Blackest night and bloody red: the colors of horror

We’re back with more data analysis of horror movies, again with the help of our friends of dataninja.it. This time, we are talking colors, and the way they are used to convey certain emotions. If you think horror movies, then the first colors that spring to mind are probably black and red. That sounds pretty obvious, but the guys at dataninja took it a step further: they’ve collected the images of 2100 horror movie posters, using the archivse of the horror review website splattercontainer.com.

We know you just stopped reading to count how many of them you watched. Don’t worry, we can wait.
Image courtesy of dataninja.it and splattercontainer.com

What’s in a Name: Horror Movie Titles

Greetings horror fans! How did you Halloween go? Which scary movie did you watch? I rewatched The Thing while enjoying a nice pumpkin-flavoured beer. I could have picked something else, of course: thousands of horror movies that have been made so far, some good, some terrible. So many movies, so little time to watch them, and most of the time you only have a title to decide wheter you want to watch it or not. But what makes for a good horror movie title, one that is able to capture our attention? Thankfully, the good folks at dataninja have the answer. A group of young journalists with a passion for data analysis, they have compiled a dataset with more than 9000 horror film titles, looking for the most recurring words.

Peakaboo, or how I learned to be scared by jump scares

If you’ve been on the internet before (and if you’re not, how the hell did you end up here) you are probably aware of screamers. They are videos with a scary face and loud noise in it, and people love to make a friend watch them (and then tape the reaction). They are dumb prank, but even dumb prank can illustrate a concept quite well.
The love-hate affair that horror fans have with jump scares has a long history. Most consider them cheap, uninventive, or even not scary at all. Others understand that they have a purpose and actually like them when used appropriately. I find myself in the latter category: while I don’t think that most jump scares do more than startle you like you wold startle a baby by screaming at his face, I can appreciate a good, unexpected, sudden assault to my senses. You can call them cheap thrills and you would be right, the thing is that it’s easy to make a jump scare, but it’s hard to pull off a good one.

From the Depths of the Valley

Why is Final Fantasy – The Spirits Within a scarier movie than the latest Paranormal Activity ? No, it has nothing to do with the incomprehensible plot or the absence of any relation with the videogame series. It’s because, despite the impressive technical achievements, all the characters in that movie looked and moved like creepy, soulless mannequins. While trying to deliver this CGI bonanza,  Square Studios (immediately defunct after this movie) plunged us into the depths of the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is a well know effect, especially by videogame fans. Coined in the 70s by roboticist Masahiro Mori, the term indicates a sensation of repulsion towards characters that are supposed to look human-like, but for some reason don’t exactly look human. It can be small details, like the movement of the brows, the appearance of the skin, or lips not perfectly in sync with the voice. Whatever it is, it throws us off to the point that we instantly know, deep down, that the thing we are looking at is a thing, and not a real person.

GET AWAY FROM ME

Don’t get me wrong, animating a human face is really, really hard. The human eye can detect fakeness very well, as any movie fan that has watched some shoddy CGI will tell you. Even with all the immense progress that computer animation has made in the last years, we still can’t get it quite right. We can create characters with rich expressions and emotions like the ones in The Incredibles or UP, but whenever we attempt for less cartoonish, more realistic humans, we end up with monstrosities like Beowulf or Polar Express.

Spooky Sounds: why horror soundtrack is scary

Let’s take a walk in the forest, shall we?

Click on the image and lower the volume of the video on the left, so you can only listen to the soundtrack on the right. Can you feel the tension rising? What started as a nice, relaxing walk through a beautiful forest turns into a creepy experience. It’s almost like something really bad is about to happen, but you don’t know what.

And yet, there is nothing to be scared about in the video. It’s just a nice, quiet forest. You can try to mute the soundtrack on the right and turn on the original audio of the forest video, and see for yourself how greatly the mood of the scene changes.