Exchange of Realities

Yesterday, I explained why I find fear to be a good emotion to evoke. But it’s not enough to want to try to inspire fear; you have to understand how, and to do so in a subtle manner.

One important trick is to play against the audience’s senses, wearing away their confidence that the information they are receiving from said senses is accurate. After all, if you can’t trust your senses, what can you trust? Sight and hearing are the favored targets for two reasons: one, they are easiest to affect through description or presentation, and two, they are the ones on which the majority of people are most reliant. Even in secondhand media like stories and games, this effect will to some extent transfer over to the audience.

Image courtesy of dimitri_c on stock.xchng.

Evoking fear by interfering with vision is something a lot of horror film producers already do. Have you ever noticed that even after technology advanced past the point where it was necessary, horror film presentations continued to range towards the grayscale? This isn’t an accident; in fact, it plays to part of our own biology. As you may know, our eyes have two varieties of photoreceptor: rods, which detect light levels and intensity, and cones, which detect color (or specifically hue). By showing images in such a way that cones are rendered less useful, the grayscale presentation simulates a rod-dominant mode of sight more commonly used when trying to see in the dark. And due their dependence on vision, even people who enjoy the dark have to be more alert in darkness, straining their senses to figure out what’s going on. This alertness primes them for whatever unpleasant surprises await them. (As an additional bonus, the lack of color means that blood red stands out even more vividly.)

Use of barriers and shadows to prime the audience’s fear reaction is also important. In a horror situation, out of sight isn’t necessarily out of mind; in fact, it’s even more in mind, as not being able to see something doesn’t mean that it’s not there, but only that you don’t know where it’s going to come from. Looking through an open space, it’s pretty easy to see if something is coming or not, where it’s coming from and how it’s approaching. But when that something has crevices to hide in, and shadows that cover the crevices so that one can’t tell the ones that are too small from the ones that the something might be hiding in, or objects to hide behind, it’s harder to tell exactly where and how it’s coming in. Even mist can contribute to this effect—objects tend to be closer before they’re visible, and in thick enough mist a humanoid figure can be almost on top of you before you can be sure whether it’s friend or foe. Not having time to think through reactions makes people tense, priming them to react more strongly to our chosen fear source.

Vision isn’t the only sense we can target, either. Hearing can be thrown off in one of two ways: by not hearing enough, or by hearing too much. The quiet music used to build suspense in horror flicks works off of this principle: when it’s soft, we compensate by straining to hear, making us more sensitive to other sounds. (This, of course, works better in a game format than in text, and can also be applied to the game-master’s voice. The players will likely follow suit if the game master speaks quietly, heightening the effect.) Similarly, people who expect something to be coming but can’t hear it will be listening carefully as well, allowing the writer to get a similar effect from descriptions of the surrounding sounds.

On the other hand, there’s the opposite approach, overwhelming the brain with more sounds than it can process, particularly when it doesn’t recognize anyone. Have you ever lain awake at night, coming up with crazier and crazier interpretations for innocuous sounds, particularly when you’ve just heard, read or seen something that guides your thoughts towards an unpleasant conclusion? Same principle. And when already suspicious people are hearing all sorts of different noises, every second they spend processing the information is one more second in which they could be hearing whatever it is sneaking up on them and not even know it, or they should be able to hear it and can’t because of the other sounds. (The same thing can, of course, be done with scent.)

Fooling with the senses as a way to evoke fear is also why invisible monsters, soundless creatures, and intangible ghosts are such common and effective fare; the senses don’t agree on whether there’s something there, forcing their owner to try to figure out which to believe. This puts him off balance.

So to set up a proper ambiance, start with these tricks. Tone down the color and kick up the grayscale imagery. Give the threat plenty of places to hide. Make sure there’s either quite not enough detail, in sound or scent or vision, or far too much. Play that right, and your audience will be twitchy even before they come in contact with what they’re supposed to be scared of.