Setting The Scene For Screams
To generate unease in a creative Halloween or scare type experience you basically attack the senses with an aim to evoke the feeling of unease through one thing, the unknown. Setting a scene for a scare it is the unknown that people “suffer”.
Fear is an emotional response to the threat of danger, harm or pain. In the human body it’s a direct catalyst for a biological dose of adrenaline, gets the heart pumping and clouds the brain receptors into a knee-jerk reaction of ‘fight or flight’ or a shock that freezes you to the floor. Some people thrive on it, others will avoid it like a wet-nosed puppy on a nudist beach.
But for the sake of this creative blog post we’re going to focus on how you best create fear by prompting people to think about the unknown. Important to note we’re not talking about disgust which is a different prospect, a bit more macabre and gruesome – the blood n guts kind of stuff.
Targeting sight. To generate fear through sight (remember, not disgust), you basically deny the viewer a clear view of what might be the threat at hand. Block their vision completely, scare them straight, right? Not entirely. Complete darkness for example, can strike fear but can also generate comfort (meditation, sleep, flotation etc). The masters of fear never deprive you of your full sense of sight, they feed you small nuggets of visual info which upset or deny you the feeling of familiarity in your surroundings. They move or place something in your peripheral vision that doesn’t belong. This makes your mind generate threats from your own unknown outcome, the unease we’re looking for. Usually they’ll drip feed you the visual triggers and build to a crescendo where they’ll go for the final reveal, inducing the shock we talked about earlier. (Blair Witch Project anyone?)
When you see it…
Sound operates along much of the same lines, you deprive the ears of sound to stimulate or heighten the sense. If you remove it completely you lose the unease, it can become relaxing. However, if drip fed small audio queues your mind creates the visual, if this doesn’t match to what you can see, you’ll create an unknown. Or you could simply shock the system with a loud noise (personally I think that’s cheating though, loud noises are a cheap scare!). The beauty of sound is that once you remove sight, sound prompts the mind to paint its own picture, pairing a memory to as close a visual match as it can.