Coltan Scrivner

Because what scares me may not scare you or what scares you today may not scare you in 10 years.

And then there's this definition of if the creator meant for it to scare you, like their intention was to scare you.

And I was like, okay, that's an okay definition.

But again, if a director creates something that's not scary to anyone, but they intended it to be scary, does that make it horror?

Or if it is scary to everyone and they didn't intend it to, is it still horror?

And so I was trained largely in biology, right?

I think about these things as a biologist and I think, okay, what in like the format of the animal kingdom, what would this look like?

So we tell stories where there's a protagonist and an antagonist.

That's a pretty typical thing that all animals encounter.

There's people they want to ally with and people they want to fight against.

And in horror, what I found, and I used LLMs to annotate hundreds of movies, right?

So I had summaries of these movies and examples of the characters and what they were like and all these traits.

And what I found was that in horror movies,

it was distinctly a very powerful bad guy, powerful villain.

So Pennywise and It, right?

And that was really unique to horror.

It's the only genre where the hero is not very strong, not very capable, or at least is very overwhelmed by the villain.

So in the case of It, again, you have powerful villain, supernatural clown thing, shapeshifting clown, but then you also have just regular kids, right?

Which are the most vulnerable protagonists you could imagine.

And that creates a perfect formula for a horror story.