Dr. Frank McAndrew

On the other hand, if you overreact and you're scared and you're really looking at this and you're getting ready to run and then you find out it is just a rabbit, well, what's the cost of that?

It's pretty small, right?

And so people were selectively bred, so to speak, to be cowards in situations like this.

to think about the worst case scenario.

When you were talking about the precursor thing, I like to think of creepiness, horror, and fear as sort of links in a chain that go in a certain order.

Good horror movies are the ones that walk us through all three of those.

So think of the beginning of the good horror movie where

it's normal life at the beginning, and then suddenly the characters in the movie are noticing something isn't quite right.

They're a little confused, a little apprehensive.

That's the getting creeped out part.

They move into the horror stage when they start to realize, okay, there really is a problem here.

There is something to worry about.

But at that stage, they may not know exactly what it is or how to deal with it.

And then the fear stage is when, aha, I know exactly what the problem here is.

And

I know what I should be trying to do to deal with it.

Now, bad horror movies sometimes skip steps.

Like the guy comes running out with the chainsaw right at the beginning, right?

And there's no kind of foreplay building up to it.

And then some movies kind of flop because they spend too much time in one stage as opposed to the other.