Why Creativity Isn’t Always Good & The Magic of Horror Movies at Halloween - SYSK Choice

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Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, how your posture can affect your mood, your self-esteem, even your math skills. Then, creativity.

Speaker 1 Everyone loves creativity, but maybe that concept has been a little overhyped.

Speaker 2 I have nothing against creativity in most of the meanings that we mean it, but one of the problems is that it's a very vague term, and it kind of always has been.

Speaker 2 For one thing, it's vague about whether it is talking about art or technology or anything else.

Speaker 1 Also, how often should you take a shower? And horror films, why we love them and why they don't get no respect.

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Speaker 1 All this today on something you should know.

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Speaker 1 Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know.
With Mike Carruthers.

Speaker 1 hi there welcome to something you should know

Speaker 1 assuming you're sitting how are you sitting are you sitting up straight or are you slouching well the better choice would be to sit up straight it can do wonders for it can do wonders for all kinds of things research from san francisco state university shows that People who slouch have lower energy, higher levels of depression than those people with better posture.

Speaker 1 Whether you're standing or sitting, slouching interferes with the flow of oxygen from your lungs to your brain.

Speaker 1 In another study, participants with upright posture, good posture, showed higher self-esteem, more arousal, better mood, and lower fear compared to participants who slumped.

Speaker 1 Good posture helps with unexpected things too, like math.

Speaker 1 In a study from 2018, researchers looked at how well college kids did simple math based on their posture comparing sitting up straight and slumping 56% said it was easier to do the math in an upright position and that is something you should know

Speaker 1 what could possibly be controversial about creativity Over the last several decades, anything creative has been considered wonderful. We really all need to be more creative.

Speaker 1 The workplace needs more creative ideas. How can you use creativity to improve what you do, no matter what it is you do?

Speaker 1 There's this idea that we should foster more creativity in ourselves and in our children because, well, our children are tomorrow's creators. But wait a minute.
Hang on.

Speaker 1 Maybe this whole idea of creativity in our everyday lives has been a little overhyped. That's according to Samuel Franklin.

Speaker 1 He is a cultural historian who has earned awards and fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Speaker 1 He's developed exhibitions for the American Museum of Natural History, and he is author of a book called The Cult of Creativity, a Surprising Recent History.

Speaker 1 Hi, Samuel. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 Hi, Mike. Thanks.
It's good to be here.

Speaker 1 So I was surprised to learn, and looking at the material about you and your book and all, and the subtitle of your book, that this whole love affair with creativity is pretty recent.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So as you mentioned, creativity now has this kind of divine status.
Seemingly everybody is chasing it, is trying to foster it as a personal goal.

Speaker 2 We try to foster it in our organizations, in our schools,

Speaker 2 in our economies. Yet

Speaker 2 75 years ago, almost nobody used that word. Now,

Speaker 2 I did trace this kind of creativity craze to about the post-World War II era.

Speaker 2 That's when we really started seeing people talking about creativity and having scientific conferences on the nature of creativity and writing books and pamphlets on creativity.

Speaker 2 and devising creative thinking methods like brainstorming and other things like that to try to sort of manufacture creativity. So it is a fairly recent phenomenon.

Speaker 1 And when this all started to happen after World War II,

Speaker 1 was there a force that made it happen? Was there a big guru, a creativity guru, or what got the ball rolling?

Speaker 2 In a way, probably a lot of people started liking the idea of creativity at the same time. However, there were some major forces,

Speaker 2 some figures. It was kind of a loose coalition of people, including some psychologists like J.P.

Speaker 2 Guilford and Frank Barron and Calvin Taylor and some others whose names we don't usually remember unless we're psychologists or historians of social science.

Speaker 2 And then there were business people like Alex Osborne, who also is a name not many people know, but he invented brainstorming, which is something we probably do know.

Speaker 2 And so there were kind of a, like I said, a loose coalition of people who all were sometimes in the same room together. They were reading each other's stuff.
They were supporting each other's work.

Speaker 2 And they created a kind of

Speaker 2 a sort of critical mass of literature on creativity that continues to be influential to this day.

Speaker 2 Their reasons were varied. They came from different places.
Some were from advertising. Some were from psychometrics, which is the psychology of mental testing.

Speaker 2 And they were kind of coming from all over the place, but they agreed on certain key things about the world they were living in. One was that it was overly organized, too bureaucratic, too conformist.

Speaker 2 So they sought the nature of individual imagination or individual ingenuity. And that was something that they called creativity.

Speaker 2 And that's what really started the first psychological studies into creativity.

Speaker 1 So today, creativity, when you say the word to people, it's this idea of, you know, thinking outside the box, of coming up with new ways of doing things, of coming up with interesting and exciting ways.

Speaker 1 And so what's wrong with that?

Speaker 2 Nothing wrong with that necessarily.

Speaker 2 I think it overstates the extent to which that kind of stuff is actually valuable. So if you look at most of what needs to be done for our world to keep on ticking, for our economy to keep on ticking,

Speaker 2 most of it is actually pretty mundane. Now, that doesn't necessarily make it fun to work on, but for a lot of people, it does make it quite satisfying to do their job, do it well.

Speaker 2 I think this world needs experts. I think the world needs lots of very competent tradespeople, people who are very good with their tools and kind of know the right and wrong way to do things.

Speaker 2 So I'm not opposed to creativity. Hey, I love...
I love art. I love music.
I love when people come up with interesting new solutions for everyday things. I'm for all of that.

Speaker 2 And I'm certainly for independent thought.

Speaker 2 But I think that in the business world, creativity has become a bit of a buzzword that kind of overstates the importance of, you know, as you said, thinking outside the box.

Speaker 1 So it sounds like

Speaker 1 there are two things going on, that in the arts, yes, there is creativity, because if there wasn't, if people weren't creative in different ways, every

Speaker 1 song would sound the same, every picture would look the same. So there is some creativity there.
However, in just everyday business life and just life in general,

Speaker 1 maybe there's not as much creativity going on or can go on as we think.

Speaker 2 That's right. Although I actually think I would beg to differ about your characterization of the arts.

Speaker 2 I think even in the arts, technical mastery and very sort of mundane, repetitive things like knowing how to mix paint or how to play an instrument properly or things like that are really more important than we like to talk about them being.

Speaker 2 And if you, there's an old saying, when artists get together, they don't talk about creativity, they talk about the price of paint. And I think there's some truth to that, that even art is kind of,

Speaker 2 in many cases, really a craft as much as anything else. And if you look at some of the great artists who have

Speaker 2 characterized, you know, punctuated the 20th century, even the post-World War II era, like, I don't know, Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock, you know, they basically chose one thing and kind of stuck to it.

Speaker 2 So the generation of novelty for its own sake, I don't think has ever been as much a part of the arts as we like to think it is.

Speaker 1 It would seem that a lot of creativity is incremental, but it's still creativity. And just because it's not all brand new doesn't mean it isn't creative.
It's just building on what we've had before.

Speaker 1 But it's still, I mean, you look at

Speaker 1 a movie and, you know, the story might be just like, wow, I didn't see that coming. That was amazing how they did that.
And yeah, it's sort of maybe done before, but

Speaker 1 not like this. And so it's different.
It's not all different, but it's still pretty creative.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's true. I do think that most, that things that even feel really new and refreshing to us are, as you said, just kind of incrementally different from what came before.

Speaker 2 I don't think, I think if things are too new,

Speaker 2 we just think they're weird. So we actually quite like to know that most, you know, 90 or 99% of what's going to go on in any given song or movie or painting or,

Speaker 2 you know, a technology for that matter. But it's that little extra that surprises us and that we do enjoy.

Speaker 2 And so I think that kind of that's maybe also the extent to which creativity is important in the production of those things.

Speaker 2 I think that mastering forms can be just as important as coming up with the new ideas.

Speaker 1 So I get what you're saying, that maybe creativity has been a bit overhyped, but so what? I mean, what's the harm? What could that possibly do to get in the way of something else?

Speaker 2 Well, that's a good question, right? Why do I call it a cult? That sounds like it's a bad thing. Mostly, as I said, I have nothing against creativity in most of the meanings that we mean it.

Speaker 2 But one of the problems is that it's a very vague word. It's a very vague term, and it kind of always has been.
So for one thing, it's vague about whether it

Speaker 2 is talking about art or technology or anything else. It's also vague about whether it's talking about genius or these everyday acts of kind of incremental cleverness that we were just talking about.

Speaker 2 And I think that's by design. I think that

Speaker 2 the people who write about creativity and who have been writing about creativity for 75 years have always wanted to keep those meanings kind of together and in balance.

Speaker 2 But I think that that can do some sort of nefarious work. So I'll give you an example.
There was a big

Speaker 2 craze in urban economic development. It's still going on to some extent, but it was particularly strong in the early 2000s and 2010s.
And that was the creative cities phenomenon.

Speaker 2 The idea was that if you were a city that was struggling, a post-industrial place that had lost a lot of manufacturing, and you were looking for a way to revive your economy, well, instead of doing kind of lame things like building stadiums and malls and boring office campuses, office parks, you should attract the creative class to your city.

Speaker 2 These people who are creatives, they're artists and designers and musicians and maybe tech people too. And they together will kind of create this

Speaker 2 creative energy, which will spur innovation. And if you're a company, you should move to these cities because this is where these people are.
Now, creativity sounds great.

Speaker 2 The idea that creativity is the thing that's going to power this new economic revival sounds wonderful because, like you said, we associate creativity with the arts and with humane things and things that are kind of unobjectionable and morally good.

Speaker 2 But what a lot of the actual development was in high-tech companies, which seemed to qualify as creative, though not in the same way as the arts.

Speaker 2 Again, we're kind of conflating these two ideas of creativity.

Speaker 2 And most of the development that was done came from real estate speculation due to the presence of highly paid, again, technical workers, not of artists, not of low-paid, you know, performance artists and musicians that were supposed to be the ones at the center of this.

Speaker 1 We're talking about creativity and how maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be. My guest is Samuel Franklin.
He's author of a book, The Cult of Creativity, a surprisingly recent history.

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Speaker 1 So, Sam, this whole idea of creativity in the workplace seems very benign to me. I mean,

Speaker 1 what's wrong with wanting more creative ideas in the workplace? It doesn't mean you have to follow them. It doesn't mean you have to do anything with them.

Speaker 1 And maybe there would be a great idea that comes along in the process that really would be helpful. But

Speaker 1 I just don't see the harm in

Speaker 1 fostering that idea.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. And that's fine, and that's great.
And I think it's probably better to work for one of those companies than one that says, we don't care what you think.

Speaker 2 However, I think there are a few other kind of downsides. We were talking about the downsides to this cult of creativity earlier.

Speaker 2 And one does have to do with how creativity is promoted within organizations. And one thing I think it does is it

Speaker 2 can get

Speaker 2 sometimes when companies are talking about promoting creativity, they're talking about promoting flexibility. Because

Speaker 2 some of the ideas that came out of the 1950s and 60s about about creativity was that creative people, the creative person was this new kind of figure that came out of there, that creative people are flexible, they're tolerant, they can deal with change, they are not risk averse.

Speaker 2 Now, that's great. That can be lovely, but what it can also do is it can convince people to

Speaker 2 say instead of clocking in at nine and out at five and then enjoying their leisure time, it can convince them to work all night because that's what a creative person would do.

Speaker 2 That's what an artist would do. It can convince them that they need to have a lot of passion for their work that again would cause them to work over the weekend or work all hours and never stop.

Speaker 2 It can

Speaker 1 also

Speaker 2 part of the idea of creativity is that creative people don't really work for money. They work for the

Speaker 2 project itself. They work

Speaker 2 for the sake of the work. And so maybe we don't need to pay creative people as much.
Maybe money won't be really the incentive.

Speaker 2 It will be other things like beanbag chairs and ping pong tables, these amenities in workplaces that will supposedly make work more fun and thus more creative and make people want to stay there longer and maybe make them settle for less pay.

Speaker 2 So I think a lot of the kind of general degradation of work that we've seen, the chipping away of pensions and benefits and the move to hiring people temp or on contingent labor or outsourcing, A lot of that has been done in the name of creativity under this idea that creativity thrives on that kind of risk and dynamism.

Speaker 2 And I think that a lot of people have bought into it because it does feel quite fun and it's quite

Speaker 2 flattering to think of yourself as creative. But I think

Speaker 2 it's convinced a lot of us to settle for a lot less than we deserve.

Speaker 1 It would seem hard to imagine anyone ever saying, well, what we need is less creativity. No, I mean, because that sounds like, well, how dare you?

Speaker 1 You're stomping on my

Speaker 1 thought process, my whatever it is that, you know,

Speaker 1 it's like the genies out of the bottle that creativity is here to stay because that's what I thrive on.

Speaker 2 I think that

Speaker 2 one

Speaker 2 thing that we overestimate about the importance of creativity.

Speaker 2 Okay, one often hears that we need creativity. Like you said, we need more creativity all the time because we have big problems to solve.

Speaker 2 I agree we have big problems to solve, and I agree that we're going to need to be thinking, yeah, creatively.

Speaker 2 But I think most of the good ideas that we need to solve a lot of the world's problems, a lot of those ideas are already there. They're already known.
They've been tested out.

Speaker 2 What's standing in the way is things like political will or resources or solidarity.

Speaker 2 And so I think that the idea that we should stimulate creativity because it's going to solve our problems, I think allows us to be a bit complacent.

Speaker 2 And it sounds so great and it sounds so fun, like we're all just going to be out there solving problems. But I think it's actually going to take us a little bit more than that.

Speaker 2 We're going to roll up our sleeves. It's going to be muddy.
It's going to be messy. It might be boring or hard or frustrating at times.

Speaker 2 And it might not be about our own special viewpoint of the world. It might be about working with others.

Speaker 2 So I think that, yes, of course, it would be absurd to say that we don't need as much creativity, but I think we maybe don't need to say that we need more creativity as much as we do.

Speaker 1 Well, it does seem like there's a language problem here, because, for example, I mean, When Thomas Edison created the first movie projector, the first movie and projected it onto a wall.

Speaker 1 I mean, no one had ever thought to do that before. So that was really creative.

Speaker 1 But the act of making it happen is more of a scientific mechanical process that maybe isn't, quote, creative, but without the creative idea, there would be no process.

Speaker 1 There would be no way to get that picture on the wall. So was it creative or was it just a mechanical process?

Speaker 1 I don't know. The idea was pretty creative.

Speaker 2 Great. There's a couple of good things there.
So,

Speaker 2 first of all, if Edison taught us anything, it's that

Speaker 2 trial and error work really well. Throwing a bunch of money at a bunch of very well-trained people works really well.

Speaker 2 That you don't actually need to rely on that spark of genius or that spark of inspiration to get new stuff.

Speaker 2 Even though we think of him as this guy with a light bulb going off over his head, most of his innovations and ideas, including, I should mention, the light bulb itself, were A, not things that other people hadn't thought of.

Speaker 2 People knew that that was possible for years. It was well understood that a filament inside a vacuum bulb would make light.

Speaker 2 The problem was finding the right material that would last the right amount of time for the lowest amount of money to make it affordable, economically feasible. That was Edison's innovation.

Speaker 2 And his other innovation was getting a bunch of people in the same room to do that thing. So

Speaker 2 actual technological innovation, even artistic innovation, really happens quite socially. As you mentioned before, it happens quite incrementally.

Speaker 2 But of course, there are moments of ideas happening there, definitely. The thing is that we don't really have any

Speaker 2 general theory of how ideas come about.

Speaker 2 The word creativity, the concept of creativity, came into our language to give us a way to think about what that thing might be. Can we find

Speaker 2 the natural laws of idea coming up with? Can we find what it is about people's psychology, about their attitudes, about their personality, their cognitive abilities that can tell us

Speaker 2 how people get ideas? And if we can find that, then how can we reproduce it in a way that can give us more and more ideas all the time?

Speaker 2 And I can tell you, based on the research that I've done into the whole psychological quest

Speaker 2 to find the psychological basis of creativity, they can't find anything. There's no real

Speaker 2 unifying thing about coming up with ideas. It happens in so many different ways.
Sometimes it's serendipity. Sometimes it

Speaker 2 comes to you in the shower. Sometimes it comes to you after hours of hard work.
Sometimes it's because you're working in the middle of the night. Sometimes in the middle of the day.

Speaker 2 Sometimes it's because you're in a city. Sometimes it's because you're in the country.

Speaker 2 Like for every, you line up 10 different artists and they'll have 10 different ways of doing things and ways of coming up with ideas. And that's just the artists.

Speaker 2 You add into that people who develop products and designers and architects and fashion designers. You have so many different ways that ideas come about.

Speaker 2 And I think that the idea of creativity, it's this word that gives us the sense that there is some

Speaker 2 common phenomenon there that we can grab onto and understand. And I just don't think it's the case.

Speaker 1 You know, it is such an untouchable topic. You know, you can't criticize creativity.

Speaker 1 And we've all bought into that. So it's really quite refreshing to hear this other view of creativity and maybe a more realistic view.
I've been talking to Samuel Franklin.

Speaker 1 He's a cultural historian and author of the book, The Cult of Creativity, a surprisingly recent history. There's a link to his book in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Thank you for coming on and talking about this, Sam.

Speaker 2 Thanks, Mike. It has really been a pleasure.
It's been a fun talk. Thanks for having me on.

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Speaker 1 Horror films have long been associated with Halloween. They all seem to show up around the Halloween time of year.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting is that horror films are designed, they're intended to frighten you, make you feel uncomfortable, which makes you wonder, well, why would anyone want that? But they do.

Speaker 1 People, or some people, love horror films. Here to explain and discuss the appeal of horror movies and what they do for us and to us is Nina Nesseth.

Speaker 1 She's a science writer and author of the book Nightmare Fuel, The Science of Horror Films. Hi, Nina.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Hi, Mike.

Speaker 1 So what's the appeal of horror films to you? Why do you study them? What's so special about them?

Speaker 3 One of the reasons why I think horror films are really interesting to look at as opposed to, say,

Speaker 3 romantic comedies is that horror is one of the few genres that actually promises to deliver on an emotion. Like I know some dramas might promise to be a tearjerker.

Speaker 3 Comedies want to make you laugh, but horror movies are saying that they are going to actually trigger fright, like trigger fear in your body. That's something that's not just emotional, it's physical.

Speaker 1 Well, that's a really good point. And good horror films do just that.

Speaker 1 But why do people like that? I mean, it seems like you wouldn't want to be frightened. You wouldn't want to be scared, but people like it.

Speaker 3 The mileage does vary depending on who you are, because not everyone likes horror movies, but everyone does respond to horror movies, whether you want to or not.

Speaker 3 It's just part of how our brains work when we're watching the films. The predominant theory for why we enjoy horror movies is what's known as the stimulation transfer theory.
Now,

Speaker 3 I'm going to get a little bit technical, but it's not too much.

Speaker 3 Most people have heard about the fight-or-flight response that gets our adrenaline going so that we can either take on a threat, a real-life threat, or run away from it.

Speaker 3 When it comes to watching a horror film, it's thought that we are triggering that response in our bodies.

Speaker 3 But once our brains realize that we're not in danger, we're not interacting with a threat, we're not actually getting attacked by the monster that's on the screen, we can take the arousal, that stimulation that comes from being scared and transfer it into pleasure.

Speaker 3 And so we go from being scared and having this high stimulation, kind of high strung hormones rushing throughout the body and move that over into a more pleasant feeling because we know we're safe.

Speaker 1 So when people say they like scary movies, they like horror films, do those people tend to have other things in common? Is that a type of person that likes them?

Speaker 1 Or all kinds of people like horror films.

Speaker 1 It's just that one thing that seems to appeal to them?

Speaker 3 There has been some research that has looked at the types of people that enjoy horror films.

Speaker 3 There isn't one unifying sort of quality that where you can like walk down the street and stare at someone and say, I know that that person must enjoy horror films.

Speaker 3 But there's definitely some research that says that there are different categories of people that tend to like horror movies more.

Speaker 3 There are folks who are drawn to watching horror movies in groups of people and are sort of known as a social horror movie watcher. Or there are types of

Speaker 3 people who are more drawn to supernatural horror.

Speaker 3 And so there are definitely categories and types of horror movie people, but there isn't really a trait that unifies all horror movie lovers other than that they love horror movies.

Speaker 3 What I find in the communities that I've worked in, working with different people who write about horror and who spend a lot of time watching horror, is that they all tend to be pretty nerdy.

Speaker 3 But that's just my own personal experience in terms of talking to people in the horror community.

Speaker 1 There is a magic, and I guess it's with a lot of films, but with horror films in particular, that the people who are sitting there watching the movie know they're watching a movie.

Speaker 1 So there's really nothing to be afraid of. And yet, we're scared, we're frightened, we jump when the monster pops out.
Is that a movie-making technique?

Speaker 1 Or what causes that when, in fact, there is no danger?

Speaker 3 I think a lot of it has to do with empathy, to be honest.

Speaker 3 And in my conversations with filmmakers and directors and sound designers and editors who have pieced together all of the creative aspects of horror films, when I ask them about their craft, it always comes down to empathy and really being able to put yourself in the shoes of the characters on screen and being able to recognize the behaviors that these characters are going through as they're facing some very scary situations.

Speaker 3 And there's been some research that's also posited that

Speaker 3 When we're watching horror movies, we're running through scenarios in our head of what we would do if we were in that same situation.

Speaker 3 Now, I wouldn't say that horror films would actually like prepare you for an actual threatening situation if you were to run into a monster, but there is some research out there that suggests that

Speaker 3 by watching horror movies, we are kind of running ourselves through the paces a little bit.

Speaker 1 Is there an agreement, a sense of like what was the first horror film?

Speaker 3 The earliest horror films were among the first films ever made. So I think the first horror film that we sort of cite would be like Josh Melier's The Haunted Castle, and that's from like the 1890s.

Speaker 3 But as long as movies have been being made,

Speaker 3 we've been making horror movies. We've been making spooky movies that feature, you know, haunted castles and ghosts and witches and the devil.

Speaker 3 It's been there since the beginning.

Speaker 1 And the people who make them,

Speaker 1 do they know that there is a formula for this?

Speaker 1 That if you want to scare people,

Speaker 1 this is how you do it? Or is every film different and creative in its own way in scaring people?

Speaker 3 I think there are a few tools in the toolbox that not only filmmakers have come to use as sort of a visual language for horror, but that viewers who are watching horror movies have come to expect.

Speaker 3 Like the jump scare is a perfect example of one of those tools that tends to have a formulaic approach to it. You have

Speaker 3 some sort of tension build off the top that

Speaker 3 lets us know that something's going to happen. You know, the music starts to creep up, or maybe it suddenly gets very, very quiet.
And then we, as the viewer, know that something's going to happen.

Speaker 3 And that something usually is, you know,

Speaker 3 a monster or a cat or some thing

Speaker 3 popping out of nowhere with a musical sting. And jump scares almost always follow that same sort of formula to them.
And we love them and they work. But other than that,

Speaker 3 there are pretty creative scares that come in with every filmmaker that comes on the scene.

Speaker 1 Loud noises seem to be a big part of it, like the big bang just that makes you jump.

Speaker 3 Absolutely, loud noises are

Speaker 3 a huge part of horror films, usually following some sort of silence. And oftentimes a red herring is used in advance, sort of a false jump scare to prep us for the real scare.

Speaker 1 What makes a horror film a horror film? I mean, is there an acceptable, an accepted definition of what is a horror film?

Speaker 3 This is a question that haunts people because there isn't one true, 100% honored definition for what a horror film is.

Speaker 3 I personally think that if it's scary, it's a horror film, but I'm not as much of a purist as some folks might be. What the purists would probably say is that a horror film has to have a monster.

Speaker 3 And that monster should have some sort of supernatural element to it, whether it's a ghost, whether it's a vampire.

Speaker 3 it should be supernatural in some form rather than a human monster because if you have a human monster who is in no way powered by the supernatural or somehow other

Speaker 3 then it would be considered something that's more like a crime thriller or a psychological thriller.

Speaker 1 Is there any kind of consensus on the quintessential horror film?

Speaker 3 Oftentimes, I see people citing The Shining or The Thing as top for horror movies, and they're both great ones, and they both fit that definition.

Speaker 3 We have in The Shining, we have hauntings and ghosts, even though the horror at the center of the film is very, very human.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we have the thing, which is an alien that is at the crux of, or at the core of the horror.

Speaker 3 And both of them are often lauded as like the horror film of all time, either for the tension that the shining creates in its scares or the sheer beauty, if you can call it that, of the gore and the practical effects in the thing.

Speaker 1 I imagine there's research done when people watch horror films and then, you know, you hook them up to a machine afterwards. And if that has happened, what happens? What do you see?

Speaker 3 There have been tons of research that have tried to look into the brain while we're watching horror movies or while we're watching violent scenes and horror movies. And we'll see a few things.

Speaker 3 We'll see a lot of activity in a part of the brain called the amygdala. And that's the part of the brain that is responsible for that fight or flight response that I mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3 It's responsible for all sorts of types of arousal, such as aggression and fear.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so that, along with other parts of the brain that form what's known as the limbic system, are all parts of the brain that respond to emotional arousal.

Speaker 3 So it really is getting to our emotions and getting to our fear centers when we are watching horror films.

Speaker 1 Well, it does seem, and I guess this is true of any genre of film, action, whatever, is that

Speaker 1 If you look back at horror films from the 50s or the 60s,

Speaker 1 they're not that scary today.

Speaker 1 That there has to be a continuing, you have to continue to top the last horror film. Otherwise, people yawn and say, yeah, so what? And does that seem to be the case?

Speaker 3 I think it's less that we're trying to top previous scares and that we just have to find the scares that resonate with where society is.

Speaker 3 A lot of the films from the 50s or 60s dealt with scares that were really applicable to society at the time, like looking at post-war at that point, so

Speaker 3 communism, and looking at radiation and

Speaker 3 how much we can trust our neighbors, like those were themes that we saw a lot during that era. Today, we're seeing a lot of social horror, like Get Out

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 Nope. is another recent one.

Speaker 3 I'm saying both Jordan Peale films because they're great examples of social horrors that have come out that really resonate with where society is right now and what kind of fears we have around the people around us and where we think the world is going.

Speaker 1 When you ask people who enjoy horror films, is it just

Speaker 1 the fear is what they like? Or is there some other satisfaction that comes at the end when it's all resolved and everything's over?

Speaker 1 Or is it just, I like being scared?

Speaker 3 For some people, they just truly like being scared.

Speaker 3 But overall, I think the difference between watching a horror film that has a narrative and watching something scary unfold in real life is that we have

Speaker 3 that narrative piece to it. We get a conclusion.
We get that rising action climax. And it follows a little bit of what we're expecting from a story.

Speaker 3 And I think there is satisfaction in seeing a character go through a horrific event and then come out of it either in a world that's worse for it or at least triumphant.

Speaker 3 In most horror movies, we do have a character come out triumphant and the monster is defeated at least for a little while.

Speaker 1 Is there any indication that watching horror movies does anything for you in terms of like how you live or how you cope or anything like that?

Speaker 3 There's been some research that specifically looks at how we engage with horror movies and engage with grief in our lives. And

Speaker 3 it's been suggested that watching horror movie characters in movies like Hereditary or Midsummer

Speaker 3 or Scream, even,

Speaker 3 these characters are navigating grief alongside some monstrous events.

Speaker 3 And being able to see characters go through all these feelings and come out with a narrative conclusion can help you with navigating your own feelings.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 3 That was a really interesting study. It came out a few years ago looking specifically at horror movies as a grief processing tool.

Speaker 1 It does seem that in the world of filmmaking, filmmaking, that horror movies aren't given quite the same consideration as other kinds of movies.

Speaker 1 They're not quite as, you know, I don't know, grown up or something.

Speaker 3 Horror as a genre occupies a little bit of a niche. It's still not super respected as like an award category, for example.

Speaker 3 So in that respect, we don't see its popularity in

Speaker 3 the larger critical scheme of things. But in terms of actually who watches horror, I personally believe that everybody likes some form of horror film.

Speaker 3 They just don't necessarily like all forms of horror.

Speaker 3 And most people that I meet when they say, oh, I don't like horror movies, usually they end up saying something like, but I love Mitsamar, or but I love teen scary movies like Scream and or Final Destination.

Speaker 3 So it really comes down to it's not that they don't like being scared or they don't like horror. It's that

Speaker 3 there's just a specific pie slice of horror that they really do find fun

Speaker 1 is it ever a case because i maybe it's just me but

Speaker 1 the best i'm not a big horror movie fan but like with roller coasters or other things i like it when it's over like i like oh thank god that's over i mean it's not that i didn't enjoy it but but more because i

Speaker 3 i can exhale like oh god thank you yeah and you felt a little bit of the rush, even if you didn't necessarily enjoy the rush. I personally

Speaker 3 really hate free fall, the sense of free fall. So roller coasters that have a sense of free fall or jumping off a cliff into a lake, not for me.

Speaker 3 But I get that same feeling that you just described where at the end of it, I'm exhilarated, even though I'm glad that it's over and I don't want to do it again.

Speaker 1 Is there any research about, you know, you know, when Jaws came out and then after Jaws came out, you know, that there there was people were a lot more afraid of sharks, that watching that movie made you more afraid.

Speaker 1 In general, do people who watch horror films, are they fearful people, or are they able to watch a movie and say, that's a movie, and I'm not afraid anymore, or do they go home and look under their bed for the monster under there?

Speaker 3 Jaws was a special case for sure in that it introduced the idea of

Speaker 3 sharks as a threat, where previously it wasn't seen as much of a threat. And it actually led to the death of a lot of sharks.
So that was a really interesting, if kind of sad, social phenomenon.

Speaker 3 I don't know that there's ever been another movie quite like that that set off

Speaker 3 such a big and intense fear reaction.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned that horror films are not an award category, but when I think of a movie like The Shining, which was just so great for so many reasons, and

Speaker 1 did it win any awards? I mean, it seems like, yeah, it was a horror film, but it was also just a great movie.

Speaker 3 I can't recall if The Shining won awards, but it was definitely like critically lauded. But what tends to happen

Speaker 3 is when a horror film gets critical acclaim, usually someone attached to that horror film says that, no, no, this isn't a horror film.

Speaker 3 That happened with The Exorcist, which is, you know, a classic horror film.

Speaker 3 But as soon as it started getting acclaim, sort of the language around it became this isn't a horror film, it is a meditation on religion.

Speaker 3 The same thing happened around the silence of the lambs, which is chose the line between horror film and crime thriller, but it won an Academy Award. But

Speaker 3 as soon as that happened, we found people distancing it from horror and saying squarely that it is not horror at all or cannot be considered horror.

Speaker 3 There's a certain sort of,

Speaker 3 I don't want to say elitism, but there is a certain sort of idea that the horror film is a lesser form of film.

Speaker 3 I don't subscribe to this belief, by the way, but there's been sort of traditionally this idea that it's like a B movie or lower.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, but that is the reputation of horror films. As you said,

Speaker 1 they kind of have that B movie reputation of,

Speaker 1 I think of some of those films from the 50s, the early 60s, that were really kind of cheesy. And, you know, that's kind of the image you get when you hear the phrase horror film.

Speaker 1 It isn't the shining or the exorcist. It's more those, you know, the day the monster ate Cincinnati kind of films.

Speaker 3 Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 1 I wouldn't consider Silence of the Lambs a horror film, but you said maybe it is.

Speaker 3 I just, I think that more of a, as you said, a crime thriller more than a, I wouldn't never put it in a horror category the silence of the lambs is born of a very tricky phase in the history of horror films where the 90s just came off of the 1980s sort of like influx of slasher films where there was a lot of larger-than-life characters like like freddy krueger like jason voorhees

Speaker 3 and so in the early 90s especially we saw a dip towards realism in horror and crime thrillers tended tended to take up more

Speaker 3 of our screen time than those more fantastic types of films. We really took a turn towards realism and that's where sort of Silence of the Lambs had

Speaker 3 its

Speaker 3 time to shine.

Speaker 1 What are your favorite, what do you consider like the top couple of all-time great horror films?

Speaker 3 The Shining and The Thing are up there in terms of all-time greats. If I'm being honest with what are my personal favorites,

Speaker 3 I love more teen horror films like Scream and The Faculty, which I would not qualify as all-time greats, but they're all-time greats in my heart.

Speaker 3 But I think overall, the ones that are classics, like The Thing, like The Shining, like The Exorcist, they come up again and again because of the good reason that they are amazing films.

Speaker 1 Well, there's no doubt it is a powerful form of filmmaking because even when you consider when there's a horror film based on a book, as scary as the book can be, it doesn't evoke the emotions that a film can because of the power of the medium.

Speaker 1 We've been talking about horror films with Nina Neseth. She is a science writer, and the name of her book is Nightmare Fuel: The Science of Horror Films.
And there's a link to that in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Thanks for coming on and talking about this, Nina.

Speaker 3 Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 I would suspect most people take a shower every day.

Speaker 1 That's good personal hygiene. But actually, could it be making you dirtier?

Speaker 1 According to medical researchers, every time we take a shower and rinse, we're actually just spreading around skin-borne bacteria.

Speaker 1 That's why surgical teams and patients are restricted from showering before entering an operating room. Showering too much has also been found to be damaging to your your skin.

Speaker 1 We're just washing off the protective outer layer, which was trying to protect the fragile new cells underneath. So how often should you shower? Well, every other day is sufficient for most people.

Speaker 1 But if you can't stand the thought of that, keep your daily showers brief and avoid using really hot water and don't over scrub. And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 If you wouldn't mind just taking a moment, and it really takes just a second to leave a rating and review of this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, it sure would be appreciated.

Speaker 1 I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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