

I thought Nightmare Fuel was a really fun read, and a great resource for people who want to understand why scary movies affect us the way they do. It’s also a great platform for more study, with Nesseth including lonnnng lists of the movies she watched for each chapter, and a generous crop of resources for anyone who wants to keep reading. But more than all of that, this is a fantastically inclusive exploration of the genre. Nesseth talks about all different types of horror, and never even tells us which, if any, are her favorites. Saw gets the same attention as The Babadook, which gets just as much respect as the Universal classics. I love this even if, to be honest, I don’t completely, personally, agree with it.

Because here’s the other fun thing about this book: it makes you think about why you like horror, and which types of horror work better for you than others. For me personally, there has to be a monster—whether it’s a ghost or a shark or a person in a mask. If it’s just a person person, it usually can’t quite cross into horror for me, so rape revenge, for me, is crime drama, no matter how over-the-top if gets. I know people count Last House on the Left and even Deliverance as horror films, but where does it leave us, genre-wise? Is Game of Thrones horror? The Accused? Promising Young Woman? In the case of serial killer movies and slashers, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, In Cold Blood, anything about Dahmer, are crime dramas or true crime, but I can’t accept them as horror. To illustrate with Ed Gein: if I watched a realistic film about Gein, I would call that a true crime drama. If I watched a lightly fictionalized film that was based in Gein’s acts, I would call it a crime drama. When we get to Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Psycho, which were both based on his case, I would argue that the main characters are taken to such heights of surrealism, and their statuses as real people are so subsumed into the characters of “Leatherface” and “Mother”, respectively, that the stories are no longer about a human killing other humans. Similarly, Silence of the Lambs only, barely, tips into horror in the scene where Dr. Lecter lures his guards into his cage so he can operatically murder them. Again, this scene reaches such heights of stylization—while making you question whether any living human could realistically turn a cop into an angel and hang him from the top of a cage—that it becomes horror. On the other hand, Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is always horror because you’ll never convince me that Mads Mikkelson’s version of Hannibal isn’t supernatural. (And Will Graham is also kind of a superhero, but I’ve already made that argument.)

But see, Nesseth talks about people like me in the book. In “Horror’s Long Lasting Appeal”, she looks at case studies that broke down different types of horror fan, and what each fan was seeking from the genre. She looks at the theory that a love of horror might be genetic, and she digs into the problems that have come from an idea called “Snuggle Theory” posited by Dolph Zillman, which “suggests that the act of watching a horror movie with an opposite-gender date will reinforce desirable gender roles such as ‘fearless macho man.’ (I swear, these are the exact words that Zillman’s paper uses.)” Nesseth unpacks all the ways such a study is inadequate, from the fact that it only uses cisgender participants, to the fact that the study only showed the couple clips from a single film, rather than allowing them to respond to an entire movie or series of movies. What comes through in this chapter is the idea that horror is for everyone, and also that no one should be gatekeeping the genre. (Including me.) Which leads to my favorite aspect of the book, which is that nearly every interview and discussion of brain chemistry comes back to the idea that we love horror because of empathy. The movies don’t work if we don’t empathize, whether it’s with the people being chainsaw massacred, or with the poor misunderstood Wolf Man/shark/kaiju. There are no gatekeepers in Nightmare Fuel—Nina Nesseth welcomes everyone into the horror tent and explains why the clowns are terrifying.

Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Movies is published by Nightfire.
Read a excerpt here.

Leah Schnelbach enjoyed having an excuse to think deeply about horror, and to read the word “amygdala” so many times. It’s such a good word: AMYGDALA. Come talk about body horror and its discontents on Twitter!

About the Author

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Leah Schnelbach

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Intellectual Junk Drawer from Pittsburgh.
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