Abstract:

Well-told and engaging stories give us pleasure and instruction, they simulate worlds so we can live better in this one. [1] Stories also allow the emergence of emotions essential in building a sense of belonging with others in community, and a need to act. [2] Emotional stories are designed to disturb their audience, whether in a positive sense, as in The Million Dollar Baby drama directed by Clint Eastwood (2004), that inspires post-narrative concern about others; or in a negative sense, as In the Mouth of Madness horror directed by John Carpenter (1994), that instils anxiety and fear. In both cases, the more absorbed viewers are in a story, the more they drop their intellectual guard and the more the story changes them, preparing them for action. [1] In a previous work [3], we have discussed cases of drama stories in which empathy was the engaging feeling of immersion, and donation the consequential action. In this paper, inspired by Antti Revonsuo’s “Threat Simulation Theory” (TST) [4], we extend our analysis to horror stories. We show evidence from neuroscience and cinematic studies that, like nightmares and bad dreams, engaging horror stories have the potential to rehearsal neurocognitive mechanisms essential for threat recognition and avoidance behaviour in real life. In our discussion, rescuing the sometimes ignored-meaning of empathy –as an archaic mechanism of excitatory contagion–, we focus on the prospect-based emotion of fear. We analyse two contemporary cases of horror: the film The Intruder (intentionally designed to evoke fear contagion) and Season1 (S1) of the German Netflix series Dark (designed as a kind of big puzzle for representing the complexity of time travel); and we offer some insights into the mental training of students.

Keywords:

Pedagogical mental training, threat simulations, prospect-based emotions, fear contagion, suspenseful films.