I am going to tell you a story.
Please listen.
Or don’t. I don’t care.
No, I was just saying that to be nice. I do care. So listen.
Ready?
Ok here we go.
“Please mommy, let us in!” they screamed outside the house.
Meanwhile inside the house, a terrified woman desperately tried to call the police, unable to comprehend why those men were wearing the faces of her dead kids as masks.
Your first thought may be: what in the actual %&$#, right?
Your second thought may be: Ally, isn’t that a two sentence horror story that you found in the images section of Google? Yes. Yes it is.
But that is not my point. My point is that plot twists are a deceptive art. They accentuated the effect of the story by relying on what you think you know – only to pull the carpet from under your feet using the root of all fear: the unknown.
The fear of the unknown can obviously be traced back to our self-preservation instinct. The genes controlling neurotransmitters and their receptors are all present in several different forms in the general population. Parameters have been developed differentiating between what is “safe” and what is not. More importantly, horror follows a formula where you are safe, not safe, safe, the End! Sometimes directors even spice it up by adding another ‘not safe’ towards the end. Along the bell curve lie people who don’t know what the hell is going on, people who are scared but want to see what happens, and people who already have it all figured out. Generally, those who have it figured out are bored, while those who are seeing a movie for the first time or just getting into the genre hide their eyes. As one factor goes up, the other goes down. Enter the plot twist. Did you see it coming? If the movie was just a riddle to be solved, then did you properly interpret the signals that the movie was sending you? If you thought you did, can you actually trust the safety that you promised yourself with the knowledge of how the movie would end? If we can’t trust ourselves, who can we trust?
Here is a quick rundown of the popular biases used to create twists in the horror movies:
*I will try my best not to spoil them*
The Curse of Knowledge:
To assume that others know what you know
Think of the most famous plot twist of all time. Most people, when prompted to do this, think of ‘Psycho’ by Alfred Hitchcock. What if I told you that this French classic, released in 1955, was the movie that inspired it?
We can’t predict the end of this movie because it sets up stereotypes which are easy to understand. That way, it can deviate our focus towards the mystery. The knowledge bias states that “Once you become an expert on certain subjects, it becomes much harder to explain the basics to someone without that same knowledge”. The unreliable narrator assumes the place of the “expert,” while we might be misled by the misconceptions that we have created for that character. Les Diaboliques is a good example of a movie with a satisfying ending because the narrator is ultimately who we cheer for. However, the narrator wielding their power to deceive us into misunderstanding a negative truth is a different story. Both situations create suspense because we don’t have control. Lack of control = fear. Why was Michael Myers frightening in ‘Halloween’? Two words: Uncanny Valley. Not just his appearance, but his actions too. He is not controlled by human morality or mortality. If lack of control is frightening, so is the plot of ‘Diabolique’.
Confirmation Bias:
To seek information that confirms what you already believe
Before Christopher Nolan went crazy with ‘The Prestige’ and ‘The Dark Knight Rises’, there was this movie
The reason why this falls into the confirmation bias category is because the main character is a victim of it himself. As a result, we are at a loss. In the last example I talked about satisfying endings, or when the main character turns out to be the “good guy”. In this case, the main character is the antagonist. This bias is most common in movies with unreliable narrators: the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Shutter Island, Primal Fear. It is no mystery that this stems from the societal fear of ourselves and those among us. Taboos around mental illness, fear of trauma, Rwandan genocide, Vietnam war, Russo-Ukranian war, basically any and all proof that people can act outside of the predefined boundaries of “morality”. I said this before in a class discussion but I think that it is worth mentioning now. Sometimes we don’t fear what we don’t know because we don’t know to fear it. We fear what we do know, which is how little we actually know. When I said that I am pretty sure I was just making shit up, or I had a point I but got lost along the way. But even a broken clock is right twice a day, so let’s hope that is the case.
What you could extract from that is that people have control when they “know the truth”. When they don’t, they create an explanation. From the commonly accepted (Force of gravity, origin of the universe, existence) to the more disputed (life after death, supernatural, if Helen Keller was faking it), we have no truths. The nature of a theory can’t be proven. As technology is advanced we are becoming more aware of what we don’t know and doubting what we do. I think that this is reflected in the confirmation bias. Whether or not the breadcrumbs that you have picked up explain the truth of the situation is in the hands of the director, not us. It is never in our hands.
Anchoring:
to lean too heavily on the first piece of information you hear, failing to correct it as you learn new data
The only faith that we can have is faith in faith itself. There, I just told you the whole story of this movie. You should still watch it though because Alejandro Jodorowski’s mind blows me away.
Forgive me for not knowing the precise terminology for this: the Barnum effect if it weren’t just applicable to personality prescriptions (like horoscopes) “The tendency to accept certain information as true even if it is so vague as to be worthless”. In my 17 years on this lovely planet, I think I might have learned something. Everyone makes **** up (Not in a bad way. It is how we understand things. We all do it, no exceptions. No judgment either.) In 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari said it really well: “People think in stories”.
The story surrounding this movie is religion. So when the movie introduces “the Alchemist” as someone who will enlighten us, I took that and ran. But the end presented me with a result so unsatisfying, that I actually learned something! The way this movie takes a message and a mean that contradict each other, I would define it as a plot twist. Especially because it only starts to develop later in the film, and you realize the quadruple meaning you thought you saw could just be you finding a shape in the clouds. Like the categories above, coming to the realization that the danger is not what you prepared yourself for is what makes this scary.
Availability Bias:
To believe that things that spring readily to mind are more plausible than things that spring less readily to mind
Naomi Watts, aspiring actress who knows she is an actress, but doesn’t actually know that she is acting as an actress who is actually another actress, and she is acting out of the fear of acting out which was caused by her acting as another actress.
The difference between this category and those above is the chain of logic linking one symbol/clue to another. Instead of the answer hiding right under the skin, chances are you would need specific knowledge to understand the truth from the get go. When a movie is such a puzzle, it can access a variety of methods that make you scared: strange music, strange imagery, strange creatures. You know that it is more real than your average alien movie though, thus taking away security. Even though David Lynch movies are scary, per se, they are so fun to analyze that you end up peeling back the layers to find a truth that Lynch is examining. That truth is real, unexpected, and cruel. Watching a Lynch movie is frightening because you know that he is examining a real weak spot, but it is woven into so many metaphors and puzzles that you don’t know what he is trying to tell you at first glance.
Hindsight Bias:
The tendency to see an event as predictable, once it has already unfolded. We experience hindsight bias when we look back and say, “I knew it all along.”
The movie drops clues left and right. Here is a list of clues that I saw after watching the movie for a third time
- The detective’s office and the posters on the walls in the station (obviously)
- Kint being a perfect shot but still saying “How do you shoot the devil in the back? What if you miss?”
- Kint saying that he watched Keaton die through the rope, but in the death scene no one was behind the rope
- Kint using the same lighter as Soze
- He (Kint) confessed to killing Keaton while Kujan was yelling
- I didn’t notice this when I watched the movie: I read an analysis that said that the word “Soze” in Turkish means “Talks too much”. Verbal Kint. Verbal, people. VERBAL!
People are scared of dying. I originally thought that this fear of being outsmarted and convincing yourself that you knew the truth went back to natural selection. People have a herd mentality, so back in the good old days of 35. 000 BC, Henry the human posed a threat to Nelly the Neanderthal. Why isn’t the same true now? How long will it be until we look back and think about how naive we were in 2023?
Answer – I don’t know. I don’t think it is as straight-forward as being a result of natural selection. Were our ancestors less smart? They had larger brains, but the correlation between brain size and intelligence has only been proven to be 30%. This means that it would account for <30% of the population being more intelligent as a result of a bigger brain. Modern man also has more neocortical neurons. The IQ of the average population has also increased by 30 points in 93 years, meaning that the average Joe today would be “gifted” if they lived in 1910. I guess my point is that the “most intelligent person” is a nonexistent label because we can’t define intelligence. No offense, but IF someone reaches the summit of that mountain, they would have better things to do than take pictures and show them to us. If we can’t identify intelligence, how do we know when to stop having fun and start worrying that the more intelligent might destroy our fun?
If I could choose to know more, it would be the different impacts that dread and suspense have in horror movies. The reason why I would like to know this is because it would be a dead giveaway of what I mentioned above. Are we more scared of what we know or don’t know? I assume data could be collected, but would range among different groups of people. Are dread and suspense interchangeable? When we watch a normal horror movie, how is the dread that we feel less lasting than the suspense of an experimental horror? Is the aversion to “different movies” a result of moral panic (something that can be taught) or would our brains react the same way if experimental horror was what we were used to? Is everyone else as fascinated as I am with this subject, but they just pretend to not be because of stigma?
I wish learning more gave you more answers instead of questions.
