This article was translated from Chinese by Gemini 2.5 Pro.
I finished watching The Conjuring 4 the other day, and it’s hard to put my feelings into words. The Conjuring 3 was already a letdown. It’s fine if the plot isn’t stunning, but as a horror movie, its primary job is to be scary. And the result? Each installment is less scary than the last. Of course, this is because the audience is growing, evolving, while the scare tactics of The Conjuring series have not changed.
So, the question is, why do horror movies or games make us feel scared? Where exactly is the horror? How is this terror created?
Why We Seek Horror#
When a monster is chasing us, our brain activates the fight-or-flight response. This response triggers a series of physiological changes, such as the massive release of neurotransmitters like adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine, leading to an increased heart rate, rapid breathing, and heightened sensory perception.
This surge of neurochemicals produces a state of high arousal. However, because we are clearly aware that we are in a safe environment (like a movie theater or at home), our brain is able to separate this physiological arousal from actual danger.
When the threat is removed, the residual physiological arousal transforms into a strong sense of euphoria and relief.
In other words, the physiological arousal caused by fear does not dissipate immediately after the threat ends but instead enhances the subsequent positive emotional experience, making the entire process enjoyable.
Threatening scenes in horror movies significantly activate the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), the insula, and the thalamus.
These brain regions are closely related to the generation and representation of arousal states and the general awareness of one’s own emotional responses. For details, see the paper:
Beyond the science, psychological theories explaining why humans are attracted to horror have a long history. The most famous classical theory is Aristotle’s concept of Catharsis.
This theory suggests that by watching fictional scenes of violence or horror, the audience can purify or release their own deep-seated negative emotions, such as aggression and fear, in a safe environment. In this framework, horror media becomes an emotional release valve.
Of course, not everyone enjoys horror. Many might think that those who like horror are seeking thrills, which is certainly true, but it’s a bit too one-sided.
Related link 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02298 ↗
Some people may have unique thoughts and insights. When watching a horror story, they can exhibit an ability to understand and appreciate the plight of the characters in the story without being overwhelmed by their painful emotions, thus maintaining a kind of appreciative distance.
Therefore, we may seek horror for physiological, psychological, and emotional reasons.
Horror Games#
I don’t know what everyone thinks about horror games, but for me, horror games are often much scarier than movies. This isn’t to say that horror games have more advanced techniques; it’s due to the advantages of the medium itself.
The most fundamental difference between movies and games in the horror experience is interactivity. In a movie, the audience members are passive observers, witnessing characters scream, run, and die, but they are powerless to do anything.
In a game, the player is the decision-maker. Whether it’s hiding in a closet to avoid a monster or choosing to walk down that dark hallway, every action the player takes determines what happens next. This interactivity creates a sense of immersion far more intense than that of a movie.
When watching a horror movie, the audience feels scared, but they are safe and not responsible for the tragedy unfolding on screen. In a horror game, however, the player holds the controls, and that control comes at a cost.
Every step, every breath, and every mistake is their own, because they know that one wrong decision can lead to terrifying consequences: Game Over.
At the same time, the fear of the monster in the game intertwines with the fear of being unable to overcome the game’s challenges. This dual anxiety is unique to the interactive medium of games.
Furthermore, the pacing of a movie is controlled by the director through meticulous editing, sound design, and cinematography, placing the audience on a pre-designed emotional track.
In contrast, horror games hand over part or all of the pacing control to the player. The player can decide how long to hesitate before entering a creepy room, explore every corner slowly, or rush through dangerous areas.
This freedom creates a more personal and unpredictable sense of fear, allowing suspense to build in a more natural and internalized way.
Horror Techniques#
To effectively induce fear, creators employ many techniques in movies and games. These techniques range from the most direct and instinctual physiological shocks to the most subtle and profound psychological manipulations, together forming the complete spectrum of the horror experience.
Jumpscare#
The Jumpscare is one of the most common and direct techniques in the horror genre. Its core lies in exploiting the innate human startle reflex, which evolved as a very rapid, protective physiological response to sudden, potential threats in the environment.
The effectiveness of a jumpscare relies heavily on the use of nonlinear noise—that is, sudden, drastic changes in the frequency and amplitude of a sound. Our brains, evolved over millions of years, have firmly associated this sound pattern with danger signals, such as the roar of a predator or the scream of a companion.
Of course, the jumpscare is the most effective, yet also the most low-level, scare tactic.
It’s effective because auditory stimuli are processed by the brain faster than visual stimuli. That sudden! sound effect bypasses our higher cognitive functions and directly triggers the brainstem’s startle reflex, making us react before we even consciously register the threat.
It’s low-level because when a person repeatedly experiences jumpscares in a safe context (like watching a movie or playing a game), the brain gradually learns to identify these as false threats. This is desensitization. As a result, the intensity of the startle reflex diminishes or is suppressed entirely.
For me, for example, many jumpscares are preceded by obvious changes in the scene, which allows my brain to prepare, and they don’t scare me at all.
BGM#
Sound design is at the core of building a horror atmosphere. Sound can be divided into two main categories: diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound.
Diegetic sound originates from within the story’s world, such as characters’ dialogue, the creak of a door, or environmental noises, which the characters in the story can also hear.
Non-diegetic sound is external to the story’s world and can only be heard by the audience, the most common example being the film score.
The essence of horror lies in cleverly playing with the relationship between these two. For example, an ominous non-diegetic score can signal impending danger to the audience while the characters on screen remain oblivious. This information gap creates intense dramatic tension.
Of course, a good BGM can also be hair-raising, like the main theme of the game Lakeview Valley, or the jarring sound effect when a character is injured in Lakeview Cabin.
These are effects achieved through sound design. Therefore, a good background score is key to a terrifying atmosphere.
Pacing#
The construction of horror also relies on the pacing of the narrative itself. This involves controlling the flow of information, creating mystery and suspense by delaying or partially revealing key details.
A good horror narrative alternates its rhythm between slow, tense build-ups and sudden bursts of action or scares, keeping the audience in a constant state of unpredictable imbalance.
However, this is not without its failures. For example, in the movie The Conjuring: Last Rites, the scene in the middle where they are watching television uses a pacing that is not very clean or crisp, making one feel drowsy.
Psychological Horror#
The above are some very basic techniques. They can be used anywhere and combined in various ways, but true horror does not originate from the movie or game itself, but from the mind of the audience or player.
The Uncanny Valley Effect#
The Uncanny Valley theory was first proposed by Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori in 1970.
The hypothesis states that as a non-human entity (like a robot or virtual character) becomes more human-like in appearance, an observer’s affinity for it increases.
However, when its similarity reaches a critical point where it is almost indistinguishable from a real human but still has subtle differences, the observer’s affinity suddenly plummets and turns into a strong sense of revulsion, fear, and eeriness. This sharp drop in affinity is the so-called Uncanny Valley.
This is a well-known effect, but the true source of horror is that when an entity exists on the ambiguous boundary between human and non-human, our brain struggles to classify it quickly and clearly.
This cognitive conflict triggers a psychological discomfort similar to cognitive dissonance, leading to aversion and fear.
Of course, there are undeniably other reasons, but cognitive dissonance—feeling the unknown, feeling that something is not right—is the key.
Cognitive Dissonance#
The Lakeview Cabin series and Lakeview Valley, created by indie developer Roope Tamminen, are outstanding examples of using a unique art style and game design to create a profound horror atmosphere.
The core horror mechanism of this series does not rely on realistic graphics or traditional scares, but is built on a carefully designed aesthetic dissonance.
As you are taking a pleasant walk by the beautiful lakeside cabin, you encounter a trap. The beautiful scene is suddenly distorted, and everything becomes incredibly bloody.
This visual dissonance, this dissonance in the background sound, finally gives rise to the feeling of terror we can experience deep inside: dissonance.
Fear Stems from the Unknown#
On the spectrum of horror games, Outer Wilds occupies a unique position. It is not a horror game in the traditional sense; its cartoonish visual style and soothing music even create a warm atmosphere.
However, many players believe it delivers a deeper, more lasting sense of fear than classic horror games. This unique horror does not stem from monsters or jumpscares but is rooted in a more primal and grand source of fear.
The unknown, and the existential awe and terror that arise when facing the vastness of the universe—Cosmic Horror.
An exploding star, a black hole that can swallow everything, an ocean planet covered by giant tornadoes, or the helplessness of getting lost in space, floating alone until your oxygen runs out.
These elements combine to create a profound sense of helplessness and insignificance. A zombie can be conquered, but a supernova cannot.
This fear is subjective and personal. Different planets in the game often trigger different primal fears or specific phobias within the player, such as fear of deep water, fear of enclosed spaces, or fear of the infinite void.
Through its physics engine and environmental design, the game makes these grand, impersonal threats feel incredibly oppressive and real, thereby triggering the player’s instinctual survival responses.
(And by the way, I hope you all get to play this game personally. This is what a game should be!)
Why Aren’t Horror Movies and Games Scary Anymore?#
If I were only talking about simple horror techniques, I wouldn’t need to write this article. In recent years, both games and movies have shown a trend towards commercialization, or what you might call “phoning it in.”
Everything, regardless of genre, is about making money. The horror games we get to play are no longer the kind that can chase us relentlessly but are lazy works that rely on empty worlds and bizarre contrasts.
Through repetitive methods and techniques that players or audiences have long become numb to, piled on top of each other, you are made to experience this horror through a process that looks like it was generated by an AI. Is it really horror?
Desensitization#
The core driver of the modern audience’s diminished sense of fear is not the overconsumption of fictional works, but the unprecedented and constant exposure to real-world horrific events.
The 24-hour news cycle and social media algorithms push real images of war, violent crime, and disasters directly onto people’s screens, a phenomenon unprecedented in human history.
Psychology explains this as habituation: when the brain is repeatedly exposed to a certain stimulus (in this case, images of violence and horror), its emotional and physiological responses gradually weaken. This is a self-protection mechanism.
Long ago, people could only encounter carefully orchestrated scares in a specific environment like a movie theater. Think of horror films from the 1960s.
Today, however, social media platforms have dissolved the boundary between fiction and reality. A fictional movie monster must now compete for emotional impact with the real tragedies an audience member just scrolled past in their feed.
This constant exposure to a mix of real and simulated violence passively raises the brain’s habituation threshold, making all forms of horror stimuli less likely to provoke a strong fear response.
This poses a fundamental challenge to modern horror creators. Their work is no longer being painted on a blank canvas of fear, but on one already smeared with real blood.
This means that simply relying on visual shock or gore is no longer effective, as the audience’s tolerance for these elements has greatly increased.
To recapture the audience’s fear, creators must turn to emotional territories that are not so easily habituated. More internalized forms of fear can bypass the sensory impact dulled by real-world violence and strike directly at the depths of the audience’s psyche.
But the question is, can these scares truly touch the core fears of most audiences in their current cognitive and emotional states?
Commercialization#
The creative toolbox of modern mainstream horror films seems exceptionally limited, and the most overused tool is undoubtedly the jumpscare. A scare itself is not an ineffective technique, but its use in contemporary horror films exposes a creative exhaustion.
This is because these scares are set up in an extremely formulaic way. The audience can easily predict its arrival through predictable sound design and musical cues.
A character enters a quiet, dark environment, the background music fades, the camera moves slowly, and then, at an utterly unsurprising moment, a ghostly figure flashes on screen accompanied by a jarring sound effect.
This mechanical repetition not only fails to scare the audience but can also be annoying due to its predictability.
Meanwhile, the proliferation of film series and the construction of cinematic universes have exacerbated narrative homogenization. When an original concept succeeds (like Saw or The Conjuring), studios tend to milk its commercial value by producing endless sequels, prequels, and spin-offs.
But these subsequent works are often just simple copy-and-pastes of the original’s core elements, lacking innovation and breakthrough. As the series continues, the initial novelty is exhausted, the stories become increasingly repetitive, and they ultimately become a poor imitation of themselves.
At the same time, games are also a disaster area. All sorts of shoddily made games are appearing in droves. They aren’t scary, they aren’t fun, and some aren’t even finished.
This shoddily made garbage floods the environment we can access. We can’t really distinguish the truly scary games or movies, because you have to taste it to know if it’s crap or a feast.
Horror is one of the most profitable genres in the modern film industry. Its business model can be summarized as low-risk, high-reward.
First, the production costs of horror films are generally low. They usually don’t require expensive top-tier stars, grand sets, or complex visual effects.
Many successful horror films take place in a single or limited location (like a house), and the cast is relatively small, which greatly controls the production budget.
Horror films with budgets between 15 million can often leverage huge box office returns.
Furthermore, horror has a loyal and active fan community. Horror fans will actively seek out, discuss, and spread the word about new horror works. Strong word-of-mouth can often turn a small-budget independent film into a blockbuster.
This built-in audience base makes the marketing risk for horror films relatively low.
In stark contrast to the brilliant success of horror is the huge predicament that drama films face in marketing.
In the contemporary film market, dramas are widely considered one of the hardest genres to sell. Especially for younger audiences like Gen Z, the label “drama” is almost synonymous with “boring” and “dull.”
(I actually think so too. What? You say Oppenheimer? That’s different. Oppenheimer has intense conflict.)
The entertainment consumption habits of increasingly younger audiences lean towards immediate sensory stimulation, strong social attributes, and unique community experiences. Horror films happen to perfectly meet these needs.
It provides a physiological heart-pounding experience and also offers an excellent social scenario for friends to watch together and scream together.
In contrast, dramas, which require the audience to immerse themselves quietly and invest emotionally and intellectually, are at a natural disadvantage when competing with fast-paced entertainment formats like short videos.
It is based on this huge contrast in the commercial prospects of horror and drama films that a systematic genre-mismatch marketing strategy has emerged.
Studios and distributors have realized that by taking a film that is essentially a drama or a psychological thriller and disguising it as a horror film—through deceptively edited trailers, thrilling posters, and repeatedly emphasizing its horror elements in promotional materials—they can effectively attract the large, young, and financially stable audience of the horror genre.
But, after watching The Conjuring 4, do you really think it’s a horror film?
False Horror#
“Elevated horror” is a term often used to refer to a group of films that emerged after the 2010s, which are distinguished from traditional horror films in their artistic style and thematic depth.
The common feature of these films is that they prioritize creating psychological fear and a repressive atmosphere over relying on jumpscares and gore.
Their narrative core often revolves around complex human emotions and real social issues, such as grief, trauma, family conflict, identity, or existential anxiety, and they possess the quality of art-house cinema in their audiovisual language.
However, this is essentially a well-designed marketing gimmick. Its primary function is not to perform a rigorous artistic classification but to solve a commercial problem.
How to sell a horror movie to a high-brow audience that despises horror films or is unwilling to admit they like them.
By attaching the “elevated” label, marketers effectively provide this audience with an excuse or a stepping stone.
It implies: “This isn’t just an ordinary horror movie; it has profound themes and artistic pursuits.”
This allows audiences who typically frequent art-house cinemas to consume a horror film with a clear conscience, without worrying about their taste being sullied.
At the same time, this label also provides convenience for film critics, allowing them to safely praise a horror film because its “elevated” status has already set it apart from its “low-brow” peers.
One could also argue that the popularity of “elevated horror” is actually an upgraded version of the genre-mismatch strategy described above.
Some creators or production companies might have originally intended to make a serious drama about family trauma, but to gain the lucrative profits and high attention of the horror market, they added supernatural or thriller elements and then packaged it as “elevated horror.”
This way, they can attract the core horror audience while also appealing to art-film enthusiasts through its profound themes, thus maximizing commercial benefits.
Moreover, the hierarchical notion implied by the term “elevated horror” fundamentally reflects an ignorance of and arrogance toward the rich and glorious history of horror cinema.
The subtext of the word “elevated” is that all other horror films that do not meet its criteria are “low-level.”
This binary division is not only arbitrary but also highly misleading.
It wrongly attributes elements that have long existed in horror films—such as profound themes, complex psychology, and social criticism—to the new inventions of a few contemporary directors.
In fact, from the depiction of a crisis of faith in The Exorcist to the exploration of domestic violence and mental breakdown in The Shining, these classic works had already reached extremely high artistic and intellectual depths.
Therefore, the label “elevated horror” reeks of elitism. It implies that 90% of horror films lack story and are not worthy of attention.
It is not a true film subgenre but merely a synonym for “a good movie,” which has been used with ulterior motives to elevate some works while demeaning and negating the rest of the entire genre.
This practice is not only disrespectful to history but also hurts the feelings of fans who love all forms of horror films.
So#
I feel that the category of horror has transformed from a means of releasing stress into a tool for making money. This is something we can see in all walks of life, like using AI to generate games that are not fun at all.
Take Little Nightmares 3, for example, which is being made by the team at Supermassive Games. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this team, but I have to say, I wouldn’t play their stuff even if it were given to me for free.
So the question is, do they really not know that their stuff is trash?
Perhaps the question itself is wrong. In the logic of capitalism, the standard for “good” and “bad” is not artistic value but commercial return.
A game with a 3-hour runtime that sells for $50, a movie that rides on a classic IP and makes its money back on marketing alone—on a financial statement, they are undeniably “good” works. They have precisely completed their mission: to make money.
The most terrifying thing in this era is that horror itself is no longer horrifying.
But does this mean we should declare the death of horror?
No, quite the opposite. This might be an opportunity for us to strip away the commercial foam and marketing lies to rediscover the most primitive and pure core of fear.
True fear has never existed in formulaic jumpscares or the pretentious profundity touted by the “elevated horror” label.
It exists in Outer Wilds, in that visceral shudder of your own smallness and powerlessness as you gaze upon a supernova about to devour everything.
It exists in works that stay true to their creative vision, like Reanimal, in that eerie atmosphere that cannot be described with words but can only be felt with the heart.
Imitation can only ever copy the form, never the spirit.
When the mainstream market is flooded with more and more horror products that are all form and no substance, we, as the audience and players, can no longer be lambs easily deceived by cheap tricks. We must become connoisseurs who know how to distinguish the soul from the shell.
The next time we choose to walk into a dark movie theater or put on headphones late at night, what we should watch or play shouldn’t be that garbage. It should be the works that, after all the noise has faded, are what truly send a chill down our spine.
Horror is not a genre; it is art.