The scariest horror characters look scared

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Have you ever noticed this? Rarely do the scariest villains have merely angry looks on their faces.
More often, they also (or even mostly) look scared themselves. Somehow, that makes them look scarier.
And I think I know how. We humans instinctively drop our defenses a degree when we see someone looking scared. (Our defenses toward them, I mean.)
Horror artists and directors take advantage of this, by making their villains look scared, and this more widely opens up the audience emotionally, so that the intended experience of fear becomes stronger: You're scared for the hero when they look scared, plus you're also subconsciously (and illogically) scared for the attacker if they, too, look scared.

Note:















Another twist in some horror films away from what any real killer would look like is a complete absence of malice on the face. This produces the same effect as the first technique: we lower our defenses somewhat, thus allowing the fear to reach us more strongly, and on a deeper level:














My conclusion is that horror artists exploit our often-subconcious sympathy reactions to produce greater fear within us.

Last edited by Ragtime on 13 Feb 2009, 12:59 pm, edited 6 times in total.

would this be fact or speculation?

in nature, when an animal is frightened, it has two options: run or attack. from an evolutionary standpoint, I can speculate that dropping defenses wouldn't be the thing to do when facing this.

this however would still support the idea of feeling fear when seeing fear.




The problem that i see with this idea is that the fear is not what we would be trying to defend ourselves against, it's something that we would be generating as a response to threat. lowering defenses doen't make us more vulnerable to fear, only to the threat. If we are comfortable enough with something to lower defenses towards it than that is evidence of the subsidence of fear. Though further fear could be generated when someone's confidence in their expectation of safety becomes unstable and they then can no longer rely on their judgement on what to trust and what to fear.

Is it just me, or do none of the characters in the images actually look scared? One looks surprised, the others just, I don't know, but they don't look scared to me.

Last edited by OccamsIndecision on 13 Feb 2009, 7:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Exactly. That's how they get us. Sudden fear after a calm feeling is its own kind of fear, that combines with the main fear, that of the villian.



That too.

I just told my wife about my theory, and she, unlike me, is a horror afficienado. She thinks I'm right, and she said she never noticed that trait in horror characters before, but she said it sounds right, like the little boy in "The Grudge", she said he looks scared when screaming at you, and it makes you more scared seeing that.

There's also a weird, mega-CGI horror movie coming out (or it may just recently have come out) where the deformed human monster in it looks frightened while screaming his head off in rage.