Verified by 
Key points
- Horror movies use sound to frighten audiences.
- We perceive some sounds as scary because we naturally associate them with danger.
- Horror movies take advantage of such biologically potent sounds.
By Frederik Lundsgaard Jensen, M.Sc. and Mathias Clasen, Ph.D.
The Fear Centre of the Brain Is Activated
Researchers have shown that humans perceive approaching sounds differently than we perceive receding sounds.
We overestimate how quickly the sound approaching us is moving (Neuhoff, 2001). There is also more activity in the brain’s ‘fear center’ when we hear sounds approaching us than when we hear similar sounds receding from us.
This tendency to overestimate the speed of approaching sounds is called ‘auditory looming bias’ and is presumably a biological survival mechanism.
It is also found in rhesus monkeys (Ghazanfar et al., 2002), which indicates that the tendency is deeply rooted in primate psychology.
If we automatically perceive a rapidly approaching sound as a sign of danger (for instance, a hungry predator moving towards us), there is a greater chance that we react quickly and adaptively and avoid being eaten.
In the clip below, which is from the horror movie The Grudge, there’s a clear example of such a ‘looming’ sound. The intensity of the soundtrack increases to the point just before the final climax in the form of a jump scare.
The volume increases steadily throughout the sequence, but also, the soundtrack is intensified musically by continuously adding more layers of sounds and instruments, for instance, by way of strings playing higher notes.
This sound design stimulates our inner prey and creates a disturbing sense that something bad is approaching – which is also what the clip demonstrates.
Ghastly Drones
A final example of an efficient auditory horror effect is the musical drone. A drone – a continuous, monotonous sound – occurs when a note or chord is drawn out and can be heard in bagpipe music, for instance.
The drone is not necessarily scary, but it is often found in horror movies and can seem ominous.
This is probably because the drone usually does not have an obvious source, you cannot see where the sound is coming from, and it just keeps going and going without change or deliverance.
A good example of this can be found in John Carpenter’s horror movie The Thing where a drone sound is used to create anxious anticipation.
Fear of the Unknown
We are used to sounds being clearly linked with a source and carrying meaning, but the drone is not linked with a clearly defined, tangible danger (like the roar or the scream is). It does not obviously mean anything.
It does, however, play with the fear of the unknown, which is one of the most fundamental kinds of fear that humans are equipped with (Carleton, 2016) and creates an expectation that something bad can happen at any time. There is an expectation of a scary climax surrounding the drone, but no indication of when the climax will occur.
In this way, the drone also plays with the psychological phenomenon called creepiness. Researchers have shown that situations or persons are perceived as creepy when they are considered unpredictable and are associated with a threatening type of ambiguity (McAndrew and Koehnke, 2016).
When we don’t know if a person or situation is dangerous (for instance, if a stranger stares at us for a bit too long, or we find ourselves alone in a dark forest), we perceive it as creepy and react with heightened vigilance to danger signals.
In this way, a drone can presumably also be perceived as creepy, especially if it appears in a horror movie where you know that something scary can occur at any moment.
Watch Out for the Sound
It is no coincidence that sound is so important in horror movies. Humans are by nature equipped to detect and respond to sounds because sound may contain information that is relevant to our survival, such as information about an ambush lurking animal.
We may not be able to see the camouflaged prey or predator, but if we are lucky, we can hear it.
In this way, we are particularly attentive to sounds that signal danger, such as very deep sounds, rapidly approaching sounds, or scream-like sounds, because such sounds have been important to our survival for millions of years.
Horror filmmakers are in the business of stimulating our biological defense system (Clasen et al., 2020). A good horror movie is a scary horror movie – and sound is a particularly efficient tool (Lerner, 2010) because, for one thing, sound is difficult to shield yourself from.
We can shield ourselves from scary images (by closing our eyes), but it is harder to shield ourselves from scary sounds, partly because we cannot close our ears, and partly because we don’t just listen with our ears.
Sound is pressure waves, and they can spread throughout the body; even if we cover our ears during an intense thunderstorm, the blasts from the lightning strikes can still be felt in the body and be registered in that way.
Similarly, sound from a horror movie can – especially if you watch them in the cinema or have a very good sound system at home – get straight into our biological fear system and scare the living daylights out of our inner prey.
So if a horror movie becomes too scary, it may be a good idea to turn down the volume or cover your ears.
This is part two of a two-part series. The article is based on a Danish-language article also published in Danish on Forskerzonen at videnskab.dk. The text was translated by Majbritt Kastberg Grønbæk, to whom the authors extend their gratitude.
References
Carleton, R. N. (2016). Fear of the unknown: One fear to rule them all?. Journal of anxiety disorders, 41, 5-21. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2016.03.011.
Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2020). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 14(3), 213. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ebs0000152
Ghazanfar, A. A., Neuhoff, J. G., & Logothetis, N. K. (2002). Auditory looming perception in rhesus monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(24), 15755-15757. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.242469699.
Lerner, N. (Ed.). (2009). Music in the horror film: Listening to fear. Routledge.
McAndrew, F. T., & Koehnke, S. S. (2016). On the nature of creepiness. New ideas in psychology, 43, 10-15. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2016.03.003.
Neuhoff, J. G. (2001). An adaptive bias in the perception of looming auditory motion. Ecological Psychology, 13(2), 87-110. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1207/S15326969ECO1302_2.
