The Horror of Being Alone: Lack of Language in Horror

“We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.” -Orson Welles

Introduction

Are you alone while reading this? Look to your left, to your right—is there anyone there? If you aren’t alone, does the person or people near you know why you’re looking at them—or are you alone in that thought? Humans have a very obtrusive relationship with being alone, or especially with being unable to communicate with others. Now don’t misunderstand me, the occasionally alone time is healthy, the peaceful Sunday night reading in bed, a cup of tea letting off gentle steam under one lone lamp—all is well—until you hear what sounds like footsteps down the hall—when you’re supposed to be the only one home. You go to pick up your cell phone, to text or call your significant other, and it just refuses to turn on— and the sound is getting louder—closer. You get up and run to the door, quickly locking it—but suddenly the sound has ceased, and the silence surrounding you sits heavy on your chest—you are alone, and in that moment, your only companion is fear and your heavy beating heart.

Now what if someone else was there in that room with you, a friend or a significant other, and you were able to talk to them? Would having them there make the situation less scary? Well 88.13% of the sample that took my survey said yes— but more on that later. That fear associated with being alone, without being able to communicate with others, is heavily relied upon within horror movies—and is even touched upon throughout much of culture and media. A large majority of the climactically scary parts within horror movies involve a character being alone—and if they aren’t alone, their group is detached from the community around them—the neighbors don’t know, the police don’t believe them, and something or someone is coming to hurt them. When I interviewed “M”, a self-proclaimed horror fanatic—he mentioned these types of scenes very early into our interview:

0:08:32 C: And just going back on the whole believability of language thing, do you believe... Do you feel like the parts in horror movies that are most scary tend to be with less dialogue? So that silence, and just music, and...

0:08:53 M: Yes, there are some parts, movies that I like once in a while, is when... It's that scene where you're looking for whatever it is the protagonist is looking for in the dark. And it's from a first person point-of-view. With the silence, I just think that's... Again, when you're trying to put yourself in the movie, I think that's very very important to connect with it.

There is a reason these silent scenes are so impactful, and it has a lot to do with the lack of dialogue and the inability for the character or characters to communicate with their outside environment. Humans need a decent amount of communication to feel safe, and that fear that stems from being unable to communicate with others may have a heritably passed down reason behind it. Horror movies, as well as other cultural media sources, use lack of language and disconnect from community to create this fearful atmosphere of being alone. This paper will specifically prove that horror movies play on and perpetuate the innate fear of not being able to communicate with others.

Method

My first research for this paper required me to do something I had been doing for a long time—watch horror movies. I am admittedly a huge horror movie fan—from the weird and experimental, to the mainstream and big budget—if it caught my interest, I have watched it—accumulating a catalog of hundreds of horror movies in my watch history. For this paper, I refreshed my knowledge of some of my favorite horror movies—such as the director James Wan’s movies, the Scream series, American Psycho, etc. While rewatching these movies, I took observatory notes about what was happening throughout the scariest scenes with them in regards to language and communication. I also took note of where characters were placed, in regards to their community, and whether or not they were disconnected from their community during the horrific ordeal.

Next, I sat down to interview M—a close friend of many years, and someone I was confident was a fellow “horror nerd” with the fact that he has watched at least 200 horror movies. We sat in a comfortable and isolated space, and spoke for just over an hour. I started with basic predetermined questions, and when the opportunity for something deeper arose, I would ask him questions that drew more personal experience and opinion based answers out of him. Due to M’s high intellect and general intelligence, fantastic qualitative data was gathered—proving him to be an excellent source of information as I did in depth discourse analysis of our interview.

Lastly, I created a 20 question anonymous survey on the online platform Qualtrics, with a mixture of multiple choice and free form answer questions. The mixture of these two types of questions gave me an ample amount of quantitative and qualitative data. I shared this survey on three different social media platforms: Facebook (to my family and friends), Twitter (to my family and friends), and then Reddit. Reddit was the most successful source of participants, after I shared it on the “Horror” sub-reddit (a community of horror fans that go there specifically for horror related content), and it was well received by the community within it.

Observations
Interview – Discourse Analysis

My interview with M took place in the perfect setting for an interview about horror and fear—sitting around an old table in my dingy and dimly lit basement, the sounds of wood creaking above and the dings of old pipes functioning on their last leg—we frequently found ourselves stopping to acknowledge the sounds of the setting around us, asking ourselves “What was that?” We started talking casually before the microphone turned on—I wanted to ensure that he was both comfortable and relaxed, and at no point did I want him giving me answers that he simply thought I wanted to hear. After joking around a bit, we signed the consent forms, turned on the microphone, and started.

I already knew M has an immense amount of horror knowledge, and I’ve seen him dissect horror movies to an expert degree in the past—examining their elements to determine his satisfaction with them. With that in mind, I had one goal going into the interview: get M talking about movies, have him dissect them, and let him tell me the reasons why he felt that way about them—he has an expert leveled viewpoint from his watching history, and I wanted him to feel I had that confidence in him. I started with some preliminary questions, how many horror movies he’s seen, his favorites, his least favorites—and the follow up question that got the juices flowing—“why?” As I dug deeper though, and started asking about his own personal experiences, it seemed that the things he was most scared of were situations of which he was alone, or of which he felt alone. M spoke a lot about his fear of the unknown, but that fear especially kicked in while he had no one to speak to.

0:11:46 C: So what was it that was so scary in that moment? Was it the idea that you didn't know... Understand what was going on?

0:11:51 M: The unknown, the unknown. Yeah. I always find places where people are known to be, and just empty, terrifying to me.

0:11:58 C: So if you were...

0:12:01 M: So imagine a busy hospital, just to see it empty. You don't see a hospital that's empty. You don't see a subway station empty. Places where there's so much human energy, and it's just gone, totally void of it. It just has this weird feeling about it. I don't know. I don't know if it's scary, or weird.

0:12:19 C: That your brain just kind of...
0:12:20 M: Yeah. Just like turns into this, "This is no good. No good." 0:12:23 C: Do you think it has anything to do with the silence as well? 0:12:28 M: Yeah.

0:12:28 C: Kinda going back on how we were talking about with the fact that those scenes, when they were...

0:12:32 M: Right. Scenes that are just absence of sound is just like... It's weird.

We can see M having this innate response to areas of which are devoid of community, devoid of people, devoid of communication with other people. This may be indicative of a Larger Cultural Story, of which media and especially horror movies, depicts empty areas as a foreshadowing of something dangerous being the only thing in the room with you. At the same time, this may also be do to a heretical response passed down from our early ancestors, of whom faired better in groups than when alone. Situations that may have been dangerous in our prehistoric history, would be passed down to us generation after generous. Within his paper “Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror”, Stephen T. Asma talks about the findings of biologist Tim Flannery in regards to the “face-hugging” monster in Alien, and why the creature is so terrifying, or at least cringe inducing. Our prehistoric ancestors in Africa may have dealt with dangerous arachnid that attacked in a similar manner, such as the six-eyed sand spider, which would seem plausible, hence conditioning our species to fear creatures like it, and even leading top an innate arachnophobia within humans. (Asma, 2014)

With that evolutionary and heretical fear trait being passed down about spider like creatures, like the ones in Alien, it would not be a stretch to say that empty spaces were a very scary environment for our ancestors. Being unable to simply call the police force, like we’re able to do in current times, would mean that when one of our ancestors was completely alone—if they were to encounter a threat, regardless of whether it was human or creature—they would have to defend themselves all on their own—alone. This then puts into perspective the justification for M’s fear of these empty spaces of which are usually inhabited, and we see horror movies play on this fear of being alone in an open space all the time. The zombie movie (well, infected organism/zombie depending on your interpretation) I AM Legend for example, utilizes many tense scenes of which the main character, played by Will Smith, is walking alone or only with his dog in wide open city streets, devoid of humanity. Further playing on this idea of communication with others making us feel better, we see Will Smith’s character talking to his dog frequently throughout this film—presumably to feel less alone, and more safe. That may also be why, towards the end of the movie (spoiler alert) when his dog is infected, and he is forced to kill his canine partner, and only companion, it is especially heartbreaking—and further fear inducing when he is sitting alone in a silent room— now completely alone. Scenes like those in I am Legend would play on the fears of M, and show how these movies use that silence, lack of communication, and concept of being completely alone to play on what may be an innate heretical fear passed down to us by our prehistoric ancestors.

It seems that M’s personal fears, even when they involved other people around him, involved him perceiving himself as alone, and leading to him feeling in danger.

0:49:35 C: Now, are there any situations that scared you that are beyond these things? So beyond the demonic, beyond the dark, beyond the unknown, something that scared you that was out of the norm, that you wouldn't have expected to scare you, whether it been when you were younger or now?

0:49:54 M: That would probably have to be for another day 'cause I gotta think of that one, but if there's something that gives me anxiety, large crowds. Never been to a concert, still can't go. I can't handle being surrounded by large crowds. I think that's probably why I also hate plays so much. Not so much the people, it's just the fact that it's wall-to-wall...

0:50:16 C: Confined.
0:50:16 M: Yeah. And I'm not claustrophobic. I can be in a place by myself. I don't like having a mob of 1,000 people.

0:50:24 C: And why do you think that is?
0:50:26 M: I don't know. I really don't know where that came from either.

0:50:31 C: Do you remember any situations of which you were in that position, and you found yourself freaking out?

0:50:39 M: It's probably if I got separated from my parents, or something, and I'm not remembering it maybe, I would guess. And like in a crowd of people, and you can't find them. But obviously, when you're five, the world is just a terrifying place. So without your parents, you're just, this is it, this is the end.

Here we see M talking about the anxiety of being in an extremely crowded place, and there seems to be a deeper story involving being separated from his parents, and it is indicative of a Larger Cultural Story that we all may feel a children—that fear associated with being separated from our parents in a public place. This fear could simply be due to the unpredictability though, so I tried to get him to elaborate further—which led to him talking about how both his fear of empty public spaces and his fear of large crowds combine in zombie movies.

0:56:24 M: But again, imagine just waking up in this hospital not knowing what the hell happened to you. Yes, this is a cliche, played-out thing, but I think this came out after 28 Days Later. 28 Days Later was ‘02,’04. Walking Dead, I don’t know when the comics were written. Rick had the same thing, waking up in the hospital by himself. So imagine walking around London or Manhattan, just no one around. Again...

0:56:48 C: So now the opposite now. So now we’re not in this crowded group, we are completely isolated......right?

0:56:55 M: Right.
0:56:56 C: So there’s this bareness, and it bothers you.

0:56:58 M: But then this is where they meet, and now you meet this horde of people running at you for God knows what.

In M’s reaction we once again, even in zombie movies, see this use of emptiness in public space, disconnect from community, and a lacking in the ability to communicate with others playing into this innate fear of being alone. But even the hordes, and M’s fear relates to this feeling of being alone, as I learned talking with him further about a dream he had of which he is completely alone. I pointed out the contradiction between his nightmares of which he is alone being fearful, and his real life anxiety associated with large crowds of people being around him, and his defense was as follows:

1:04:17 C: And once again, at that ending part, you were alone.

1:04:20 M: Yes.

1:04:23 C: Now, with that, it almost contradicts with that huge... How...

1:04:29 M: But I'm alone in this huge crowd, you see? That's the difference.
11

1:04:32 C: Yeah. You feel alone in that huge crowd, even though there is plenty of people...

1:04:36 M: Like if you guys came... 1:04:38 C: Like when we were with you...

1:04:39 M: Like if you guys gave me a group hug right now, everyone, obviously, I would have no problem. It's everyone I know and trust, and that's fine.

1:04:46 C: So let's say we're at a concert, and we're all together? 1:04:50 M: I probably could handle it.

1:04:52 C: Okay. It's just the feeling if you were, let's say, there alone and in that position, would be the fear?

1:04:57 M: Right.

We see M making the connection that even in large crowds, that feeling of being alone generates fear—but if a group of friends were with him, and he was able to communicate with them, the situation would be more bearable. We see the power of this group dynamic in horror media of even the most simplistic of forms. For example, in the original Hanna Barbara cartoon, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, the mystery gang very rarely experiences the villain while they’re all together, but once they split up, the villain would then begin to terrorize individual members separated from the group. This horror trope is so frequently used, that within the slasher film Scream, one of the main characters Randy Meeks is stating the rules to avoid being killed off in a horror movie, and one of those rules is to never say “I’ll be right back”. Horror movies tend to separate a character from their community, and then separate them physically, before allowing danger to fully overtake them. This horror trope demonstrates and perpetuates the feeling that we should feel better together, and enforces the fear of being alone—if you are not alone, danger cannot reach you—hence further playing on this innate fear we have of being in danger when we are alone and unable to communicate with others.

Observation – Survey Data Demographic

With a majority of my responses being gathered from this Horror sub-reddit of horror fans and my general Facebook friends, it gave me a diverse and hearty sample size of 540 participants. My sample was 58.70% male, 40.19% female, and 1.11% other genders. A majority of my sample was within the age demographic of 22-30 years old (44.26 %), followed by the second and third age ranges being 31-40 years old (23.70%) and 18-21 years old (18.70%). My sample consisted of participants from a multitude of countries, but 396 participants were from the United States, leading to an information bias leaning towards that country. Though some participants opted to withhold their city, participants were from a respectable estimate of 373~ different cities throughout the world. 96.30% of participants stated that they enjoyed horror movies, while 3.70% of participants stated that they did not enjoy horror movies (520 Yes /20 No). 81.67% of participants said that they enjoyed horror novels, while 18.33% of participants said that they did not enjoy horror novels (441 Yes/ 99 No). When asked to estimate how many horror movies they had watched throughout their life on a scale of 1 to 200 movies, the sample had a mean of 132.47 horror movies watched and a standard deviation of 67.40.

Notable Findings – Quantitative Data

The above question asked the participants to determine, out of the five choices of “scary” scenarios, what was the scariest to them. Out of the five choices, the scenario chosen the most was “Suddenly, everyone in the world is ignoring your existence— no one can hear you, no one will speak to you.” with 28.70% of participants choosing this response (155 participants). This was the only scenario, of the five, that explicitly described the participant being in some variation, alone—and in this case—unable to communicate with others. This furthers the concept of an innate fear of being alone being engrained in my sample, and being that sample is composed of 96.30% participants of whom enjoy horror movies—their may be correlation between their movie preferences and their fear of being alone being reinforced by them.

The above question asked the participant to once again determine the scariest scenarios, of three possible scenarios—but all three scenarios involved a variation the participant being alone. The scenario that was chosen the most by participants was “You are being stalked by a stranger, and no one believes you.” with 64.26% of participants choosing this scenario (347 participants). This scenario shows an example of disconnect from community, of which the community around them do not believe the participant. This is another trope perpetuated by horror movies; with victims within horror movies frequently not being believe by their friends, family, their community, or police departments. A majority of horror movies involve a decent amount of ignorance amongst those within the community, leaving the victim unable to communicate efficiently with those who would make them feel less alone—and hence these results could show further connection between a sample that is extremely partial towards horror movies, and the fears they themselves experience.

The above question asked the participants “Is a situation less scary if you have someone or multiple people with you?” An overwhelming majority of participants, 88.13% (475 participants) responded yes to this question. This reinforces the idea that levels of fear are intensified if the participant is alone, and more at ease if they are with someone they can communicate with while in the situation. This also reinforces the horror trope of the “group dynamic” mentioned prior; of which the scarier scenes tend to occur when a character is alone and without a group.

The above question asked participants “Think about your favorite horror movie scene. Do you feel that the most fearful situations in horror movies are when there is no dialogue between characters?” A majority of participants, 72.59% (392 participants), responded yes to this question. While assuming the participants properly thought of their favorite scene, and were able to accurately remember it, it serves as further prove that horror movies tend to isolate a character during the scariest of scenes.

Notable Finding – Qualitative Data:

Biggest Fear

Participants were asked, if comfortable, to name their biggest fear. What was most interesting about the data for this question was how a majority of participants, that obliged to answer it, responded with fears that involved a variation of being alone. Some examples include being alone, dying alone, being isolated, no one understanding me, being completely abandoned, being lost at sea, getting lost, isolation, being alone in my house with a killer or demon, nobody caring about me, being alone in the dark, not being alone when I think I am, and being alone in a coma. Due to the vast individualized variations of responses, due to this question being an open-ended answer—as well as some participants opting out of answering—it isn’t possible to quantize this data. Despite that, from an undetailed analysis—it seems that a majority of participants that did answer, answered with responses that involve them being alone in some type of way. This question in no way pressured the participants towards responding with a trend involving being alone, and yet a majority of participants answered in this way. This was one of the strongest data sets of all the research I had done that showed an extremely common fear of being alone or unable to communicate with others—so much so—that it shocked me when I was reading through it. Further, considering that a large majority of participants enjoy horror movies, there may be a correlation between their fear of being alone and the horror movies they are watching.

Limitations of Overall Study

There were many limitations to this paper that may hinder the effectiveness of proving its thesis, as well as contributing to a larger research goal. Firstly, the this paper was set to be due within a two month time frame within an Undergraduate English Class. Besides time restraints, the rubric set for this paper required it to relate to language, and though the thesis does relate to language (or more specifically the lack of it), it withheld the paper from exploring other subject matters that would not efficiently fit within the rubric. Further, the interview is just that, single, and the time frame did not allow for the interviewing of multiple horror fans—or even those who do not enjoy horror—leading to observations based off of one sole source. In regards to the survey, though in this case it was large and leaned positively towards the thesis, the sample was skewed towards fans of horror, and does not truly include the opinions of those who are not fond of horror. Lastly, time frame, the oddity of the subject, and resource availability led to a lack of secondary sources to backup the findings within this paper.

This research can be better improved in the future with a larger sample size, a longer time frame to complete both data gathering and secondary source acquisition.

Conclusion

In his paper Horror Movies and the Cognitive Ecology of Primary Metaphors, Bobo Winter makes the connection between the metaphorical association between characters going vertically down in their setting, and evil being down. (Winter, 2014) His paper showed that knowingly or unknowingly, horror movies (and movies in general) could contain certain metaphorical perpetuations that are already engrained in people and the culture that has shaped them. This paper, its interview with M and its survey show that horror movies play on and perpetuate the innate fear of not being able to communicate with others. The inability of being able to communicate with others, is ultimately, the idea and feeling of being alone— which ultimately leads to an innate fear that seems to be engrained within human nature.

Research tends to simply study language, but there is something important that occurs when there is a lack of language. Studying the culture of horror movies—an industry that focuses all of its energy and resources on crafting fear— gave us the ability to examine how they use the lack of language and a disconnect from community as a tool. The use of this tool, and its effectiveness, may give us a glimpse at what truly scares us as a society. It can relate to why we naturally build discourse communities, with their own lexicon that allows us to even better communicate with those around us—keeping us from ever feeling alone. It may give us a glimpse at why the opposite media culture of horror—love songs and romantic comedies—are so popular. If so much of our society truly fears being alone and being unable to communicate with others, the idea of a romantic lover of whom we can unconditionally communicate with seem like a heavenly escape from that fear. Is the fear of being alone what makes love that much sweeter? After all, is there anything scarier than the person you love the most not answering your calls?

Nonetheless, there is something there—there is a reason why even at times when we’re sitting alone in our own homes, there is always that slight edge—why else would our hair stand at the sound of the swelling floorboards creaking? Why does our heart beat faster when we hear a bang in our empty home? I believe the answer is somewhere within the fear we all had as children, when our parents were off to sleep and we were sitting alone in our dark rooms, looking into the deep dark closet, checking under the bed for unwanted renters—wanting to be alone, while not wanting to be alone.

Works Cited

Asma, Stephen T. "Monsters on the Brain: An Evolutionary Epistemology of Horror."

Social Research 81.4 (2014): n. pag. Web.
Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Dir. Joe Ruby and Ken Spears. N.p., n.d. Web. Scream. Dir. Wes Craven. 1997.
Winter, Bodo. "Horror Movies and the Cognitive Ecology of Primary Metaphors."

Metaphor and Symbol 29.3 (2014): 151-70. Web.