Coltan Scrivner

Some of the work that I'm doing now is looking at, how do we even define what horror is, right?

We have this conception, again, if I see a horror movie, I can say, oh, that's a horror movie.

But I have a hard time, like,

coming up with a recipe for what makes a horror movie.

The traditional answer, again, has been if it scares you.

That's kind of a flimsy definition, right?

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.