Horror Neurobiology (WATCHING SCARY STUFF) with Austin Lim

Thrills. Chills. Hiding behind your hands. It’s officially SPOOKTOBER month with a huge, fascinating (and I promise, mellow) episode on why humans watch horror, and what’s happening in your brain. Not only do we have the author of “Horror on the Brain: the Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction,” neuroscientist Dr. Austin Lim, but this also features CUTS from other episodes to FLESH it all out. Enjoy the political sociology of zombies vs. vampires, feminist body horror, horror as anti-war art, liminal spaces, the best blood in the business, goosebumps and Goosebumps, evolutionary mismatches, why clowns unsettle you, and if horror is having its moment. (Note: it is.) Also, we had to cap this at 2+ hours so if we don’t cover *your* favorite movie or series and you yell at me about it, I will roll my eyes so hard that I will die and then I will haunt you by hiding your car keys.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's that bird outside the hardware store that dive bombed your mom's head 12 years ago, Ally Ward. And if you're here, you might like horror, or perhaps you've been sent this episode by someone who does, who just wants you to attend a midnight graveyard screening of Poltergeist just this once for them. Why do they love it? Why don't you? Or vice versa? Okay, so let's ask neuroscientists who like brains, and particularly one. By the way, happy Spooktober. For this episode, we went all out, like those neighbors who wait all year to bust out the 12-foot skeleton. And we made this almost a horror anthology

• 0:39Alie Ward?

  of past creepy episodes to explain what happens when the brain lets itself be scared on purpose, or you force it to be. Jury's out on that. So if you've been listening to Ologies for a while, you know that in October, we like to bring you explorations of autumn, some of the more spine-tingly episodes, but they're not all scary, okay? This one, maybe a little bit, but for example, just sneak peek. Stay tuned this month for episodes on whales who kill, the history of brooms. We've got one on the greatest tales of modern folklore, like the man who mothed his way too close to the moon. So we have quite a science-rich, sweet, gently creepy few weeks ahead. That's all coming up this

• 1:23Alie Ward?

  month. But let's kick it off with that intersection of scariness, fiction, and your bundle of neurons. So first, though, quick thanks to all the listeners who submitted questions for this and support through Patreon.com/ologies. Thank you to everyone out there and Ologies merch from OlogiesMerch.com. Thank you to the sweeties out there who leave reviews for the show, which help other future Ologites discover us. And I do read them all, such as yours, The Nerdy Goose, who just wrote that they have found their people where biological vocab and puns are both welcomed and celebrated. The Nerdy Goose, I'm always going to be your podfather. So thank you to sponsors of the show also, who keep our lights on and the mics on and enable us to donate to charities every week.

• 2:05Alie Ward?

  This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time, award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas, so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Father Ward, you say. There's no way you would need a career coach. You have it all together. That's a lie, and you know it. I actually hired a career coach, and without

• 2:47Alie Ward?

  them, I wouldn't have started Ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know where to find a career coach, I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right, I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut, or you have to make a decision about expansion, or what direction you want to take your company, that's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on

• 3:31Alie Ward?

  my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to and what to say no to. And then we're super helpful in helping me streamline, and now I get to sleep more, and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss. Okay, horror neurobiology. So this ologist is an associate biology, psychology, and neuroscience professor in the College of Science and Health at Chicago's DePaul University with a roster of courses, including The Brain and Behavior, Physiological Psychology, The Brain Through Science Fiction, and of course, wrote the book on the topics titled Horror on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction. I could not get them on fast enough,

• 4:14Alie Ward?

  so we hopped on a call to kick off this creepiest month. And he was flanked by a backdrop of bookshelves containing all kinds of fiction. And content warning, we do talk about some scary stuff, but not too scary. We talk a little bit about trauma. There is one mention about self-harm ideation, but it stays pretty calm. Listen, we've tried to cover as much as we could in like, an hour or two. I don't know how long this is going to be. So if we don't cover your favorite movie or series, and you write to bitch at me about it, I will roll my eyes so hard, I will die. And then I will haunt you by hiding your keys and messing with your phone battery. Okay? We clear on this? I covered as much as I could.

• 4:56Alie Ward?

  Also, you may notice an arc here in my own journey with horror. I am not drawn to the genre, per se, and I usually avoid it through the comfort of a turtleneck pulled over my face. But somehow, this episode got me to kind of see its darkness in a new light. I'm changed. All right, let's get into the political psychology of zombies versus vampires, goosebumps, anxiety in scary movies, evolutionary mismatches, thrillers versus horrors versus gore, clowns breathing down your neck, feminist horror, and if the genre is having its moment, with author, neuroscientist, and horror neurobiologist, Dr. Austin Lim, and appearances by various ologists. You'll be excited immediately.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Austin Lim, he/him.

• 6:04Alie Ward?

  And Dr. Lim.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  That's correct, yes.

• 6:08Alie Ward?

  And so, you are a neurobiologist. So you study the brain?

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yes. So that was all of my training. I did that sort of hardcore cellular molecular level stuff for about a decade. And since then, I've realized that neither myself nor anyone I talk to really finds any of that stuff interesting. So I've sort of shifted my interest quite a bit.

• 6:34Alie Ward?

  I'm interested. I understand that the striatum is a focus of your work. And I don't know what that does. And I don't know how it relates to everyday life or horror. So can you tell me a little bit about what the striatum is?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. It's a brain structure that does a lot of the integrative work. So it ties in a lot of our senses and helps us kind of figure out what kind of outputs to carry out. Most of my work doing research is looking at it in the context of pathology. So in Parkinson's disease and in Huntington's disease, which are two movement disorders, where they're characterized by unusual outputs, or difficulty with outputs, or uncontrollable outputs. I'm mostly talking about motor outputs here. But the striatum's also been implicated in a lot of other really interesting behavioral changes, including drug addiction and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

• 7:33Alie Ward?

  OCD? Yes, OCD. In fact, we have not one, but two episodes on the topic, featuring the legend, Dr. Wayne Goodman, and the wonderful and warm Dr. Uma Chatterjee, who herself has struggled with the disorder. As it turns out, also, so do I. Found out not too long ago. So we will link those OCD episodes through in the show notes. Anyone who struggles with OCD can tell you that OCD can feel like being trapped in a house of horrors. But exposure therapy really helps turn the lights on, so you can saunter right on out of there. And yes, Dr. Lim studied the striatum, which can be related to obsessions and compulsions, but also to fear conditioning, as evidenced in the 2013 Biological Psychiatry paper,

• 8:15Alie Ward?

  Regulation of Fear Responses by Striatal and Extrastriatal Adenosine A2A Receptors in Forebrain, which explains that this stuff matters because conditioned fear helps people predict when something not cool is about to happen, based on what happened last time. But dysfunction in how those fears are learned, or overlearned, can be maladaptive, and it can underlie PTSD and anxiety disorders. But for some fans of scary stuff, some genre fans, that is just, that's worth the price of admission. Well, we'll back up a little bit. What was it about the brain that got your brain interested in it?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of a circuitous route for me personally. It's one of those little, like, dirty secrets that I don't tell my undergrads, is that my undergraduate degree was actually in political science.

• 9:08Alie Ward?

  Oh, was it?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I was mostly interested in looking at the mechanisms involved in voting behavior. That was kind of my senior project.

• 9:18Alie Ward?

  Don't say.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's kind of, you know, at the end, it's still behavior. It's still about human brains and why they want to do things. But then I had to take, my senior year, I had to take an introduction to neuroscience class. And the way that the concepts were presented was just so interesting to me, that you have, you know, 86 billion little parts, and they're all chattering with each other. And somehow, the whole idea that the sum is greater than its parts, you get these little pieces interacting, and then you get the whole range of human behaviors. You know, all the healthy things that we do, all the imagining about our future, all the creation of new things that have never been thought

• 10:01Speaker 01

  of before. Somehow, those pieces make something bigger. And that was just so fascinating to me as a field. It's like, oh, yeah, this is something I could study forever.

• 10:13Alie Ward?

  It is interesting that horror and voting are both in your purview, one might say, especially this season. There's a dovetail there. But I have to say, because I saw your, your bookshelf is full of books, and just based on the spines, it looks like a lot of genre. I'm going to imagine that you have been a fan of kind of spine-tingling things for a while, then?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's gone through phases. It started out when I was really young. The Goosebumps books were my favorite. And then, you know, I've always been a gamer, so I played a bunch of video games. And I have a very specific memory of playing one game with my cousins, a scary game, In the Dark.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  And then the phone rings out of nowhere and all of us jump and we just turn it off and run away. And it was that moment that I turned off on horror almost completely for

• 11:13Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  Like 10 years. It scared me so much.

• 11:16Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  And then I've, you know, within the past decade or so, sort of cycled back into it. And it's like, oh yeah, this is cool. This, uh, this fires up something so different than what I'm used to reading.

• 11:28Alie Ward?

  Who was on the phone? Did you ever find out who was calling?

• 11:31Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't, I don't even remember. Probably a ghost or something. I don't know.

• 11:36Alie Ward?

  It was just your soul from the future warning you. Just some breaking science news here. Scary stuff stays scary, as evidenced in the turn of the century Y2K paper, Tales From The Screen: Enduring Fright Reactions To Scary Media. This was in the journal Media Psychology, and it found that 90% of samples of young adults carry fears from scary media that was seen in childhood or adolescence. 26% of the participants still experienced residual anxiety or disturbances with sleeping or eating patterns and avoidance of behaviors or situations like those seen in scary media when they were younger. Oh, also that phone ring that we did, that's

• 12:21Alie Ward?

  like the last time we're gonna jump scary in this episode, I promise. As I'm recording this, the president just said that my city getting bombed would be a small price to pay for gas prices going back down. So we got, we got enough jump scares. So can you run me through a little bit of the basics of when you're scared like that, when you're playing a horror game versus when the phone rings and it's your principal with some sort of accusation or whatever? What is happening? What part of your brain is responding to that? Is that mostly amygdala? Can you kind of let us know, like, what's the basics of what's lighting up?

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're spot on. So amygdala plays a major role in sort of initiating the physiological response to fear. So amygdala takes in a bunch of our sensory inputs and then it communicates with another series of structures, the HPA axis, hypothalamus, pituitary, and adrenal glands. And through that process, by the time the signals make their way all the way down to the adrenal glands, which sit like funny little hats on top of our kidneys, it sends a signal into our bloodstream saying, okay, you need to initiate this immediate survival response. And this is one of those evolutionary ancient responses to keep us

• 13:40Speaker 01

  safe in the moment. And so it's doing all those things to our body. It's increasing our heart rate. It's dilating the bronchioles, which let us get more oxygen into our lungs, which then gets to our muscles, allowing us for what trained neuroscientists call battle or skedaddle. That immediate reflex where I have to do something right now if I want to live. And so whether we're watching something scary, we get that slow elevation and then the jump scare hits, the creepy face appears out of nowhere, or the masked killer knocks the door down.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  Why, hello there?

• 14:17Speaker 01

  Suddenly we get that full-blown bodily response that's been, you know, preserved for almost all of evolution, probably.

• 14:27Alie Ward?

  So blame your amygdala. This is a little egg-shaped nugget deep in your brain that is at the controls of your fear response. Without it, you would not be wary of sketchy situations. You wouldn't get loose stools before a roller coaster. You might not sense that you're about to be mugged, which has happened twice to someone known just as SM. She's a bit of a neurobiological anomaly and has been studied a lot by neurobiologists because she lost her amygdala to a genetic disorder. So known as just SM, she has faced a life of tragedies from this condition. She remains, though, as a scientist who have

• 15:08Alie Ward?

  rapidly studied her, a pretty positive and upbeat person. She's been called, quote, "the world's most famous living neurobiological patient." But yes, she's in a lot of situations that other people would flee. Now, I consider my amygdala to be a screaming almond of terror. And let's hear a little from biopsychologist and author of the book Brave New You, the now Dr. Mary Pfeiffer, who is one of our all-time favorite guests after she did a two-part fearology episode. She's great.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  The amygdala is gonna be kind of like the size of your thumbnail, but shaped like an almond. And it's gonna be on both sides. So if you were to cut your, your brain in half, then you have one on each side.

• 15:51Alie Ward?

  Ooh, okay.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  And they're really small, but that is kind of the powerhouse of the fear response. That's gonna be the control center. So when our body is going to perceive a stressor, so we talked about like, you know, stress versus fear, you can really start to look at it as stress is going to be the physiological response that your body's having to a stressor. And that stressor is going to be the outside thing, the trigger. Stressors are generally never in our control, but our stress response is.

• 16:22Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 16:23Speaker 03

  So let's go back to the story that you said about getting mugged at knife point.

• 16:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Right? So the, the stressor is going to be the mugger

• 16:32Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  with the knife threatening your life. And

• 16:35Alie Ward?

  There were two of them. One for each side of my amygdala.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Right? Oh, that's nice. They thought about you. They're like, you know, we're gonna, we're gonna tag team. I mean, you obviously are very ferocious opponents. They're like, we're gonna need backup boys.

• 16:48Alie Ward?

  This was in my late twenties. Spoiler alert. I survived as a slightly more anxious person than I had been previously, which is why this neuroscience fascinates me. So as I'm getting mugged.

• 17:01Speaker 03

  In that, in that moment, your central nervous system is what is allowing you to interact with your ineternal and your external environment. So your senses, your eyes, your ears are picking up a threat. So that's gonna be the stressor. You have no control over that stressor. But your stress response is what's happening inside your body. And your, you know, amygdala is kind of like hitting the panic button, being like, okay, we need to, we, it's go time. And then at that point, it's going to create a kind of like cascading effect through your hypothalamus and thalamus and getting everything ready for your body to, in this particular point, to do the fight or flight.

• 17:41Alie Ward?

  Okay, so little recap. This whole shebang is part of your limbic system. And once again, the little almond-y amygdala, deep within your brain, receives info. This says, ha, no, oh no. I'm paraphrasing. And it chemically pokes your thalamus, which sends other signals to the brain to just release a floodgate of adrenaline and cortisol in preparation to either engage in fisticuffs or get the fuck out ASAP. Okay, so this next thing she says changed my whole life. Okay, get ready for it. Are you ready for it? Get ready for it.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  And I think this is a good time to kind of also separate, when we look at fear, we have kind of like two major types of fear. What I call factual fear versus fictional fear.

• 18:36Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  So since we're on this example, like factual fear is going to be actual threats to your life that are happening in a shared reality right now that your body's responding to. So you getting mugged at knife point was hell yeah factual fear. Like, like shit is going down. It is time to put all, all systems into fight or flight. And that means at that time, your body is shutting down non-essential systems. So cellular regeneration, not taking that offline, don't need it. Digestion, like, we're just, we're not gonna worry about that. Libido, don't need to be worried about sex at time right now. Just, just trying to get out of here alive. And then that means that other resources can be put to your skin. This is why you can either break out in cold sweat or get hot, because your blood

• 19:19Speaker 03

  is flowing to your muscles, so that your muscles will have the energy to do what it needs to do to survive. There's also a, and that's all the stress response. There's also going to be the other side of that, which is fictional fear. Just like a good fictional book might have a nugget of truth in it, but most of it is just made up.

• 19:38Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  So with fictional fear, that is the everyday fears. And that's the fears that I really focus on of how we can change our story with our fictional fears so that they aren't like firing up the amygdala so much. And that we're not going into this full stress response because in modern times, our body isn't really good. Like, our amygdala just sees stressor, right? It's up to us to control how that is perceived. Because if we are constantly in hyperdrive with our amygdala just keep sending signals of danger, danger, danger, when it's not necessarily dangerous, like, it could just be annoying, or, you know, maybe it's a, it's a good stressor, like, it's an opportunity. If we don't start to

• 20:20Speaker 03

  discern that for ourselves and we constantly are just redlining the stress response, then that's why we're seeing this increase in all of these other issues in our body that usually would be taken care of.

• 20:33Alie Ward?

  And so fictional fears are just that, whether they're these enduring, all caps, what ifs in your brain, or they're

• 20:46Alie Ward?

  Like a shadowy TV show with staccato violin. Your body will react. And those goosebumps we get, is that really just to make us look hairier and bigger? Are we seeing a creepy clown face on a TV and our body's like, quick, you need to look bigger?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's one reasonable explanation for like hairier animals where they have a little bit more body hair to kind of puff up and change their appearance. One of those unusual responses that don't seem to have a very strong survival protection element in humans now.

• 21:28Alie Ward?

  So yeah, goosebumps are little, little tiny muscles at the base of your mammal hairs. And when they're normal and just chill and relaxed, pretty smooth, until they get triggered by your sympathetic nervous system. This is the system in your body that initiates that battle or skedaddle response. And then those little tiny muscles, they flex and they pull your hairs up, kind of like if you were raising up a flagpole. And this makes sense in, let's say, a cat who is facing down a coyote. But we have lost most of our fuzz, some of us because there was a Groupon for laser removal. But the erector pili muscles at the base of our hairs, they did not get this memo.

• 22:10Alie Ward?

  But goosebumps, you may not do jack shit when we're about to get gored by a bull, but without Goosebumps, the children's book series named after you, would we even be here? But why are you here? By here, I mean in the horror genre, enduring pit stains and raised heart rates, watching an actor being just chased by another actor. So according to the 2021 Finnish paper titled Psychology and Neurobiology of Horror Movies, the fear of injury and illness, as well as those fears pertaining to the end of social relationships, are the most common fears in the general population of humans. They also did some survey data that showed that the scariest horror movies deal with

• 22:53Alie Ward?

  those kind of universal themes, illness, injury, and getting iced out. I feel so alone. So why isn't the Tom Hanks solo island romp Cast Away, or in His Fiance Hooks Up With Someone Else Also, he doesn't even know about it, but it is heartbreaking, why isn't that ranked up there with The Exorcist? It's got everything, right? So a 2026 article, The Science of Scare, The Scariest Movies According to Science, claimed to measure 250 participants with heart rate monitors. And according to their metrics, the most spine tingling thing to put yourself in front of is the eerie thriller Sinister, which was inspired by a nightmare that the writer,

• 23:37Alie Ward?

  director experienced after watching this other freaky film, The Ring. So the protagonist in Sinister is Ellison Oswald. He's a crime reporter. He's a married father of two, played by Ethan Hawke. By the way, I've watched trailers. It is scary. Also, there's like a boogeyman in it who looks a lot like if Jack White had an evil twin with no mouth. Now, some people love to be creeped out. And I'm wondering, do people who have had more frightening experiences, do they gravitate toward horror because they're getting a resolution out of the end? Or do you feel like maybe people who have more PTSD are like, no, thanks, I'm all full on that?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Like you said, there is a resolution that tends to wrap things up in a fictionalized art horror setting, where you know you can experience these things in a safe, ultimately safe manner.

• 24:33Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  And then you get the ups and downs. And at the end, hopefully, well, in many cases, things get resolved. And then you feel that relief as you've sort of come back down from that high emotional state. And so it produces this sense of ease, a sense of relaxation, contrary to kind of what you expect with horror. I think it's such an interesting thing because there's so much of a paradox with what horror can do for people.

• 25:01Alie Ward?

  Yes, yeah. It's interesting to think that like going on a scary roller coaster just for that feeling of coming back into the station and knowing it's over, like that that might be part of the draw. And according to the 2024 article, Why Do We Like Horror Movies? From thrill-seeking to morbid curiosity, why some folks enjoy a good scare has many possible scientific explanations. So this said that in addition to just the adrenaline highs of an increased heart rate and mental alertness that comes along with fight or flight, researchers have also found that, yeah, it's the relief from the suspense and that realization of safety. And as you clear the adrenaline, it can feel, I'm guessing, just kind of like if you had

• 25:46Alie Ward?

  taken a big, long hike and then rested on a feather bed. But that feather bed is, no one's probably going to kill me tonight. Now, what about zombie apocalypse movies? Let us consult the 2021 study in Personality and Individual Differences. This was titled Pandemic Practice: Horror Fans and Morbidly Curious Individuals Are More Psychologically Resilient During the COVID-19 Pandemic. So yeah, people with a morbid curiosity toward like fictional disaster movies, like Alien Invasion, or apocalyptic, or zombie films, these people who are into that exhibited

• 26:28Alie Ward?

  both greater resilience and preparedness during the height of the quarantine. And the results support that exposure to frightening fictions allows audiences to practice these effective coping strategies that can be beneficial in shitty, real-world situations. Speaking of real life, where does binge watching Dateline figure into all of this? So there was a 2025 paper in the British Journal of Psychology titled Out of the Dark: Psychological Perspectives on People's Fascination with True Crime. And it notes that from a psychological perspective, violent movies, video games, and fictional horror consumption is distinct from true crime media when it comes to the brain.

• 27:13Alie Ward?

  And it continues that the true nature of true crime stories, including these unresolved cases, or this lack of satisfying resolution or ending, those can elicit stronger emotional involvements and feelings of personal relevance. And demographically, and binarily, they say that while fictional violence and horror are preferred by men, research has established that the vast majority, up to 93% of true crime consumers, are women. And one theory is something called defensive vigilance, where this consumption of nerve-wracking true stories serves as information gathering to prevent real-life situations.

• 27:58Alie Ward?

  And while things are indeed brutal for ladies and trans folks, especially right now, is it in direct proportion to the entertainment media and the headlines we see? So I interviewed the esteemed Dr. Callie Renison, who's a victimologist, and she studies the psychology behind crime. She's an amazing professor. She is responsible for the textbook definition of someone who is a sexual assaulter being a photo of Brock Turner. Again, legend. But she studies the psychology to better advocate for victims. And we talked about this in the victimology episode, so let's hear some of that. What kind of questions? And what kinds of things really shocked you when you started digging into it?

• 28:41Speaker 04

  Oh, I think, I mean, I held on to a lot of stereotypes, like who's victimized more? Well, older people, clearly. That's not true. And who's victimized more? Well, women, clearly. And that's also not true. Specific types of violence, yes, women are more likely to experience, but overall violence? No, that's men. I'd see something written about young, black, urban males, for example, and it's always written about their offenses, but very little written about the fact that they're victimized at some of the highest rates. And so that was a part of what my work, I wanted to do with my work, is to bring this to people's attention about who is being victimized. And that's what I continue to try to do.

• 29:15Alie Ward?

  Why do you think that we are focused on certain victims and not others?

• 29:22Alie Ward?

  As a culture, at least, as a media culture.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  I mean, I think it's our culture, and I think it's still messed up and it's still dominated by a lot of incorrect stereotypes. I mean, one of the things that I always think about is blaming the victim. And you'll hear a lot of people say, don't blame the victim. And I agree, don't blame the victim. But let's not kid ourselves either. We blame the victim a lot. We blame young black men who are killed for doing nothing, except being black, walking down the street. But if you blame, say, a white person for being harmed, then people really get upset. So I wish as a society, we would start viewing all victims the same. These are all people who were violently attacked, and it wasn't their fault at all. And I wish we could have that compassion for all types of people, regardless of age, or race, or ethnicity, or other types of lifestyle. But we're just

• 30:10Speaker 04

  not there as a society yet.

• 30:12Alie Ward?

  And now, in the year 2026, it's impossible to think about the media attention and the money made exploring wealthy suburban white family trauma and criminal justice. Meanwhile, the Violence Policy Center released a 2026 study that found that, quote, "Black Americans accounted for more than half of US homicide victims, despite comprising only 13% of the population, with 85% of those victims being male." So for Black Americans ages 10 to 24, homicide is the leading cause of death. And it's devastating to consider how many

• 30:53Alie Ward?

  tens of thousands of adults and over 20,000 children have died in the genocide in Palestine, with their individual identities and their stories going unrecognized. But when it comes to human consumption of true horrors, there was a 2025 Journal of Cognition and Emotion study titled, "Why Do People Engage With the Suffering of Strangers?" And it surveyed and interviewed hundreds of people about their motives for informing themselves about the suffering of others. And it broke it down into various reasons, from information-seeking to risk prevention, to morbid curiosity, the rarity of the suffering or the incident,

• 31:35Alie Ward?

  and even socialities. So other people are talking about it. Ask, pull aside a boomer this holiday season, ask, where were they on the night of OJ Simpson's live broadcast "High Speed Chase" through LA? They will likely remember watching it, perhaps with some chip and dip. Now, I was reading through the study, and one response, again, it was about why do people engage with the suffering of real-life strangers? One response in particular read, "I engage with the suffering that comes with shootings in the USA, because it is something I'm not used to seeing in my country. In a way, the shootings make me feel safe, because I know that all of this is happening far, far away." Wait, is this fucking play about us?

• 32:19Alie Ward?

  But that was just a detour into the appeal of true crime and horrors. But let's get back to horror and fiction.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  There is actually some other literature to kind of cycle back about sensation-seeking as being a driver for maybe why people enjoy fearful things. You know, I gladly would admit, I used to be a weird kid, a little bit weird of an adult. But I used to do things like spin around until I got really dizzy, just to feel some different sensations. And I used to enjoy, you know, just temporarily cutting off circulation in my hand to feel how weird it is when it tingles. And I think that that sensation-seeking is one of those factors that contributes to people liking horror films. There's some evidence with

• 33:10Speaker 01

  a specific gene, the MAOA gene. It codes for a protein that's responsible for processing dopamine. And dopamine has a lot of functions. In addition to reward and movement, it also might have something to do with the sensation-seeking. Changes to dopamine signaling have been implicated in a variety of things. The big one, substance use disorder, but also just thrill-seeking in general. And so I've always wondered if the thrill-seeking or sensation-seeking threshold is lower for some people, that it encourages them to maybe seek out new behaviors.

• 33:50Alie Ward?

  And yes, we can back this up with the 2020 Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences paper, "Horror, Personality, and Threat Simulation: A Survey on the Psychology of Scary Media." And that reveals that people high in sensation-seeking and intellect and imagination expect not just the negative, but also the positive emotions from consuming horror content. And they sort of brave this initial aversive response to these simulated threats, and they get a positive feedback loop through being able to cope with the fake danger. Like, why are you gonna hurl yourself off a building in a winksuit when you can just

• 34:30Alie Ward?

  watch an undead farmer scoop out a skull? Should your watch list, though, put you on a watch list? You know what? If so, you gotta hit the feds with the 2024 study titled, "Bleeding Heart Horror Fans." This is in the Journal of Media Psychology. This one does, in fact, warm our bloody hearts, as it demonstrated across three separate trials, that the enjoyment of fictional horror movies was correlated with higher cognitive empathy and generosity, and lower cold-heartedness, despite how many horror movies a participant had seen, they said. And hey, there was a 2018 paper in the Journal of Social and Psychological Sciences titled, "Personality Types and the Enjoyment of Horror Movies." And it noted that high

• 35:15Alie Ward?

  sensation-seeking is found to be a better predictor of horror movie preference, but so is low neuroticism. But you might grow out of it. There was a 2021 Finnish study I mentioned earlier, and it notes that emotional experiences become progressively weaker after early adulthood. And it's well-known that emotion regulation ability increases during aging. And consequently, particularly younger audiences are easier to scare with movies. So, you know, listen, as your hair becomes more robust, and your neck hurts from just, like, sleeping, a creep popping out of a tomb is no match for, like, an adjustable-rate

• 35:58Alie Ward?

  mortgage. A lady in a nightgown, splattered with food coloring, this, it's like an amygdala nap.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  There's an element of validation, almost, in horror. So, for example, the history of feminist horror is really profound, and there's a lot of interesting stuff that has been done to sort of study these films and media at an academic scale.

• 36:25Alie Ward?

  What is feminist horror, really quick? Because I did not know that that was a genre.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah. So the feminist horror idea, it's kind of gone back, but, you know, before, women had a very strong voice in media. So people like Ira Levin, who was a dude, but in the 60s, he wrote Rosemary's Baby, which is still one of those classics. I'm waiting for a remake for that one, so I got my fingers crossed on that.

• 36:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I'm surprised they haven't.

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Paramount Pictures presents Mia Farrow in a William Castle production, Rosemary's Baby, from the bestselling novel by Ira Levin, suggested for mature audiences.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, right? So considering how long ago the film was, it's been quite some time. They're due for a remake. Meanwhile, you have, like, six remakes of Carrie, which I'm thrilled about the new one. But still, yeah, it's interesting as a subgenre, because it sort of validates all of those fears that are out there, right? You should be afraid. In Rosemary's Baby, one of the big things about it is gaslighting. So in addition to, yes, there's a woman who gives birth to a demon, right? That's kind of the secondary kind of thing. The whole time, everyone is saying to this woman, like, everything's fine. Don't worry about it. Just keep taking this weird-tasting medicine. Never mind what that does.

• 37:53Speaker 05

  You know you're not supposed to be up and around. Is the moza? Rosemary. Shut up. Rosemary. Shut up, you're in Dubrovnik.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Her supposed doctor is saying this is normal. Don't read anything. It'll stress you out. Don't go to consult any other medical professionals. You know, it's sort of validating the issues and the fears that people have in their real life.

• 38:16Alie Ward?

  And of course, in terms of real life, Rosemary's baby director Roman Polanski has been a fugitive from the US since 1978 on charges of drugging and sexually assaulting several children. Oh, and the star of that, Mia Farrow, she was married to Woody Allen. So in terms of being manipulated by men who seem to have it all, and then they turn out to be Satan. Well, I guess there are your issues and fears that people have in their real life. And yet, a lot of feminist horror does theme around revenge, such as a viscerally satisfying 2017 Cora Lee Farajat directorial debut Revenge, which I enjoyed very much.

• 38:56Alie Ward?

  Now, it's been also like 15 years since the screenwriter Diablo Cody and director Karen Kusama teamed up for Jennifer's Body, which has become very much a cult horror classic. And Cody explained that she took this foray into fangs and blood, saying that we wanted to subvert the classic horror model of women being terrorized. She said, I want to write roles that service women. I want to tell stories from a female perspective. I want to create good parts for actresses where they're not just accessories to men. Or in the case of most slasher films, there's this trope of a final girl who survives to tell the story of how some big dude with some kind of power tool

• 39:39Alie Ward?

  killed all of her friends and her boyfriend in front of her. But I guess now she's just gonna go off and ride into the sunset and like do like a TED Talk about it?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  You know, the horror themes that get brought up are oftentimes, you know, reflection of society's fears and anxieties, right? So in the 60s, all the sci-fi stuff was all about Cold War-related issues. And as feminist voices become more prominent and more in the forefront, you're starting to see new takes to the scene. So The Substance was a fairly recent one.

• 40:19Alie Ward?

  Oh, right.

• 40:20Speaker 01

  Where it's basically about the kind of restrictions or demands that are put on body image.

• 40:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And so it's a woman who is getting older, a former, basically, face of a company who has the ability to take this medicine, potion or whatever, and turn her into a younger version of a younger, you know, more attractive person who is now going to be pushed as the face of this company.

• 40:48Speaker 06

  Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?

• 40:54Speaker 06

  Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?

• 41:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, and The Substance, same director as Revenge. That is this surreal and, I'm sorry, hilarious body horror. And it's about sort of the weight of toxic beauty standards that are just crushing the body and soul of its protagonists. And also, literally just this week, the internet is so chafed because they don't like the way Megan Fox looks, like 20 years after Transformers. I'm gonna guess mostly men are saying that they just wish she'd aged gracefully, which is absolute horseshit, because if she did, then they would all be piling on about how she looks old. So yeah, message received.

• 41:43Alie Ward?

  But is it enough to change the algorithms of the stuff people can buy and inject to be perfect? Of course it's not. So, you know, whether women are depicted as victims of overpriced serums or hounded by men whose hands are literal knives, women as victors in the horror genre, they have become more visible. I mean, after all, we're probably more comfortable at the sight of blood, if nothing else. Oh, and on that topic, actually, Dr. Sheila Blumberg came on to chat about surgical angiology, veins and arteries. And I asked her, I'm including a clip because it's one of my faves.

• 42:24Alie Ward?

  I asked her about one director in particular who gets her field right. What about when you're watching movies and you see a pool of blood? Are you ever like, that's not oxygenated. That is too much for what they hit.

• 42:40Speaker 07

  My commentary about movie blood is none of it looks really good.

• 42:44Alie Ward?

  Why is that?

• 42:45Speaker 07

  I don't know what they use. And I heard they some of them use paste of some sort. I can't think of which movie had really good, maybe like Kill Bill. Like Quentin Tarantino has good blood, but the rest of them, it's, and that's, I always like, look at the characteristics of it. And so I'm like, ah, that's so fake. Like, so you don't, I don't particularly get gory about those kinds of things because it doesn't look realistic.

• 43:08Alie Ward?

  Is it the viscosity or the color?

• 43:10Speaker 07

  Both.

• 43:11Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 43:11Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the only thing that looks accurate most of the time is old dried blood. Like if it's an old crime scene, that looks more realistic because it's congealed at that point, right? So I think the fresh blood of when they cut people and they're sort of like spurting, I'm like, really? No, I don't.

• 43:30Alie Ward?

  She's not wrong. I researched this for way too long. And according to a 2022 slash film article titled Quentin Tarantino Only One of the Best Blood for Kill Bill Special Effects, it says it's really difficult to recreate blood digitally. And Tarantino prefers practical, real-life, goopy effects. He also told a Time Magazine reporter that, quote, "I'm really particular about the blood. So we're using a mixture depending on the scenes. I don't want horror movie blood, all right? I want Samurai blood," he says. "You can't pour this raspberry pancake syrup on a sword and have it look good. You have to have this special kind of blood that you only see in Samurai movies," quote. So that's his take on it. And in yet another article, a 2015 Vulture piece, There Will Be Lots of Blood,

• 44:15Alie Ward?

  one of his producers divulged that Tarantino films require a separate blood budget and blood of such a specific range of hues that no other filmmaker is allowed to use it. And this range of bloods, plural, are under the label Tarantino Reds by the special effects house that furnishes his custom supply. He has a custom blood supplier. I hope this is a lesson. People make art, make science, make stuff. We're only here for a little bit. Life is short, make stuff. Oh, and in one of the films that we have so far mentioned in this episode, and I'm not going to be specific due to spoilers, but the filmmakers used 36,000 gallons of fake blood,

• 45:00Alie Ward?

  which they blasted through a fire hose off screen. And I just, I love the innovation.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  That's kind of one of those things that we get to see as horror is evolving, when new voices come forward. And it's sort of pulling in society's kind of understanding and fears about things. And we think a lot of, or at least I think a lot about Get Out. So that was, I think, just less than five years ago, written by Jordan Peele, his first deviation from his normal comedy. He makes this excellent horror science fiction that brings into the limelight the anxieties and fears of Black Americans living in our society. So I think it's really exciting to see new voices or different voices

• 45:47Speaker 01

  bringing in different perspectives into a genre that has been kind of shoehorned in the past with who the target audience is supposed to be.

• 45:55Alie Ward?

  And even going back to one of the most seminal works in American horror, the early 1970s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the establishing statement of the film, I think it was even on the billboards, is that it's a true story. And that is utter nonsense. It, the story's not true at all. But at that time, early 70s, government deception about Nixon's Watergate involvement and also this ongoing Vietnam War and the gruesome images from that conflict and people's experience as veterans inspired the film itself, inspired nightmares for decades. But that statement that it was true was a political statement

• 46:37Alie Ward?

  about how much Americans were being lied to. So just think of all the great horror movies that we're gonna have in the next few decades. Can you walk me through a few other highlights historically of,

• 46:54Alie Ward?

  you know, maybe this was a reflection of the, of the space race? Or this was a reflection of, I sometimes wonder if the zombie movies were a reflection of, I don't know, globalization or LSD experimentation or psyops and stuff? Like, can you walk me through, maybe now that we have a historical perspective, maybe what's somewhere a reflection of?

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. So there's this really, really fun study that was done. So this wasn't scientific. This was a dude with a lot of time on their hands, who put together the correlation between how many, what percentage of films per year either focused on zombies or vampires?

• 47:39Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Right, so two sort of classical tropes in Western horror. But he found a correlation between zombie films and Republican presidents winning.

• 47:51Speaker 01

  And vampire films and Democrat presidents winning. I think the interesting thing about this correlation, so a lot of caveats to it. First of all, there's the lag between when the movies start being made and when they actually come out. So that's kind of a confound there that I don't know if it was accounted for or not. But the observation, the idea is that the fears of zombies appeal to certain voter ideologies. Something like you have large numbers of maybe driven by consumerism. That was a big thing that George Romero did when he made his second zombie film.

• 48:33Alie Ward?

  And he's talking about the classic Night of the Living Dead, which is about some people hanging out in Pennsylvania until a bunch of like bluish faced undead ghoulish corpses come and just ruin the party. And Dawn of the Dead, also by Romero, came out a full decade later. He wanted to wait, he wanted to give it a little breathing room in between. And instead of Pennsylvania country, they're in a place with a food court.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  It took place in a mall and it's almost mandatory now. If you have a zombie media, you need to be in a mall at some point.

• 49:06Alie Ward?

  No, you do. The mall ones are the best. There's so many resources, pretzels, store rooms.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's really fun. It's a cool setting for one. You have all those neat things you get to play with in a film and part of it might be paying homage to that work. But the links that was made with the voter ideology here was that we're afraid of large numbers of just sort of mindless consumers.

• 49:35Alie Ward?

  Hmm.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  The other way that it could be interpreted might be large numbers of unnamed people, which might be a fear that's put on top of immigrants.

• 49:46Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  So that might be another sort of thing that could be explored in the future. I think it'd be really fun to do a rigorous academic study on this. Whereas the vampires, on the other hand, the classic vampires are sort of leeches, right? They're bloodsuckers. They sit at the top of a hierarchy, right? They've had so much time on earth to gather their wealth and to collect wealth. And so they sort of represent what happens when resources are being taken from people.

• 50:18Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  And then allocated in one area. And that could reflect the fears that people have, which might influence them to vote one way or another.

• 50:27Alie Ward?

  And as one blogger goes by Mr. Science Show, put it in 2009, it's that the movies depict what we fear at the time. And he says that Democrats who believe in redistributing wealth fear the Wall Street vampires who bleed the nation dry. And vampires, such as Dracula, represent the aristocracy. And Republicans fear a revolt of the poor and the disenfranchised, and they fear zombies. Also, it's been said it's the other way, that Republicans represent these hordes of conformity

• 51:08Alie Ward?

  and that the vampires are the Democrats who want to suck, I guess, the government funds dry. I don't, I don't know. Honestly, the statistics on it, it's a little iffy. And also films can be in development for like literally decades. But also zompiers, vampires, whatever you want to call them, neither one is dead. They're both just, you know, hungry. Maybe zombies want to do some mindless snacking, the other one craving a hot blood smoothie. But I asked teratologist Dr. W. Scott Poole, who wrote the books Monsters in America and Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of the American Empire, to just get down to brass tacks and silver bullets with me.

• 51:53Alie Ward?

  What exactly is defined as a monster? What's a monster? What's a demon? What's a zombie? What's a cryptid? When it comes to the teratological, how do you define that as an expert in this?

• 52:06Speaker 02

  So here's the thing about me that drives some of my other monsterologists crazy.

• 52:13Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I don't define the monster. Now, let me back up.

• 52:21Alie Ward?

  I was gonna say, well, I guess this interview's over. It's been great talking to you.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, no, don't cut, yeah, don't cut me off yet. I'm pretty sure I got something here. So hang in here with me. I think that the monster by its very nature is definition defying. One of the things that when I first became interested, really, especially in kind of the academic study of monsters, like thinking about them as a scholarly topic, is just the fact that it's kind of this category that completely ignores categories. And so, for example, you mentioned vampires. Okay, vampires, we count those as monsters.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  We also count Godzilla as a monster. We also throw serial killers in there in kind of our spectrum of the monstrous. And so what do any of these different kinds of expressions of horror, chaos, what do they have really in, in common? And as I looked at it through time and as I looked at it as a historian, like what's going on when people are afraid of these particular things? And so what I decided is that it's really sort of the context itself, the political, the historical, the cultural context that defines the monster.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  One example of this would be that in the 19th century, for about 60 years, Americans, most Americans, certainly middle-class Americans, were obsessed with the idea of the sea serpent.

• 54:10Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  And, and when I say they were obsessed, I mean, they loved reading accounts of sightings. There were lots and lots of Americans that were absolutely sure that they had seen one. There was an incident in the 1830s in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in which about 130 people claimed that a sea serpent showed up in Gloucester Harbor and they all saw it. There was even sheet music that you could play on the piano at home. It was called the Sea Serpent Polka. It's really, and no, I can't play that for you, Ally. If I could, I definitely would.

• 54:53Alie Ward?

  That was a clip from the 1850s banger Sea Serpent Polka, which was composed by Eastern European-born pianist Maurice Strakos and covered by Jamie Winters via SoundCloud 170 years later. So according to the 1887 New York Times obituary of Maurice Strakos, he was a musical prodigy and began making really good money performing concerts at the age of 11. But his parents disapproved, so he got out of Dodge, like later losers. He high-tailed it to Vienna at the age of 12, like a little tiny Justin Bieber, who got emancipated and wrote a polka about a sea serpent.

• 55:35Alie Ward?

  I was shocked to find that his obit and Wikipedia page both neglect to mention this composition. So maybe it was a blip in his otherwise very noteworthy life. But also, I mean, come on, name a better song about a sea serpent. Name any song about a sea serpent.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Hopefully you know that where I'm going with this is who's scared of sea serpents today? Nobody that I know. We're not watching films about them, we're not reading books about them, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But in the 19th century, the sea serpent was it. The sea serpent was there, vampire was there, zombie film was all those things. And when I really looked into it, one of the things that I discovered is that there's so much talk and so much interest in the possibility of these kinds of creatures because it's at a time when the nature of scientific evidence, there's a lot of discussion of the nature of scientific evidence and what counts as scientific evidence.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  And the sea serpent became kind of a perfect forum to discuss those kinds of things. It became a forum to discuss Darwinism. It became a forum for scientists themselves to talk about what it meant to do professional science. So sea serpents don't have a lot to do with vampires, but they're both monsters. And so I think it's in many respects, the historical context that creates our monsters.

• 57:07Alie Ward?

  And did they ever figure out what that sea serpent was? Was it like an oarfish? Was it just a, one of those big wiggly ones?

• 57:14Speaker 02

  So I'm pretty sure that they were seeing a whale. The oarfish has been suggested as for the, actually kind of hundreds of worldwide sea serpent sightings. And there was actually a New England whaling ship, I believe this was in the 1840s, that they claimed that they had, close to the Antarctic Circle, they had managed to get their hands on the corpse of a sea serpent and they were gonna bring it back to New York City. And like runners had come like in advance, kind of say, announcing that this was happening. So there were stories in the New York Times.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  And then they got back home and they were like, sorry, we misplaced.

• 58:02Alie Ward?

  How do you misplace a sea serpent?

• 58:07Speaker 02

  We, well, you know, you just lose stuff, right?

• 58:12Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, but I think that shows you like kind of the level of fascination that, you know, it's been lost to us.

• 58:21Alie Ward?

  And I don't know, I miss the fear of sea creatures. I wish that were what we were worried about. I mean, at least we knew we could avoid them by just like not wailing. But some zombies, I hate to tell you, they are real. If you ask Matt Simon, a science writer who authored the book Plight of the Living Dead, What Real Life Zombies Reveal About Our World and Ourselves. And this book is so good. Matt's a hilarious writer. It features all kinds of Darwinian gore, from parasitic wasps doing brain surgery and keeping you alive while their babies eat your guts, to tales of crickets who yearn to drown themselves in the moonlight so that a nematode as big as them can crawl out of

• 59:06Alie Ward?

  their butt. Are these zombies? Let us ask neuroparasitology guest Matt Simon. First off, how do scientists feel about the term zombie? When you approach them about this book, which has the best title ever, Plight of the Living Dead, were they like, enough with the zombie stuff? Or are they like, whatever gets people to care about our research?

• 59:27Speaker 05

  It depends on the crankiness of the scientist, right? Like anything. Informally, it is totally fine to call these things zombies. Zombie is a difficult term to define in popular culture because there's so many different kinds of zombies now. They'll say it is behavioral manipulation on part of the parasite influencing its host, which is a, it's a mouthful. Let's just, let's just call them zombies. But is it a brain eating human that rose from the dead? No, but it is zombie-esque.

• 59:57Alie Ward?

  Just a wee background on this from the 2018 paper, The Undead in Culture and Science. So the English word zombie emerged over 200 years ago, but it comes from the older Haitian French zombie, most likely originating in West Africa. But zombie persons are part of Haitian folklore. They're usually someone who's had a short illness and then dies, is entombed, and then is brought back to life via witchcraft to serve the person who resurrected them. Kind of like a finder's fee, I guess. And as you can imagine, from dying and reanimating as a corpse, usually zombies are pretty wiped out. They have a loss of coordination or ataxia. They're not very chatty.

• 1:00:37Alie Ward?

  And while a lot of horror movies took their cue from Haitian folklore, a BBC episode of Planet Earth inspired the video game and subsequent hit TV series, The Last of Us, starring my future best friend, Peter Pascal. And this game and series kind of launched the spores of zombie animals into all of our brains. And this theme of invasion or takeover has been just lurking in the shadows of so many scary movies, going back even to Bram Stoker's Dracula figure, which was an encapsulation of the author's own paranoia of Britain being overrun with refugees from the colonies it colonized. Let's get back to Dr. Lim.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  But then you also get the confound that the original classic vampire was an immigrant.

• 1:01:23Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 1:01:24Speaker 01

  He was an immigrant into England. So I'm talking about Bram Stoker's Dracula, where they have a Romanian man. And there's so many little bits throughout Dracula where it's talking about how unusual things are in a foreign place. You have an English lawyer who goes to live, well, he is taken prisoner under Dracula's castle in Romania. And so you're looking at, oh, how strange things are in this, in this place where things are a little bit different and the trains aren't on time, God forbid.

• 1:01:57Alie Ward?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  So it's really interesting to see how that kind of lines up. It'd be really a fun study to do.

• 1:02:02Alie Ward?

  And yes, in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, you've got Dracula buying a Piccadilly Pietre Terre in London and then taking a boat to this seaside English town after killing the entire crew. And then a bunch of characters kind of bounce around to Budapest, to Romania. They're just kind of chasing, eating, cursing each other. The story is told via various like letters between the main characters and ship logs. And there's like plenty of hot horny nocturnal nightlife, albeit undead life. So I, I think in a modern day version, there could be like a travel vlogger element.

• 1:02:45Alie Ward?

  But Jeff Holdeman is a professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University at Bloomington and is a professional vampirologist. He has packed lecture halls, waiting lists for his classes on the culture of vampire lore. His syllabus that he updates is over 60 pages of references to every movie, every book, and it's updated all the time with his very charming alacrity. He's one of our most beloved guests. So of course we had to deliver just a little bit of his two-part episode. So let's hear a little bit more about Bram Stoker's Dracula and how this immortal fictional icon was born.

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  Bram Stoker worked for Sir Henry Irving in his theater company.

• 1:03:34Alie Ward?

  Sir Henry Irving was a stage actor. Side note. Sounds like kind of a dick.

• 1:03:39Speaker 01

  And Stoker's writing on the side as well. He's got multiple novels published. I have not read any of them other than Dracula. And I've read Dracula a whole bunch of times too, because it's compelling literature. But it is very theatrical. It's, it's very pre cinematic. And the first thing that Stoker does, being in the theater, he writes this novel and then he has a reading of the entire novel on a stage, which then establishes copyright for the stage.

• 1:04:12Alie Ward?

  Ah, smart.

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  And then later, somebody comes along and Sir Henry Irving is like, this is garbage. And somebody says, actually, this would make pretty good theater. And, you know, other than like, I mean, how do you do a ghost on stage? Or how do you make somebody turn into a werewolf on stage? But a vampire on stage isn't too terribly hard to do.

• 1:04:35Alie Ward?

  Ah.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  So we get our first theatrical treatments of Dracula as a stage play. And actually, Bela Lugosi is, is on the, on the stage and the theater performances of this. So he gets part of his start there in the theater.

• 1:04:51Alie Ward?

  And 25 years later, vampires just jazz handed their way onto the silver screen.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  In 1922, the movie Nosferatu comes out by Murnau, German movie.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  German Expressionism, everybody who's ever taken a film class has or should have watched Nosferatu. This cliff girl, I'll eat her later. And that was after World War I. Germany starts this mess and then loses the war and then has its military taken away from it and then also has to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. And Murnau feels this connection between, you know, having the life force drained out of Germany by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, just like a vampire.

• 1:05:49Alie Ward?

  Just throwing a huge ass pity party for itself after World War I. Germany, come on, don't do this again.

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  So you get this novel that comes out in 1897, but they're in Germany, in post-war Germany, and they don't have money to pay the copyright. And so they make changes and turn Count Dracula into Count Orlak and they conflate some characters and change the time and change the place and change the setting. Hopefully this will be enough to not violate copyright. Bram Stoker has died by then, but his wife is still alive and she is not a wealthy woman. And so she sues to have the movie destroyed. And the courts say, you know, yes, this is copyright violation and all of the copies were destroyed of the movie.

• 1:06:38Alie Ward?

  Oh my gosh, I didn't know that. Wait, what? How? I've seen this film with the tall, gaunt, ashen ghoul with no hair, but really long nails and those sharpened beaver teeth. How did I see it?

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  Except for a couple that were in some film archives. It's like, you can imagine how celluloid burns and so they're like, burn the vampire and destroy all these, destroy all these copies of the movie. But vampires always have a way of coming back. So just like, just like our folkloric vampire, which could have, you know, died and disappeared, it shape shifts into a, into a literary device, into a metaphor and gets picked up into literature and then gets picked up into cinema.

• 1:07:26Alie Ward?

  Oh, it gets picked up all right, partly because of a copyright error that Stoker was like, oh, man, paperwork. And it's allowed the character just to live on and on and on and on through time. So many iterations.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  And so they, they make Dracula in 1931. And there you've got Bel Legosi in this tuxedo. And he's got his accent because it's, we have sound by now. And he really plays this East European count.

• 1:07:58Speaker 05

  My blood now flows through her veins.

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  But, and think about this, this 1931, we had a lot of nobility who came to the United States fleeing, especially after the, the Russian Revolution.

• 1:08:11Alie Ward?

  Just a quick side note for all of us who don't have the dates for the Russian Revolution just etched in our memories. We're talking 1917 to 1923. That's more than a century after the French Revolution, which we touched on in the field trip minisode, I Go France, a few weeks ago. There's just so many revolutions. There's so little time. But actually, since Jeff's first two episodes aired, we have made a revolutions episode. Literally, the field is called revolutionology with world expert historian, Dr. Jack Goldstone. We've also made an episode on the collapse of societies with author and scholar, Dr. Joseph Tainter. But anyway, after the Russian Revolution.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  We have these East Europeans that are both working, you know, in factories and building skyscrapers and things like that, but also these educated people, wealthy people who are from the dark east and they're still scary and they still practice religions that, that we don't know. And we, we put a lot of our fears into these, you know, possibly powerful people who are wealthy and educated and come from this area of the world and practice those, those religions.

• 1:09:20Alie Ward?

  And vampires are a stand-in for the classes that appear privileged.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  The nobility has a castle and everything. So already in the 19th century, when we're trying to demonize the nobility, right? What better way of trying to tear them down than to call them vampires? People who, who take more than their fair share, who suck us dry of our, of our life force.

• 1:09:43Alie Ward?

  Newsflash, John, the super rich, they're not like us.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  Count Dracula is hypnotizing and he's wealthy. He's got, he's got piles of money with dust on him in his castle. And he, you know, can control the weather and he can control people's actions and he can control wolves and everything else. That arms escalation starts already by then with beauty and with abilities and with wealth. When you're undead, when you're undying, you remember the old times, which then means that you're this automatic historian. So you're smart and you remember things and you've seen people's actions over a very long period of time. Nosferatu, dead end because nobody wants to be with Nosferatu. Bel Legosi is like, eh, he's kind of older.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  It's like, but he's got a tuxedo on and he's like, he's debonair and he's got this way of speaking and he's kind of, you know, mysterious. And then he's got these eyes that are enchanting and he can control people. And I tell my students that we're, one of the mysteries we have to solve is how do you go from a reanimated corpse to a vilth? This is a vampire I'd like to fornicate with.

• 1:10:54Alie Ward?

  A vilth. Bless this man. Protect him.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  So why in the world would you want to be with this gross reanimated corpse? Well, you clean them up and you give them lots of money and you make them really smart.

• 1:11:08Alie Ward?

  Okay, well, then why can't a vampire just drop by the potluck unannounced? So many people want to know, when did they have to get invited in? Was that something that's super historical? Or did that emerge in like 1985?

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  This is from folklore. So many of these things, again, the literary vampire didn't just immediately be born out of nothing. This is just importing all of these traits from the folkloric vampire selectively at first. And then when the well runs dry, we dig somewhere else. People will go back to these old sources. And so there, there's always this pulling from, from folklore. And in Central and Eastern Europe, you didn't let people who you don't know into your house. So I am an ethnographer and I go out into the villages in, in Poland and Lithuania every summer. And a stranger walking into a village, even today, people are suspicious. You can see people watching out of their windows.

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  It doesn't help that I go and work in cemeteries too. But they'll often, you know, see me, the, the road only leads to the cemetery. And then, you know, like somebody shows up 30 minutes later just to, you know, water the flowers. What a coincidence. And then they're like, so what are you doing here? And then we talk and I explain what I'm doing. And then they're welcoming. Once I'm a known quantity, I'm welcomed in. But you wouldn't welcome in somebody who you didn't know, especially in this pre-modern time when there are diseases. So you don't know if somebody's a murderer. You don't know if someone's a thief and you don't know if someone's a plague bearer. And so it's safer to keep them, either keep them completely out of your village, or if they come up, to keep them on the other side of the fence and talk at a distance. And I have a lot of people who will do that.

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  And then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll let me in. And then we'll be in their yard for a while. And then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll invite, you know, oh, you must be thirsty. How about if you come into the, into the house? And then according to Central and East European tradition, you have to feed a person and, and give them something to drink. And so, you know, I go from the person who's looking at me with suspicion to the person who's like feeding me and giving me drink and saying, next time you're in the village, you can come and stay in my spare room. That, that tradition though, of not inviting strangers in is very old and it's very logical.

• 1:13:29Alie Ward?

  Just a side note, I just found out, Dr. Holdman will actually be performing live in Indianapolis on October 17th, 2026, at the Crossroads Comedy Theater's Meet a Lecturer series. And he will be delivering part of a talk called, Fangs for the Memories: Life Lessons from a Vampire Class. So I imagine it will sell out. So you can check that out. That's a Crossroad Comedy Theater to see if there's any tickets left. I don't know, I haven't even checked. If you're in Indianapolis, you better tell him hi. Okay, some things, by the way, they might feel illogical, but to our bodies, they make sense. Or, or everything can seem weird. Like if you took an edible and entered a line dancing competition.

• 1:14:14Alie Ward?

  Dr. Lim explains.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  It kind of ties with one of these really interesting theories out there about an evolutionary mismatch between the way our bodies were for the majority of our existence up until more recent times. And we don't think about, basically, the idea behind this evolutionary mismatch is that we're living in a world that our bodies haven't been fine tuned for.

• 1:14:40Alie Ward?

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 1:14:41Speaker 01

  We're meant to occasionally experience fear, right? And we think about, I don't imagine, I don't really know what life was like for these proto-humans, but I could imagine it was scary, right? There was always a risk of something just coming along and you look at the, you know, you look at the big cat in their eyes and then they maul you to death. And that was a fear moment that you had always been living with. And you're expecting to have those sudden spikes in your battler skedaddle. You expect your body is meant to supposedly, in this theory, experience these things frequently. But then, since the relative safety of governments, you know, we don't think about it, we don't get those spikes anymore.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  So maybe one reason people might be drawn to these experiences is they like hearing and they like feeling that emotion.

• 1:15:35Alie Ward?

  We're talking about like fiction and horror, but at the same time, in, in a lot of countries, we have absolutely unrestricted access or somewhat unrestricted access, access to photos and video and news about atrocities that are happening, about famines that other people are experiencing, about aid being cut off. We're seeing a lot of actual gore and horror coming out of some parts of the world. In a natural setting, we would have 100 or 200 people around us and we wouldn't know about so many real life horrors.

• 1:16:17Alie Ward?

  Do you think that that, that plays with our brain differently?

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, so a couple of things about that that just sort of surfaced in my head was there has been some reasonably strong evidence that reading or engaging with fiction of any sorts, whether it's movies or books, helps us develop our sense of empathy.

• 1:16:40Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 1:16:41Speaker 01

  And so potentially, in the context of horror, we are empathizing with the characters on screen, their plight, and just being a part of their stories, fictional in this example, can help us increase our perspective-taking, kind of increase what we consider to be an in-group.

• 1:17:04Alie Ward?

  So, yes, film history is sort of just like a courtroom sketch of our own world history. And Dr. Catherine Zimmer's essay caught on tape, "The Politics of Video in the New Torture Film," reveals that these days, films in the action, suspense, and horror genres now highlight the overarching themes of a surveillance culture. And it kind of coincides with this horror subgenre called torture porn. And she says that as common as this surveillance film, and sometimes overlapping, are the sadomasochism horrors

• 1:17:45Alie Ward?

  like Hostel and the Saw franchises. And again, in that Tarotology episode with Dr. W. Scott Poole, we talked about how gore reached a peak in a certain era and then shifted with the times. So, let's hear that.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  There is, I think, a tie between what we think of as gore and horror that is very particular to, really, the last 100 years of global history. My sense of it is that what we think of as the horror film is actually born in the aftermath of the Great War, of World War I. This is when you see the first usage of the term horror film. Supernatural films that had come before that were of a different type, tended not

• 1:18:40Speaker 02

  to make use or make reference to gore, to the reanimated dead, to the literal supernatural. And so I think that what we think of as horror is a very 20th, 21st century experience. One of the things that happened with the world wars and post-colonial conflicts that have followed is that essentially, there's sort of the progress of combat medicine at the very same time that there's all these new terrible ways of killing and mutilating the human body. World War I is the early example of that.

• 1:19:23Alie Ward?

  World War I, side note, lasted from 1914 to 1918, and it marked the real shift from wars fought on the backs of horses to the birth of the modern military-industrial complex via innovations of weapons of mass destruction, like the tank and chemical weapons, improved submarines and machine guns, and the MK2 pineapple-looking hand grenade. Weapons manufacturers are like, what a great war. But yeah, the global rise of tearing up each other's bodies for money and land and resources and religions was the putrid shit that fertilized the growth of monster and horror genres as we know them now.

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  This continued all the way down to the present. So I think that like, it's actually not an accident that in the United States, it's in post-Vietnam America, a country that had become used to seeing the reality of gore, the reality of the mutilated human body, that you have the explosion of interest in the slasher film, films dealing with war and horror. And in fact, there's a very direct connection there. One of the great, many

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  would argue, the great makeup artist, sort of the star of Fangoria magazine, was Tom Savini, who worked on films like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the first Friday the 13th film, a number of the classics of the horror genre. He was a combat veteran of Vietnam.

• 1:21:05Alie Ward?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  And has spoken about this. Actually, he was very specifically a combat photographer. And one of the ways that he dealt with that experience is while it was happening, he essentially imagined it as special effects.

• 1:21:24Alie Ward?

  Wow.

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  He just sort of called it special effects in order to endure, you know, seeing what was happening to his friends and to his comrades. And, you know, then in certain respects, this was therapeutic for him in later years. But one of the real geniuses, you know, of gore effects in the modern horror film, he brought that with him from Vietnam. I mean, that was quite literally sort of the war coming home.

• 1:21:51Alie Ward?

  Oh, wow. I found a 1984 clip of Tom Savini doing a show and tell of his ghoulish effects for one David Letterman. And I gotta say, Tom saunters out with this jaunty Saturday Night Fever swagger. He's got tight jeans, a mustache, he's chewing gum, and just has this cool confidence of your older brother's friend letting you check out his Trans Am. This man could get it. Even Letterman was clearly enamored.

• 1:22:19Speaker 05

  Or what is it? Special makeup effects, it's called. I see. And what does that, when we go to a film, what of your work do we see? Oh, well, anytime somebody's head is blown off, or a cut throat, or a little creature runs around, that's me. Now, having a head, having a head blown off, it comes under makeup? Special makeup effects, sure. Oh, okay. Well, let's take a look at some of the stuff.

• 1:22:38Alie Ward?

  I wonder if that was just a way to deal, obviously, with the trauma, compartmentalize it.

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  I think so. And I think that, you know, it's mostly anecdotal evidence. I also just have a sense that that's why that generation also is particularly interested in those films. And the 70s and 80s are, you know, films today don't have the same amount of gore and blood and et cetera as you would find in the era of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the first Halloween, and the Friday the 13th films, and the Nightmare on Elm Street films.

• 1:23:14Alie Ward?

  And by the way, I just want you to know, I was up researching this horror episode like past 2:00 AM, almost 3:00 AM. I don't recommend that. The Dishwasher freaked me out. The willful suspension of disbelief, I feel like, is such a big part of horror, knowing it's not real, but it's okay to be scared by it because consequences are pretty much nil versus what is, what's real and what's an actual horror. And I remember I went to Haunted Hay Ride years ago, and I tend to get pretty freaked out at those things anyway. But this guy, we have pretty good actors in LA, right? There's a lot of, a

• 1:23:55Alie Ward?

  lot of actors out here that seasonal work at a haunted corn maze is like, pretty good. And this, this guy ran up to me to scare me in the face, but he had like really fresh breath, like he probably had just had a Mentos or something. He was like terrifying looking, but I was like, oh, this guy's fine. I never thought that like the olfactory would be a part of it. But if he had smelled like, you know, like a rotting possum, I probably would have felt something different. Hell, yeah. We did an episode on literary olfactology, or the politics of smell as

• 1:24:34Alie Ward?

  depicted in fiction, with the very internet-famous Dr. Ali Luchs. And as it turns out, smell-a-vision would go so hard. But she explained to me, books do a pretty good job of telling us who a person is, or who a person is perceived as by how they smell. And what about some other smells in novels and in poetry? The way that people are portrayed, do you find that that goes through their bodily smells, or their food smells, or their perfumes? Like, what types of notes, what do those notes draw on a lot?

• 1:25:12Speaker 04

  Gosh, big question. The nice thing about literature is that very often, it kind of replicates, but also intensifies life. So, all of those things can be found in literature. You know, comments on people's bodily smells, comments on people's food, especially when that food is kind of new to someone. The whole point of smell, really, is for us to notice new things in our environment. So, my former supervisor, Steve Connor, says that smell is the sense of discrimination. It helps us distinguish the ripe from the rotten and the good from the bad. And that's its kind of function for us. So, very often,

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  in real life, as in literature, smell kind of acts as a way of sometimes othering people, but also kind of registering discomfort with the otherness of people and their weird ways and behaviors and foods.

• 1:26:15Alie Ward?

  I understand that we can't really identify smells unless we have something in our memory to compare them to, or kind of a simile, like...

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  So, smell has this very unique relationship to parts of the brain that really evoke, you know, memory and emotion. And association as well, the hippocampus. And one of the things about smell is that it doesn't go through the same kind of processing as other sensory perceptions. So when we smell something, it evokes very visceral, immediate responses.

• 1:26:54Alie Ward?

  So yeah, I guess be thankful that zombie movies leave that up to the imagination, since after all, our imagination does heighten the agony. Now, when it comes to horror, you need that blur between you and reality. And in researching Nosferatu for that vampirology episode, I had heard that while Nosferatu is immortal, the recent restorations of the old prints are just stunning and powerful. They're much more crisp, much more detailed. And I saw some of it, and I gotta say, having been raised on like the grainy, ghostly version we saw in film school, something is lost when detail is added.

• 1:27:38Alie Ward?

  Like seeing the edges of his bald cap ruins the vibe. So sometimes the devil is in the details, and less is more.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  When you're talking about the suspension of disbelief, it's, it's one of those things that, I mean, it's one of the reasons why movie theaters are such an ideal spot for seeing scary things, right? You're much more immersed as opposed to if you're on your couch.

• 1:28:05Alie Ward?

  Yeah, with the hall light is on and, you know, your partner's scrolling Instagram next to you or something, but in a movie theater, yeah, you're just locked in.

• 1:28:16Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. It's cool to think about that as a, as a way to almost disconnect. One of the questions that was brought up to me was, some, one of my students wasn't really big into horror, but I think they recognized that it's a genre that has a lot of potential to tell really cool and unique stories from a new perspective. And she was kind of wondering how to get over the hump of the fear and anxiety that goes along with a lot of horror films. I always think about this whenever I need a break from something. It's like, these are a bunch of actors who are surrounded by microphones and cameras.

• 1:28:58Speaker 01

  There's a boom mic, there's a guy behind a camera somewhere yelling instructions. It's a very easy way to sort of break the cycle, in my opinion. Just think about, oh, what, what are these people actually experiencing? They have the, I think acting is one of the weirdest jobs. It's so funny to think about this. You're famous for pretending and it's, yeah, and they make a ton of money for doing it.

• 1:29:24Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  And it's extremely hard.

• 1:29:27Alie Ward?

  Yeah, super hard. But yeah, you do, you have so much infrastructure around you when you're actually recording that to convincingly seem helpless or deserted or without resources to survive is such a big leap. But I agree with you about seeing things in a dark theater and having that sort of sensory stuff cut off. How do horror enthusiasts and neurobiologists, what do they think about this upcoming kind of surge in horror, you know, obsession and back rooms and, gosh, like Wicker's coming out, Carrie's coming out? Is horror having a moment right now?

• 1:30:09Speaker 01

  Potentially. I know that Get Out won some awards, and this is a genre that is not regarded very highly as far as what kinds of genuine stories you can tell and what kinds of acting you get to show, what kinds of scripts you get to write. And, and recently, Sinners was nominated for a bunch of stuff in Academy Awards.

• 1:30:35Alie Ward?

  So yes, the 2025 Ryan Coogler horror film, Sinners, it grossed over $360 million. It was nominated for a record 16 Academy Awards. And Coogler took home an Oscar for writing. Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor. Although I feel like in playing a dual role as twin brothers, he honestly deserved like a two for one deal on the statues. I hope someone hooked that up. But Get Out, that was the 2017 psychological horror thriller that was written and directed by formerly Keon Peale, Jordan Peale, who was the first Black American to win for Best Screenplay. Get Out was only the sixth film in the horror genre to be nominated for Best Picture.

• 1:31:19Alie Ward?

  Horror films are not going anywhere. A 2026 article on Screen Wire titled Horror Industry Report 2026: Box Office and Streaming Data Reveals That Quote "Horror Is Operating At Historical Highs Across Nearly Every Measurable Dimension." The genre captured an estimated 14% of the domestic box office in 2025. That's the highest market share on record, while outperforming all the other genres on the return on investment.

• 1:31:48Speaker 01

  I'm wondering if the fact that there are some, some kind of a broadening of the scope of the kinds of stories you can tell. I think many people, when they think of horror films, they think about the slasher flicks, right? The Freddy, the Freddies, the Jasons, the child's play kind of stuff where it's just people being killed off one by one, but you get to tell these really neat stories.

• 1:32:11Alie Ward?

  Can I ask you some questions from listeners? We have some really good ones.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:16Alie Ward?

  Okay, amazing. They know you're coming on, so they are like, here we go. Okay, before we go though, let's support something that will soothe our souls. And Dr. Lim chose to cause Homes for Animal Heroes, which is dedicated to rehoming retired research dogs. But I'd like to make an additional donation this week to an org that we've supported before, most recently in June's Patternology episode about fatherhood with Dr. Darby Saxby. And that is Homeboy Industries. They began in 1988 in East LA as a way of improving the lives of former gang members and has today become a blueprint for over 250 organizations around the world, from Alabama to Idaho to Guatemala and Scotland. It's the largest gang rehabilitation and reentry program in the world.

• 1:32:58Alie Ward?

  So for over three decades, they've stood as a beacon of hope in LA and other places to provide training and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated people, allowing them to redirect their lives and heal from the trauma of systemic inequity. So thank you to sponsors of the show for enabling us to make that donation. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed.

• 1:33:40Alie Ward?

  After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. The other day, your podmother, Jarrett, was like, why do we have to eat every day, like three times a day?

• 1:34:23Alie Ward?

  But Hungry Root, they get it, and they get to know your likes and your dislikes, your goals nutritionally, what works with your lifestyle, and then they recommend groceries and recipes just for you. They help you discover new meals, ingredients you may not have chosen for yourself, but could end up being like, this is my new favorite. Hungry Root, they just help you spend less mental energy planning meals, shopping for groceries and cooking, so you can just put that time toward what matters to you. And I teamed up with Hungry Root to create an online cookbook. It's called Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein and Low Dairy Menu. And we have a protein-packed chicken avocado rice bowl, sweet potato and Chipotle salad. They also have some really great veggie options too, like this Moroccan vegetable

• 1:35:08Alie Ward?

  tagine. That's heck of good. You can explore my digital cookbook, Pod Mom and Dad's High Protein Low Dairy Menu, for free at hungryroot.com/ologies. And for a limited time, get 40% off your first order, plus a free item in every box for life with code OLOGIES. Trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking.

• 1:35:52Alie Ward?

  Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details. Here's some things that I love to wear, okay? I like wearing all black because it matches. Also, a sleeveless Mongolian cashmere sweater. Those are some things that I find myself reaching for all the time. And they have a permanent place in my wardrobe, and they are Quince. That's exactly what Quince does so well. They make these elevated essentials. They use premium materials and designs that are just timeless. They're made to be worn again and again. They're those quality pieces that are there to stay in your closet. And as the weather gets a little more crisp, Quince, they've got everything you need to round out that wardrobe.

• 1:36:37Alie Ward?

  They got warm, responsibly sourced down jackets, cozy cashmere scarves. And because they cut out the middlemen, you get very high-quality stuff for a lot less money. So find the fall pieces that you will reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. You can get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And then when Quince asks where you heard about them, just let them know it was Ologies Valley Award, because she loves them. It's the best way to support the show, too.

• 1:37:11Speaker 06

  With the Discover Cash Back Card, it's payback time when you earn cash back on everyday purchases. Activate and earn 5% cash back at different categories each quarter on up to $1,500 in purchases. That's 5% cash back at different places each quarter, like grocery stores, on gas, and at restaurants. It pays to discover. Terms apply. See discover.com/five for details.

• 1:37:38Alie Ward?

  Okay, so you all sent in some stellar questions via Patreon.com/ologies, where you too can join for as little as one hot dollar a month and submit your questions ahead of our recording. But enough clowning around, let's get to those questions. Okay, Lynette Devia, Leilei Broton, Julie Dukes, Gardener Gabby, and Malenka K. Want to know, Lynette asked, what the fuck is it with clowns?

• 1:38:04Alie Ward?

  A lot of people, Malenka wanted to know, are there any fears that are more conditioned in us from popular media like clowns? I mean, yeah, I guess just, there's also a resurgence in the clown scene. So that's interesting. It's just if people thought that 2026 wasn't full of horrors, just know that there is a really big resurgence in clown arts on both coasts. So watch out. But yeah, was that just Stephen King bringing it into the zeitgeist?

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a cool question about what is it, what is it with the deal with clowns?

• 1:38:39Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Stephen King's It was a big influencer for that. I think there's also something about clown makeup that initiates the uncanny valley sensation.

• 1:38:50Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  And this is a really cool thing that was originally described in the field of robotics. And then eventually it shifted over into the neuroscientists being like, oh, this is cool. Let's, let's learn more about this. The whole principle behind the uncanny valley is when people were first starting to develop robots, they were thinking that the friendliest robot would be the ones who look most human. So in the 80, I think it was in 1980, when this roboticist came out with this idea, they didn't have all the tools to make the robots look perfectly human. They were very, very close, but whenever a humanized looking face would try and smile

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  at you, there was always something a little bit off about the way they looked. Whether it was, you know, the, the muscles were pulling up in weird angles, or the eyes didn't match the face, or, or something like that. And I think this has been most pronounced in the movie Smile. I don't know if you've seen this one.

• 1:39:53Alie Ward?

  No.

• 1:39:55Speaker 04

  I'm seeing something no one else can see except for me. It's smiling at me.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  It's a scary movie about some weird demon thing that makes people smile before they do terrible things. And the idea here is that you get this mismatch. You're seeing a person smile weird, and you immediately think, you know that something's wrong. It's not a natural smile, and you can sense that there's something wrong. The idea with the uncanny valley is that we have a natural fear towards those things that are just a little bit wrong, not quite right, but not so distanced from it that it looks fake. So possibly what the clown makeup is doing, it's exaggerating the smile, and it's exaggerating

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  the blush, doing things to eyes, producing shadows and potentially, right? And so the reason why these things might be scary to us, it could be one of those protective things. It's all evolution in the end, where you're sensing that this smile from this outsider doesn't actually mean a genuine pro-social smile, that this is a smile that, a smile from a person who might mean harm to me.

• 1:41:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:12Speaker 01

  And so I should have some kind of aversive reaction against it. And the thing about the clowns is that it extends to many of the other fears. So the big one that I think of immediately is Michael Myers.

• 1:41:25Alie Ward?

  Masked men picking people up off the streets, one by one. In America, we call that a Wednesday. Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:31Speaker 01

  There's the slasher thing. Yeah, he has a giant knife, scary. But also, his face does not move. He's wearing a mask, and it's occluding the features. It's got the face, it's got the nose and the eyes and the mouth, but they're not moving. And there's something about that that is just inherently kind of repellent to a lot of people. And so it adds a second layer to that horror.

• 1:41:58Alie Ward?

  And I would say too, in The Shining, Jack Nicholson smiling through that door.

• 1:42:05Alie Ward?

  You know, just like, here's Johnny moment, where it's just like, he has such like a frozen Joker smile. Joker, I suppose, yeah, would be another one. So that makes tons of sense. What is creepy? Do people study that? They do, and we have had them on Ologies. So I had hunted down Dr. Frank McAndrew, who is a social psychologist who co-authored the academic paper on the nature of creepiness. And the topic here is seropsychology. It's all about creepiness. We did a whole episode. Is it like obscenity? Do we know creepiness when we see it? Let's listen to that and ask Frank. I thought this was a great question from Sarah Swank. Says, along with the uncanny valley questions, why do AI images of people make my hair stand up when they're just a little bit off?

• 1:42:50Alie Ward?

  Or what is it about lifelike dolls and robots in that uncanny valley? I think there are different kinds of creepiness, and some other researchers have kind of pointed this out. And mine was all about the ambiguity of threat. You know, is there a danger here? But it's clear that a doll is not going to kill you. Probably. There's another way of thinking about creepiness. I think it's called categorical ambiguity. The problem with creepy dolls and robots and lifelike AI images that are a little off is our caveman brains aren't prepared for things to look so human, but aren't human.

• 1:43:29Alie Ward?

  And so we respond to them as if they're real people, but consciously, we know they're not. And so there's this battle going on between, you know, our conscious processing of what's going on here, but our unconscious involuntary response to that. As something looks more and more human, we like it better until it dips into that valley where it's almost exactly human, but it isn't. I'm almost afraid of the AI images getting better and better to where it's undetectable. That's when it starts to creep me out. Like when they start having like AI models that have like a zit here and there. I'll be like, wait a minute, now I can't tell, you know?

• 1:44:11Alie Ward?

  And for more on uncanny valley, that quantifiable dip in comfort when something is real looking, but it's not real enough, you can see the 2012 paper, Danger Avoidance: An Evolutionary Explanation of Uncanny Valley from the Journal Biological Theory, which explains that many species are known to bury, hide, or otherwise isolate their dead members. And being cohabiting social animals, it explains, primates have also developed burial as a mechanism of separating the dead from the living. And necrophobia, or fear of the dead, is deemed to be one of the reasons behind human burial practices, at least since the early Iron Age.

• 1:44:52Alie Ward?

  And it's thought to be one of the reasons that people find human-like response more important than appearance in robots. Because when something looks a lot like us, but is a little off, we're like, that's a corpse, and we don't like it. So what dead stuff skeeves us out? I'm glad you asked, because the researchers ranked the rank. And in order from the least offensive to the most offensive are, you ready? Okay, least offensive, a dead insect. And the paper says, as a matter of fact, many of us kill insects without even having the feeling of regret. Also, I should note, we have some great episodes on spiders and bugs and ants. Okay. Moving on. A decomposing insect body is a little grosser.

• 1:45:35Alie Ward?

  Next, a dead, small animal, then a decomposing, small animal. We're going up the scale. A dead, large animal, and then a decomposing, large animal. Think like a dead cow, or like a deer or something. And then a human corpse. And I thought that was it. I thought that was the apex of the list, like the summit of what's creepy. But it turned out it was just a paragraph break. And then it continued on the next page with the penultimate, a decomposing or freshly dead mutilated corpse. And then this paper says that the top tier creepy thing human brains want to avoid is...

• 1:46:17Alie Ward?

  So specific. A freshly dead mutilated corpse with sudden movements. This, again, is a scientific paper. I think, I think the research speaks for itself there. I think we get it. So now we know what to avoid if we're having a stressful day. That's helpful. Is horror overall helpful? Wondered patrons Alien Oceans and Al Ham. Well, we already know that exposure to horror can leave lasting anxiety. And shout out to patrons, first time question asker, Aishen Reekany, Goblin Prince, Floater Mall, and Mark Rubin's mom, who is, quote, "absolutely terrified of all flying creatures, even butterflies, and we think her fear stems from watching the birds when she was young."

• 1:46:59Alie Ward?

  Please, Mark, don't tell your mom we have a Mothman folklore episode. Anthrolepidopterology coming up this month. Or maybe, maybe it would be good, like a form of therapeutic horror, if it exists. Let's ask Dr. Lim.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  To kind of back up just a little bit, there are some applications of scary things that have been used in therapeutic settings. And I think these are super cool. There's one, so EEG tech has come a long way since it was first conceived, like 100 years ago. There are commercially available EEG monitors that don't read quite as many points on your head, but it can still give you some idea about your mind state and whether your anxiety levels might be high or low or whatever. There are games that have been designed to help people try to harness relaxation strategies

• 1:47:54Speaker 01

  as ways to counteract that thing in real life, whenever they are experiencing a high emotional state. Is there a way that you can lower that emotional state? And in traditional biofeedback systems, you've got that waveform that's appearing, and you're saying, try to relax your mind so that this number goes down or this number goes up.

• 1:48:17Alie Ward?

  Yeah. And in Dr. Lim's book, Horror on the Brain, he details a little bit about the history of EEG. Oh, electrical mind blowing here. It's nuts. I simply must share with you. So he writes in his book, "The man who invented the EEG never would have predicted its many medical applications today. He was too busy trying to prove he was psychic. A brush with death drove Hans Berger to build the first prototype. Having just dropped out of a university, unsatisfied by his studies in astronomy, he enlisted in the cavalry." So Dr. Lim explains that Hans Berger was in a training round in the cavalry and almost got minced into hamburger by a vehicle.

• 1:49:01Alie Ward?

  But shockingly, the driver stopped short, just in front of him. And he continues, "The next day, much to his surprise, he received an urgent telegram on behalf of his sister, living miles away, wondering how he was doing and if he was healthy." So why now? Obviously, Berger concluded, his brain generated an invisible distress signal. And luckily for the fields of neuropsychology and medicine, Berger was the type of person to believe in ESP. So it became his quest to capture and decode the signals of the brain, and it culminated in the development of the EEG. And the first prototypes involved some metal probes pierced into the scalp. They are now deemed not necessary to capture the electrical signals.

• 1:49:46Alie Ward?

  But he did discover alpha and beta brainwaves. And so Dr. Lim writes, "Despite his advancements in functioning imaging technology, Berger was looked down on by his contemporaries, who believed that reading such tiny brain signals through the skull was hopeless. But Berger paid no attention to the cynics, and he ultimately revolutionized medicine." But tragically, Berger died by suicide in 1941, and he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize three times. And he never knew this lasting impact that his near-death experience had on neuroscience forever. I mean, he didn't know, because I guess he wasn't psychic, but he was a good scientist

• 1:50:31Alie Ward?

  after all. And I have to remind you, you know, on the right track. At some point in medicine, people thought soap was a superstition in operating rooms. They thought cancer was ghosts. You know what? You got a question? Get into it. But back to Dr. Lim and games, like Neuroskies game Mindlight, which seems safe for kids. And it uses this consumer-grade headset, it looks like a gaming headset, with some EEG tech in it. And their site says that it's clinically validated to decrease anxiety by at least half, with benefits lasting even months after playing the game. And the gameplay is described as "a fun adventure to defeat monsters, solve puzzles,

• 1:51:14Alie Ward?

  and overcome challenges as you rescue grandma from her haunted house." First off, I hope grandma's house isn't haunted by grandpa. But secondly, I gotta say, for me personally, most of my trauma comes from having a grandma who was a bitch. So this may not work for everyone. But you can read the 2021 paper, "Scaring Away Anxiety: Therapeutic Avenues for Horror Fiction to Enhance Treatment for Anxiety Symptoms," out of Denmark's highly respected recreational fear lab. To learn more, and Dr. Lim explains.

• 1:51:48Speaker 01

  These games are so cool because they provoke that response. By using horror in a therapeutic setting and connecting a person to an EEG, you can train people to become better at relaxing themselves when they know they are in a high emotional state. These games are super cool. There was one that was designed where it's a first-person game. You're walking through, you know, classic haunted mansion or whatever. And then as your dread levels, as your anxiety levels start to rise, bad things will start happening to your character. Like more things will start creeping in from the corners, or water will start flooding in from the walls or whatever.

• 1:52:31Alie Ward?

  I hate it.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  And, and when that happens, you're supposed to use this visual, a much more immersive visual scene, to try to level out your emotional state. And so as you try to intentionally calm your mind, the water will start draining, or the little critters will hide, scurry away, and disappear.

• 1:52:54Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's nice.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  It's such a, yeah. I mean, it's, it's, yeah, about as good as, as a simulation as you can get without using VR, which is probably the next step.

• 1:53:06Alie Ward?

  We love a resolution.

• 1:53:09Speaker 01

  Be less scared of the things in the walls.

• 1:53:12Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  They've even made these for kids, too. So they have kid version, kid-friendly versions, where you have a flashlight. And again, it's an EEG biofeedback system where your flashlight starts to dim, and you have to put yourself into a relaxed state, you know, get those biofeedback things the way they're supposed to be, to turn your flashlight back on, allowing you to see more stuff.

• 1:53:38Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so sweet.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's such cool systems to harness these biofeedback tech in conjunction with cheap EEGs and use it to help people sort of recognize when they're in a high emotional state and how to counteract that.

• 1:53:56Alie Ward?

  And do you have to stick a bunch of sticky things to your forehead? Or is this just like a headband that you wear, that you can get at Radio Shack or something?

• 1:54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a few different versions of it. The headband does get that information just as efficiently, but some of them do have the sticky things with the salty goo.

• 1:54:13Alie Ward?

  Yeah, yeah. I understand that, like, Apple is trying to put that kind of equipment, or essentially those sensors, like in AirPods, to figure out what consumers are responding to, which is, ugh.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a little invasive.

• 1:54:29Alie Ward?

  I don't like it. It's literally in your ears. You're like, leave me alone when I'm looking at house renovations from the 1800s, which is what I like to do online. But am I ever gonna buy a lead-laden Victorian? No. Do I want to see if this person finds a dead raccoon in their walls? Of course I do. I'm a human being. Is this true? It is. So Duke Law professor, the neuro and bioethicist and author, Dr. Nita Farhany, told me about it in the neurotechnology episode. So listen. If you then look at what's happening in the consumer space, in the consumer space, you take the 64 or 120 electrodes that are in a big cap, and then you have a couple

• 1:55:14Alie Ward?

  of them that are put into a forehead band or a baseball cap, or increasingly what's coming is brain sensors that are embedded in everyday technology. So you and I are both wearing headphones, and the soft cups that go around our ears are being packed with sensors that can pick up brain activity by reading the electrical activity through our scalp. You want my tinfoil hat? Or if we were wearing earbuds. Inside of our ears instead embedding brain sensors inside of those that can pick up electrical activity in our brain activity as we're thinking or doing anything. And those become much more familiar and much more commonplace very quickly. So there's just a few of those products that are on the market, but that's where most of the big tech companies are going is to embed brain sensors into everyday devices like

• 1:55:59Alie Ward?

  earbuds and headphones and even watches that pick up brain activity from your brain down your arm to your wrist and picks up your intention to move or to type or to swipe or something like that. Yeah. So if fiction about being haunted by a dead child isn't doing it for you fear wise, feel free to just get the willies by reading Apple's 2023 patent US 2023 0225659A1 for a quote biosignal sensing device using dynamic selection of electrodes, which contains Apple's blueprint for EEG capable earbuds, which will be able to read electrical activity in your eyes, heart, muscles and brain.

• 1:56:43Alie Ward?

  Everyday privacy, that's fiction too. Oh, I gotta breathe or my heart is gonna say, bye, we had a good run, Dadward. A Tasmania nerd wanted to know, can you actually be scared to death?

• 1:57:00Speaker 01

  Can you actually be scared to death?

• 1:57:02Alie Ward?

  I guess you could have a heart, you could have a cardiac event.

• 1:57:05Speaker 01

  This might be something that was, could be totally fabricated, but this was done in the early 1900s. There was a person who did actual experimentation on recently deceased people.

• 1:57:22Alie Ward?

  Oy.

• 1:57:23Speaker 01

  This was one of the measures that was enacted by British Parliament where they allowed for surgical dissections and experimentation on recently executed criminals. The idea was you don't, you know, this is just an additional disincentive for committing these horrid crimes.

• 1:57:43Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  This guy had run some electrical current through someone who was hung and they got this body to move. People were freaked out by this naturally, right? This is a dead person and now they are moving. And the legend goes that this person, one of the surgeons who was in attendance of this demonstration, went home, had some kind of cardiac event and then died from it.

• 1:58:10Alie Ward?

  No way.

• 1:58:12Speaker 01

  This guy happened to be the nephew of Luigi Galvani, the guy who discovered you can get frog legs to kick if you run electrical current through the nerves. And he was also the guy who inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.

• 1:58:25Alie Ward?

  Well, question, after he died of a cardiac event, they hook him up to some electrodes.

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  So that wasn't written into the law.

• 1:58:34Alie Ward?

  And then another person dies. And then they hook that guy up.

• 1:58:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, you get this chain of bodies that you can just experiment on. Yeah, so it was, it was recently executed criminals, it was unclaimed bodies from hospitals, and it was people who had died while incarcerated without any family members. So it was an interesting little bit when, this was also a time when human dissections was highly, highly taboo, so much to the point where med students were digging up bodies to learn how human anatomy worked. So, you know, this is late 1700s, early 1900s. You just weren't allowed to do any of this stuff. So people found ways around it.

• 1:59:14Alie Ward?

  If you need to know more about this, we have an osteology episode all about skeletons and a university run body farm and how to will yourself to that action for science, as well as a fantastic pathology episode about graveyards. We have a Parisian catacombs episode about absolutely decomposing chaos of French cemeteries of your. We also have a wonderfully sweet one called Desertology with Monica Torres, who is a funeral director and embalmer and cremationist and a very sweet makeup artist to your dearly departed. She thinks no one should be riding motorcycles. Side note, as a funeral director,

• 1:59:58Alie Ward?

  just think about it. Speaking of absolute gore, Storm said, do our brains react differently to different kinds of horror, like gore versus thriller? And Atrain Rakhani, first time question asker, wanted to know, how do you categorize horror movies? Like, is there any info on how each might affect the brain, like psychological horror, slasher, gore, comedy horror, cosmic horror? So many flavors.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a cool question. I think disgust as a primary emotion doesn't get enough credit in its role for keeping us safe, right? We think about fear as that we have to protect your body in this moment, but disgust has a lot to play with as far as its evolutionary benefits, right? We see things that are disgusting and we have a very strong reaction to it.

• 2:00:53Alie Ward?

  So I have just learned that horror fans definitely stick to taxonomies here. If you have been listening to this, absolutely flames on the side of your face, angry because maybe I've said the wrong genre. This is it. I hope that you didn't turn it off. I hope that you're feeling, smelling an air of vindication here. So there are genres and people can argue about them. So horror generally means that there's an unstoppable, maybe a supernatural or like an other worldly or surreal mysterious force. And there's some kind of terror that it,

• 2:01:38Alie Ward?

  and it might get a little gory, right? So that's where, in a thriller, it's more suspense driven and the bad person is usually a human. Now slasher movies usually have a human antagonist, but like a pretty fucked up one. And think Chainsaw Massacre, think, you know, the guy with hockey mask and stuff like that. Now gore is also called splatter because, you know, see the earlier blood discussion. So there are all these subgenres of subgenres and I could make this like a two hour episode, but you know what would be even better? Just consider asking a horror fan to delineate them all.

• 2:02:22Alie Ward?

  And I promise you, you will have a lengthy and shall I say spirited dinner party conversation, which just consider that research. And as we learned in the furology two part episodes, we've got four basic emotions, right? Happy, sad, afraid or surprised as one, and angry or disgusted. So the horror genre really seems to be in that angry and disgusted area. And in our disgustology episode, Dr. Paul Rosen, we had him on, he's wonderful. He shares that being grossed out keeps us alive and safe from poisons and contagions, et cetera. So wonderful discussion. Let's hear some.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  First of all, almost all food disgust are animal products, almost all.

• 2:03:10Alie Ward?

  Huh, except for durian, maybe.

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, but yes, and durian, of course, smells like it's rotting meat. Yes, that's right. So the question is, why do we find most meat disgusting? And that includes earthworms and, you know, all the, and rats and all the things that we find disgusting. But another way to ask the question is, why do we eat any meat?

• 2:03:31Alie Ward?

  Right.

• 2:03:31Speaker 05

  And even traditional cultures would eat much more meat than we do and more parts of the animal. Still find many animals disgusting.

• 2:03:41Alie Ward?

  And he says in different parts of the world, different cultures eat different types of protein sources.

• 2:03:47Speaker 05

  They still don't eat at all. And they tend to not like decayed meat, which is generally disgusting.

• 2:03:56Alie Ward?

  And what do you think about types of meat that we'll readily eat, such as a hot dog, even though we know there's buttholes in it, but we wouldn't eat?

• 2:04:06Speaker 05

  We know there's what in it?

• 2:04:07Alie Ward?

  Buttholes. We know that it's full of anuses. A hot dog is full of pink lips and butts.

• 2:04:12Speaker 05

  You can't be full of a hole.

• 2:04:14Alie Ward?

  Well, sure. It's fingers.

• 2:04:15Speaker 05

  You mean the liners of the?

• 2:04:16Alie Ward?

  And trails. But hot, I mean, I love hot dogs. Don't get me wrong, but I know that hot dogs are full of things that if they weren't like macerated and emulsified, I probably would not eat a hot dog.

• 2:04:28Speaker 05

  Yes, in actual fact, I never looked at this yet. It's a good question. What's in a hot dog?

• 2:04:33Alie Ward?

  Do we want to know? Should we learn this? You know what, some weiners, you gotta look straight in the face. So I Googled the sentence, "What's in a hot dog just level with me?" And I gotta say, the image search returns had a lot of appetizing photos of like crusty buns, taut meat links and mustard squiggles and the like. But let's give it up for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, just busted out the disgust with photos of a vat containing what looked like giant ribbons of milk chocolate frozen yogurt, but what actually contained whipped and emulsified muscle.

• 2:05:13Speaker 02

  Make it stay far away.

• 2:05:15Alie Ward?

  So back to Dr. Lim.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  If we think about fear as being amygdala-centered, the major center for disgust is a structure called the insula. It's often thought of as kind of the unheard of lobe. We imagine there are four lobes in the outer surface of the brain. If you kind of peel them back real gently, speaking of gore, if you just peel them back real gently, you'll come across the insula. And the insula is super cool because it plays a role in internal body sensations. So it feels what our body is feeling. It knows if your stomach is full. It knows if you have to pee. Those processes get sensed through insula circuits.

• 2:05:56Speaker 01

  When we see disgusting things, we also have a really strong emotional protective response to it. We think about what is disgusting, there is a severed body part, right? Why is that disgusting? Probably because it meant that our evolutionary ancestors recognized that whatever caused that body part to be separated might still be around. And so it could serve that protective function as well. The cool thing about insula, not only does it care about physical things like dismembered parts or whatnot, it also cares about moral infractions as well.

• 2:06:37Speaker 01

  So when we think about things that are disgusting morally, super vague, super fuzzy term, when we think about things that are disgusting, like maybe incest, for example, that also, when we feel a moral violation, we also get an insula reaction. And this has been seen in fMRI scans where insula signals will heighten in response to moral violations. This probably goes to the evolutionary idea that there is a... You know, what things do we need to keep us safe? We need to keep our uses closer to us. And those are the ones who have the same cultural values. And that might be how that kind of all ties together with fear and horror films.

• 2:07:23Alie Ward?

  So if you need to get this research into your own brain stat, you can see the 2016 research, "Moral Competence and Brain Connectivity: A Rusting State fMRI", in the journal NeuroImage, which found that via brain scans, people with higher, what's called moral competence, which is this ability to make some altruistic decisions, they showed more connectivity between their amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal lobe, which the study says may help cope with emotional conflicts that come from moral dilemmas. You're like, moral dilemmas, whoo, we need an episode on that. What, we have one on the trolley problem.

• 2:08:03Alie Ward?

  We do, it's called Trolleyology with a Harvard professor and a neuroscientist. He's an actual trolleyologist, self-proclaimed, I did not make that up. His name is Dr. Joshua Green. And he also co-founded Giving Multiplier. And I'm going to tell you about it because it's great. It's this portal, this is not an advertisement, okay? I'm gonna talk it up and tell you how much I love it, and it's not an ad. This is a charity site. So it's this portal to make charitable donations, right? And they do up to 100% matching funds to benefit whatever your favorite causes are. So you type in whatever your local charity is or something that's close to you, and you can choose to split it with these highly effective global charities that do more impact per person.

• 2:08:47Alie Ward?

  And so after the Trolleyology episode, they set up a portal, givingmultiplier.org/ologies, to see how much money Ologies listeners could raise. And within a month, I think, you guys raised over $800,000. Like almost a million dollars from this episode. I don't brag about that enough. And I should be, because it was all y'all. And again, this is not an ad. This is just a real charitable donation portal by Harvard ethicists. And it's helping more people than we could ever imagine. Just Ologies listeners through that givingmultiplier.com/ologies raised enough money to treat 120,000 children with vitamin A,

• 2:09:32Alie Ward?

  saving an estimated 70 kids' lives. Y'all lifted 30 families out of extreme poverty with no strings attached cash, gave 3,000 kids seasonal malaria protection, all of this on top of hundreds of thousands of dollars to your favorite charities as well. These ethicists literally are trying to solve the trolley problem. And again, you can go to givingmultiplier.com whenever you make a donation for something. And there are matching funds provided by other donors, and you can also split it between highly effective charities. So we'll link that in the show notes, givingmultiplier.com/ologies. Pass that on this season, while you're just thinking of others and giving gifts.

• 2:10:15Alie Ward?

  Again, we don't get anything from it, but you get matched funds up to 100%. So it's not all horrors in the world. And yes, we will link that Trolleyology episode in the show notes.

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  If you have a change in your sensation-seeking, does that contribute to heightened criminality? There's been a bit of evidence in that realm.

• 2:10:35Alie Ward?

  Is there something that's really difficult about studying this or communicating this? Is it keeping up with the content? What is it?

• 2:10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. There's always new things coming out. And I have, in addition to the fiction that I want to read, I also have to read the sciency stuff every so often.

• 2:10:54Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:10:55Speaker 01

  One of the biggest challenges is trying to keep people and trying to avoid myself falling into a new phrenology. I think about this a lot, where phrenology was the pseudoscience that was done in the mid-1800s, where so-called phrenologists would massage your scalp and say, "Because of this, your behavior is going to be this." And they had these very specific characterizations of brain regions that are supposed to correspond with some behavior.

• 2:11:28Alie Ward?

  Yeah, incredibly racist also.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it has a really sketchy background.

• 2:11:33Alie Ward?

  We will never do a phrenology episode, even for April Fools. It's just too gross.

• 2:11:39Speaker 01

  Regardless, it shaped the way people think about neuroscience and brains as a whole. It's, we have these really cool pieces of technology like fMRI, like spect scanning, like PET scans, where you can look at structures in the brain, non-invasively, real time. And these are all really major advances. But it's really easy to fall into the trap of saying that this thing is responsible for this behavior. So recognizing that networks matter much more than individual structures, we love neat little parcels and packages, but everything's this fuzzy blend of everything else.

• 2:12:19Alie Ward?

  Okay, what about horror on the brain gives him little warm fuzzies? Ah, how do you decide what you love the most?

• 2:12:28Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm super flighty. It's just whatever I'm thinking about at the moment. And right now, the big project that's on my mind is, me and a couple collaborators, we have secured some grant money to study liminal spaces and how they affect psychology. So I know you mentioned the back rooms. Liminal spaces is such a cool... I don't know if it's a new aesthetic, but it's definitely become really popular, where you have a liminal space, which is defined as a transitory space. We most often experience this thing when you land at an airport. It's super late at night. There's people around. It's not super dark, but you feel like you don't belong there. And you get this weird kind of unsettled feeling.

• 2:13:13Speaker 01

  I think of it most analogous to the uncanny valley, but for places instead of for people.

• 2:13:20Alie Ward?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  And when you are in that valley, you're experiencing this liminal mind state. How does that change your memory? How does that change your ability to process surroundings? How does that affect your ability to predict future things? These are some of the questions that we're looking forward to answering in our upcoming studies.

• 2:13:42Alie Ward?

  And liminal, just a side note, the Latin root for that means threshold, like the in-between spaces, the ambiguous middle ground. And scholars say that these spaces can be physical, like empty hallways, airports between flights, or stairwells, but can also be metaphorical, like the period between graduating from college and finding a job, or the time between waking and falling asleep. Like if you ever, did you ever leave something at school in your desk? Like your homework that you had to do, or your retainer or something? Your mom had to drive you back that evening to school? And you had to like find the custodian and ask to be let back into the classroom to grab it?

• 2:14:25Alie Ward?

  But the school was empty and eerie. You know that feeling where you're like, "I shouldn't be here, but I am"? And it's intriguing, but also you need to get out of here. So I'm sure you all have your own examples. That is neither here nor there. Oh, and if you're listening to this because someone you love really wants you to get why they have a bloody hockey mask hanging up in the den. Hmm. Any horror movies that you would recommend for... Let's say that you have a best friend or a family member or a partner who doesn't enjoy horror, or you're like, "I'm trying to share this special interest."

• 2:15:09Alie Ward?

  Any advice or good on-ramp movies?

• 2:15:15Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, start with the old stuff.

• 2:15:18Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 2:15:19Speaker 01

  I think the old stuff, everything's all rubbery. You can clearly tell without the advantage of modern CG and all that stuff. Everything looks fake, right? You still get a hint of what the dread might have been like if you were in that time seeing it for the first time. But at the same time, it's like, oh, that's clearly a dude in a suit. Or like, I can almost see the zipper kind of situation. Or that's like, that's, that's just pea soup. They've ground up, whatever. You get these really easy ways to distance yourself from the setting.

• 2:15:52Alie Ward?

  See, like a guy with a chainsaw and peppermint breath. Max Shrek, for example, Nosferatu. That guy woke up, he had coffee, sat on a toilet, he went to work, said hi to coworkers, popped in some fake teeth, did his job, cashed a paycheck, went home every night, ate a casserole. Fake ghouls, they're just like us. And our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, who assisted, by the way, with a lot of research and producing for this one, because as you can tell, it is a haunted beast of an episode. Mercedes says, I can confirm that this is good advice as someone who is averse to the horror genre. She says, my fiance loves horror and the older horror, as well as spoof movies, like

• 2:16:37Alie Ward?

  scary movie, have been a good entree to the genre for her. Also, congratulations on your fiance. We're all very excited about it. Okay. But like, which movies? Just tell us, Dr. Lim.

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  I think that as far as specific recommendations go, my personal favorite is Aliens. The whole franchise is awesome.

• 2:16:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah. Just tell me one thing, Burke. You're going out there to destroy them, right?

• 2:17:05Speaker 01

  Not to study, not to bring back, but to wipe them out. That's the plan. If you watch Aliens, it's more of an action sci-fi flick rather than a pure horror. But then if you want to think about it deeper, it's like, oh, that's, that's scary, that that might exist out there. And then after that, maybe go back and watch Alien and then Alien Earth to kind of bring everything kind of back to the, you know, you're sort of bordering on that realm between action and science fiction. You're less scared, you're more excited to see what happens kind of thing.

• 2:17:43Alie Ward?

  Strong female protagonist.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  Excellent female protagonist.

• 2:17:47Alie Ward?

  We love to see it.

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  My favorite thing to do is to describe things poorly. And I have described Aliens as being a working mother and a stay-at-home mother argue.

• 2:18:03Alie Ward?

  I thought you were going to say maybe a rom-com with an alien.

• 2:18:09Speaker 01

  I'm sure that exists somewhere. Yeah, Aliens is an, it's an excellent example of also of feminist horror, but also what if the things that happen to women also happen to men? That's kind of the, that second layer to it that I find really compelling. It's like, why is this scary to men? The experience of being pregnant and all the, the sometimes unpleasant stuff that goes along with that.

• 2:18:32Alie Ward?

  Sometimes unpleasant.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:36Speaker 01

  What happens when that's not the case?

• 2:18:38Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:40Alie Ward?

  Great one to start with. Okay, so cue it up, enjoy, and also get your book, Horror on the Brain, and really get into it. I feel like once you can learn some science behind it, some context behind it, everything becomes that much more enjoyable, which is why I love what you do.

• 2:18:57Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 2:19:00Alie Ward?

  So ask sweet people scary questions. And thank you again so much, Dr. Austin Lim, for spending some time in the dungeons of the brain to explain what is happening there. Thank you to all of our guests, whose clips we've included in this. And again, Spooktober episodes, we have so many good ones for this month. Go to alieward.com/ologies/spooktober. You can probably have one a day if you need them. But meanwhile, follow Austin across the board on social media, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, all at @docaustinlim, which we will link in the show notes, alongside his excellent book, Horror on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction.

• 2:19:44Alie Ward?

  We'll also have a link up to givingmultiplier.com/ologies and Homeboy Industry, in case those causes grab your heart. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. I'm at @AllyWard with one L on both. And feel free to deck yourself out in Ologies merch via ologiesmerch.com. If you need kid-friendly and swear-free Ologies episodes, please find them wherever you get podcasts. They're called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, so you can listen with your little goblins and ghouls. You can pass that on also to other parents and teachers. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. We have known each other since we were four and we went trick-or-treating a lot in the

• 2:20:28Alie Ward?

  old neighborhood. Adeline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwyer does the website. Terrifying me with a full calendar is scheduling producer Noel Dilworth, managing director Susan Hale. Also doles out deadline jump scares. And the ghosts in the machine are editor Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Susan and Mercedes also did a lot of research for this as it was a long episode and we were in a crunch, as you can tell, because it came out two days late. Nick Thorburn eked out the theme music. An extra special thanks musically to Jake Chaffee for their spooky tooling of the theme music and bio-musicologist Dr. David Bashwinder for the piano skills.

• 2:21:12Alie Ward?

  Such a good touch for Spooktober. If you stick around to the very end, you know, I may tell you a secret. I can't remember if I've told you this one before, but it bears repeating. One Halloween, I've always loved Halloween, obviously, you know? And one Halloween, I wanted to go as a cow. And I got a large white sweatsuit and some iron-on patches from the fabric store and went as a Holstein cow. I think my mom and I made some little horns out of felt, put them on the hood of the sweatsuit. I put some socks on my hands to look like hoes. Pretty excited to go to school. And I, I ate, honestly.

• 2:21:56Alie Ward?

  And I got to school, no one else was wearing a costume because we were in eighth grade and everyone had outgrown that, apparently, but me.

• 2:22:06Alie Ward?

  So I'm walking around, you know, girls my age, they're wearing lip gloss, they're wearing jean mini skirts. I'm wearing a pillow under a large sweatsuit and socks on my hands. I think I ditched the pillow sometime before second period. I think I shoved that in my locker. Probably, I'm going to guess, the socks came off the hands. We had work to do. But I think about that a lot when it comes to, should I wear a costume to the party? And I think the answer is always yes, because we're here for the memes, aren't we? And look, do I remember any of the years I didn't wear a costume? Of course I didn't. Also, if you're wearing a rubber mask, a hot tip is to put like some Vicks VapoRub

• 2:22:51Alie Ward?

  in it so you don't have to smell your own hot rubber breath.

• 2:22:57Alie Ward?

  Clearers of sinuses, maybe papamentos. If you want to ruin the illusion, all right, goodbye.

• 2:23:33Speaker 02

  You like scary movies?

• 2:23:34Alie Ward?

  Uh huh.

• 2:23:39Speaker 02

  Oh, look. You just got added to a meeting about coordinating another meeting to prepare for the pre-meeting ahead of the follow-up meeting, which will, of course, require a recap meeting and then another meeting. Hit your booking point, book with Southwest and enter airplane mode.

• 2:24:06Speaker 02

  Insurance may all seem the same on the surface, but having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm. It's like getting a granola bar with a candle in it when you wanted a three-layer birthday cake. You wouldn't settle for just any dessert on your birthday. So don't settle for just any insurance. When it comes to getting the help you need, State Farm is the real deal. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.