Horror films use psychological tricks

Psychologist Arryn Robbins from the University of Richmond explains that horror film directors exploit the limits of human attention and vision to hide their monsters and trigger fear. In the film Hérédité, released in 2018, a scene shows Peter walking through his house in near darkness. The camera then pulls back to reveal Annie, his possessed mother, crouching on the ceiling. She had been there since the beginning.

Psychological principles in horror

Robbins discusses this phenomenon in an article on The Conversation, noting that horror cinema uses the gap between what our eyes capture and what we actually see. Her analysis is based on well-documented phenomena in attention psychology rather than a new experiment. She compares famous horror scenes to these psychological principles, stating that directors and cinematographers act as spontaneous cognitive psychologists, placing our gaze exactly where fear must emerge.

How our vision works

Our visual system does not process an entire scene at once. It extracts details only where attention is directed, and the rest can go unnoticed, even if it is very strange. This is known as inattentional blindness, illustrated by the invisible gorilla experiment. Approximately half of the participants, occupied with counting basketball passes, did not notice a person dressed as a gorilla.

Change blindness in films

A related phenomenon, change blindness, prevents us from seeing a transformation right before our eyes. In Conjuring 2, Janet, blurred in the background, transforms into an old...