- Science.
I'm wearing a lab coat so you could trust me.
Thank you to The Great Courses Plus
for sponsoring this video.
Okay. So I recently learned that I am a freak.
So I'm 22 years old. I'm an adult and I do adult things.
I pay taxes, I pay rent, I pay insurance.
Is being an adult just paying for things?
Any way there is one part of being an adult
that I just completely bouffed.
Apparently old people are just not supposed
to have nightmares.
Like you get the occasional one here or there,
but overall you just get regular nights
of uninterrupted sleep.
That's not me.
That's not relatable.
I regularly wake up fearing I've been murdered
or some horrifying variation thereof.
Apparently only 2 to 8% of the adult population
have this problem
so my situation is unfortunate,
but also an excellent segue into spooky season.
Ghosts.
Let's talk about fears.
I've always understood fear as like a survival mechanism,
but I could never figure out why certain fears
dominated over others.
And I'm not talking about like ordering them by risk.
I'm talking about how we just had this extended
period of time where we just let haunted dolls
murder us on screen.
And so that got me thinking, what do we
as in the collective us fear most?
Luckily there is a whole genre fiction
dedicated to that very idea.
Horror, horror.
Oh my God. Horror, horror,
horror.
Oh no, horror.
That was good enough.
I don't know if I pronounce it like a human though.
So in this video, we're gonna use horror to motivate a guest
for what is scariest
and also use it as a tool to check our answer.
Unfortunately, I am not a horror expert.
If I had to rank my favorite genres,
it would be like romcoms, heist films
that are ultimately about friendship
and horror is just all the way down here.
So to talk about it, I need to do a bit of reading.
Let's get reading.
(upbeat music)
Okay. So I read a few books about horror as a genre,
and I would show you those books,
but they're currently being used as a microphone stand.
Anyway, for the sake of the run time of this video
and also my sanity,
I'm not gonna try and define what horror is.
Personally, I think it's kind of arrogant and futile
to draw clean lines in art.
Like, can you even tell the difference between
fiction and nonfiction?
Just look at how a high school history textbook
talks about colonialism.
Burn on colonialism.
Stop.
But we, you and I need some common terminology
to actually talk about this stuff.
So instead of talking about what counts as horror.
Let's talk about how horror works.
The driving force in horror isn't the plot it's instinct.
Where other genres may ask you to think and contemplate
horror forces you to feel.
From the shiver down your spine,
to the thundering beat of a telltale heart.
Horror activates primal senses,
specifically disgust, horror and terror.
Disgust is your gag reflex.
It's watching a zombie eat brains or reading a line
about the crunch of a broken bone.
It's purely physical and totally gross.
Horror is your stress response.
It's the fight or flight that activates
when you need a jump scare
or arrive at a sickening realization.
Your heart skips a beat and your sweat turns cold.
Finally, there's terror.
Terror is the anticipation of it all
and the anxiety that it comes with.
It's a seed that claws on the walls of your mind
imagining all of the ways things can go wrong.
And Radcliffe was one of the first to draw distinctions
between these emotions and their purpose.
But I think Stephen King perfected it
with his hierarchy of scares.
This hierarchy isn't a tool for critique.
It simply measures the granularity of the emotions
and the level of difficulty required to activate them.
Disgust and horror are almost technical
in their requirements,
a matter of language and structure.
But in agreement with Ann Radcliffe's original thesis,
terror is art.
Sure, it requires that technical skill,
but it also needs that something that hides in the dark.
So in building up my hypothesis for what fear most
I can't help but believe that the scariest things
activate terror.
But what are those things specifically?
Like is it serial killers, dolls, ghost, what are they?
Let's talk about how horror manifests.
Horror is ultimately an actualization
of our fears and anxieties.
So it's only natural that it comes in many forms.
It can range from the fear of being chainsaw massacred
in Texas
to having your body taken over by rich white people.
But a popular approach to analyzing horror
is to separate text and subtext.
It's the distinction between the monster
and what the monster represents.
And that is what I wanna focus on.
I post three fundamental but non-exclusive
and probably not comprehensive categories of horror subtext.
Psychological, societal, and spiritual.
Psychological horror results from a dissonance of the mind,
trapping the protagonist in a world where they lose
their sense of self and sanity.
Societal horror exploits a societal problem
like technology, xenophobia or racism.
Finally, spiritual horror explores our fear
in the unknowable,
in what happens after death and what lies in the dark.
In other words, once we strip away the text
and read between the lines,
horror can manifest in you,
the people around you and the realization
of how small all of that really is.
Okay. So now we know how horror works
and how it manifests.
Which means that we should have the language needed
to characterize our deepest, darkest fears.
We can ask what instincts it activates
and what subtext it speaks to.
And this framework isn't limited to fiction, right?
Like I am terrified of spiders
and spiders can be categorized using this language.
I'm not disgusted by the spider itself,
but rather terrified of where the spider goes after I blink.
And it's psychological because it makes me doubt my senses.
Like every shadow on the wall and tickle on my arm
could be a spider.
No.
So my hypothesis for what we fear most
is kind of in line with my own fears
and that's psychological terror.
I think there's nothing scarier than not being able to trust
the world around you, your senses and how you perceive it.
And so that naturally leads into our next step
and it's to figure out what configuration of these things
is actually most common.
I think it's psychological terror,
but maybe it's spiritual disgust.
Like those creepy haunted dolls.
So there are obviously a couple of ways to figure this out.
There are surveys, psychology studies,
but those are boring and more importantly,
difficult to execute.
So to find our answer, we're going back
to our pasta inventing K-pop standing friend,
machine learning.
So we've talked about machine learning
on this channel before,
and I'll put a card on one of these corners
to a video that gives a pretty intuitive explanation
as to how it works.
All you really need to know is that machines
are really good at math.
And that means that if your data is encoded correctly
which is a whole task in and of itself,
machines can view data a lot more objectively than you can
with all of your human cognitive biases.
Easiest example,
a machine wouldn't fall for this optical illusion.
So that objectivity as well as the ability
to keep a lot more things in mind at any given moment
makes machines really good at pattern recognition.
So we're gonna use that to find patterns
in Hollywood's biggest horror movies.
Here's my idea.
Horror movies are probably the most consistent
and popular way
modern audiences interact with the genre.
Sure there are books and Creepypasta,
but I think those audiences have higher
self-selection problems
than just the general Hollywood horror movie
attending audience.
So let's work under the assumption that people
pay to watch horror movies that they find scary.
Like you're not gonna pay to watch a horror movie
about a haunted gingerbread man, you pirate that stuff.
So we can draw this somewhat tenuous conclusion
that the highest grossing horror movies
can give us some insights into what people find scary.
Couple of disclaimers, We're doing English horror movies
because I need to be able to review my data
and I am monolingual scum.
I know that a race is a massive part of the population
given that this video is supposed to be about
what we as humanity fear,
but I guess that was clickbait.
Anyway, here's the plan.
One, get a list of the top grossing horror movies over time.
Two, feed their characteristics into a machine
and three profit
because this video is sponsored.
Anyway, let's go.
(upbeat music)
So (indistinct) data I needed was harder than expected.
So IMDb has this spreadsheet that they just update
every single day with all of the titles that are on IMDb.
So I was like, this is perfect.
So I downloaded it,
whittled it down to 21,000 horror movie titles.
They date back all the way to like 1909,
but I only really had the title
and the fact that it was a horror movie,
like that is not enough information.
So then I used another database.
I searched up every single title
and then I got more information about the movies.
Like plot information, production studio, runtime,
all of that, except
out of the 21,000 titles,
only 14 had box office information.
So I'm like three days deep into this now
without like the one core piece of information
that I really need.
So now I'm doing this.
I'm using a third database to get
the financial information that I need.
Like production budget and box office information.
I hope this works.
Otherwise I need to throw out this whole video.
(indistinct)
It's been like five hours and what I was trying didn't work
so now we're trying something different and I am tired.
Before I say anything, can you hear this laptop?
Just hold up.
A nightmare.
So how is the project going?
Out of the 21,000 ish horror movie titles
I started off with,
I managed to get the worldwide box office information
of like 1300 of them.
Like a good chunk of these movies were either
really small releases, really old or just international.
And I was using US box office data.
So all things considered, 1300 titles isn't bad.
Now a brief explanation of what I'm actually
gonna do with that data.
(upbeat music)
Data.
The sweater's really hot.
Let me walk you through the information I have.
That's a later problem.
I have like this big thing of movies.
Can you see that?
(indistinct)trash.
Let's try red.
I have this big thing of movies,
like there's 1300 movies in there.
And then for each movie in there,
I have its title, it's production studio.
The year was released, runtime,
plot summary and the worldwide box office revenue.
It's worth noting that I defined
worldwide box office revenue as just like US
plus international.
And sometimes I only got US information.
That's the world,
that can also be viewed as political commentary.
I don't know. I don't care.
So this is what I have.
Now you might be thinking,
the only thing we care about is how much of the movie made
and what the is about?
Why do we have this other stuff here?
And that's because of statistics.
Basically these other factors can also contribute
to the film's success regardless of its plot quality.
Like for example, a production studio that's really big
might also have a really big marketing budget
or might get rid of some really big names in the movie.
And that will lead to box office revenue.
The year it was released might align with like trends.
Like there was a time where every movie was just
paranormal activity in a wig.
Trends.
(chuckles)
So including these factors can kind of like control
for their influence.
That being said, people better than I
might draw a directed acyclic graph
and really justify these connections using literature.
Other people might do feature selection
to make sure that we are really using the best
subset of characteristics to really make those clusters pop.
I'm not one of those people.
I'm just gonna take all of this
and then throw it at a computer.
Hope for the best.
Science.
I'm wearing a lab coat so you could trust me.
What I'm actually gonna be doing is called
k-means clustering.
Should I write that on the board class?
Now you can Google it.
Basically what this is, is an algorithm where a computer
just looks at all of the movies and sorts them into groups,
trying to maximize the similarities within groups
and the differences between groups.
I'll leave a link to an article in the description.
Anyway, will it work for what I'm trying to do?
I don't know.
(upbeat music)
I am pleased to announce for the first time
in a very long time,
one of my stupid ideas worked.
At least it worked like better than expected.
I was really ready to like find nothing or to have olive oil
be yelled at me for an hour, but I think I got somewhere.
So I ended up with four clusters or groups of movies.
And I wanted to analyze the characteristics
of those clusters.
I wanted to see if the features that I mentioned before
were allocated in any special sort of way.
So I did that and some features were duds,
but others were actually interesting.
First off, when we mapped the movie releases
over time per cluster,
we see these three peaks that really helped define
the clusters and segment horror on film into clear stages.
There's early horror that was simplistic
and carried by men in monster suits.
Then there's 80s horror where slasher films came to town.
Finally, there's modern horror.
That covers a lot more diverse topics.
But what about the money?
Like the whole sketchy premise of this video
is that we pay for what's scariest.
So let's take a look at the top earning titles per cluster.
In cluster one, we see "Psycho", "King Kong", "Cat People",
"The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" and "Frankenstein".
In other words, the classics.
I actually found it really difficult to view these titles
as horror because like toy commercials
have better special effects.
However, the trend was pretty consistent.
These movies made audiences feel small
often literally using these grotesque and alien creatures.
So I'm tagging cluster one as spiritual or cosmic horror.
Next, in cluster two, we have "It", "World War Z",
"The Meg", "The Nun" and "The Ring".
In other words, the classics
except with better special effects.
And I mean that.
We're seeing the same things we saw in cluster one,
these other worldly creatures,
except it's only bigger and better and CGI.
However, I argue that the purpose of these monsters
are actually kind of different than the last cluster,
because they're not just monsters in and of themselves
they're metaphors.
Put the thing that does the killing in your mouth.
I forgot the quote.
So this cluster is societal horror.
In cluster three, we have "What Lies Beneath",
"The Blair Witch Project", "A Quiet Place",
"The Others' and "Dark Shadows",
which I don't know how it got there
I refuse to acknowledge it as horror.
So we're slipping in six place with "Get Out".
In other words, modern classics .
And the vibes are clear in this one, right?
We've just got big spooky haunted vibes.
Again it's spiritual, but this time
we've got some invisible monsters
like ghost, racism and Johnny Depp.
So I'm tagging these films as spiritual terror.
Finally, in cluster four, we have "The Exorcist",
"Jaws 2", "Alien", "Gremlins"
and "End of Days", in other words, childhood nightmare fuel.
And maybe you disagree with how "Gremlins"
was classified as horror,
but look at this
right?
And the grotesque thing doesn't stop there.
Just look at this gross,
gross,
gross.
So that's why I'm tagging this cluster as spiritual disgust,
but which cluster resonates with audiences the most?
Well here's the distribution of box office revenue
accounting for inflation for each cluster.
The classics make the least amount of money
with $28 million on average.
Classics with better special effects is next
with $40 million.
Modern classics have 50 million and childhood nightmare fuel
is riding high at 55 million.
Now can we definitively say that humanity fears
those creepy crawlies that lurk in the dark
more than anything else?
No.
Our data was ethnocentric, incomplete
and I didn't run a single hypothesis test.
However, I can say that out of all of the clusters
cluster four, childhood nightmare fuel was the only one
that had titles that are just burned into my mind.
Like I remember the other titles and I remember being scared
while watching some of them,
but when the cards are down and it's 3:00 AM
and I can't sleep
it's because I'm worried that that stupid gremlin
is gonna catch me with my eyes closed
and I hate that.
And that terrifies me.
So what do we fear most?
It's that stupid gremlin.
End of video.
I hope you enjoyed that video.
It was actually a blast applying some of the stuff
that I learned in school to figure out something new.
That's why I love learning, just taking in new information
and techniques to widen my horizon.
But I've graduated now when I don't feel like spending
a couple thousand dollars to satisfy my curiosity.
Luckily I use The Great Courses Plus.
It's a subscription on demand video-learning service
with these amazing lectures and courses from top professors
from like Ivy League universities and experts
from major institutions.
Your subscription gets you access to over 11,000 videos
covering science to literature, to cooking.
For the horror lovers that are watching this video
I really recommend the course monsters within.
It builds out a framework for the genre
that's a little bit more comprehensive than the one I did
in this video.
And for the people who like numbers, The Great Courses Plus
also has this really great course called
meaning from data statistics made clear.
I have it in front of me right now it has a very long title.
It's comprehensive in subject matter
but it's still pretty accessible for beginners.
And you could get started with The Great Courses Plus today
for free if you click the first link in the description.
Learn at your own pace at any time or place
without worrying about tests.
Get started with The Great Courses Plus today,
but either way have a lovely day.
There was so much rhyming there.
(laughs)