Why Horror Seduces

Ciasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 202 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 9780190666507. $99.

Mathias Clasen's Why Horror Seduces begins with the conviction that we cannot answer questions such as "why would educated, enlightened audiences thrill to stories that feature monsters that have shambled straight out of the darkest lore of prescientific superstition" without first "situating our investigation within the best current scientific understanding of how the mind works" (4). Such a situation is precisely what the book's introduction to the "biocultural" study of horror fiction provides.

Its thirteen chapters are then divided into three parts. The first, "An Evolutionary Theory of Horror," consists of four chapters. Chapter 1, "Sizing Up the Beast: What Horror Is, and How It Is Studied," provides a brief history and succinct definition of horror fiction and its relationship to the emotion from which it takes its name. Clasen defines horror "as the kind of fiction that is manifestly designed to scare and/or disturb its audience." Fiction is construed by Clasen in a broadly transmedial way that includes film, television series, and games (3), although the latter two are discussed only in passing, mainly in the book's concluding section. He demonstrates how "horror fiction is crucially dependent on evolved properties of the human central nervous system" (4) and "targets ancient and deeply conserved defense mechanisms in the brain" (4). He then touches on some of the critical disputes about the relationship between horror and the Gothic before providing a commonsensical assessment of their relationship: "'horror' is the umbrella term, a category that encompasses those kinds of fictions that are designed to instill negative emotion such as anxiety and fear in their audiences, and that Gothic fiction is merely one such kind" (10).

The remaining chapters of this section, the most conceptually significant, research-dense, and engaging of the book, "How Horror Works I: The Evolution and Stimulation of Negative Emotion," "How Horror Works II: Spooky Monsters, Scary Scenarios, and Terrified Characters," and "Fear for Your Life: The Appeals, Functions, and Effects of Horror," offer a penetrating survey of what contemporary research in evolutionary psychology reveals about how we experience fear and horror, how these negative emotions can, under certain circumstances, be pleasurable, and how they have led to...