On the milestone anniversary of two classic Australian movies Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Wolf Creek (2005), UniSC cognitive neuroscientist Dr Will Harrison speaks to actor John Jarratt about the psychological tricks that movie creators use to scare the pants off audiences. And why so many of us love it.
Fifty years ago, director Peter Weir released Picnic at Hanging Rock – a haunting masterpiece on the mysterious disappearance of some schoolgirls that changed the course of cinema with his beautiful filmmaking, masterful colour palette and shot selection.
But for a lot of Australians, including a young Dr Will Harrison, it has a very different legacy.
“My sister had to watch it for a school assignment and it scared the absolute crap out of me!” Dr Harrison said.
Why did it have this effect on people?
Most people don’t consider Picnic at Hanging Rock to be a horror movie. There’s no monster, no violence – it’s not even clear if anyone dies.
Renowned Australian actor John Jarratt – who plays one of the young men searching for the girls in the film – certainly doesn’t think it is.
But as he points out, the film does employ horror tactics and tropes to create the atmosphere of haunting dread that’s synonymous with the film.
“[When the girls walk into the rocks] everyone watching knows something terrible is about to happen. There’s an expectation formed.
“The expressions on the faces, the music and sounds underneath, it has elements of horror movies in there,” Jarratt said.
“[When the girls walk into the rocks] everyone watching knows something terrible is about to happen. There’s an expectation formed.
“But it never offers you a conclusion. It's the unseen that freaks you out. It’s left to your imagination to decide what’s ‘scary’ about that rock formation.”
Some of the other devices Peter Weir used to evoke dread in viewers were a lot more abstract.
In an interview with Vogue in 2015, he revealed he used slowed down audio of an earthquake underneath certain scenes in a bid to create a feeling of unease in the viewer, theorising it’s a sound that we are inherently hardwired to be alarmed by over thousands of years of evolution.
It sounds dubious. But it speaks to the remarkable amount of thought filmmakers and actors have given to manufacturing fear in moviegoers said Dr Harrison.
“We know surprisingly little about the science of ‘recreational fear’. For scientists like me, the interesting question isn’t why some things on screen scare us – it’s about why some people, like me, really love it.
“I've said to my colleagues that we are decades behind the actors and the creatives in film and TV in the psychology of fear,” he said.
“We know surprisingly little about the science of ‘recreational fear’. For scientists like me, the interesting question isn’t why some things on screen scare us – it’s about why some people, like me, really love it.
“But people in the arts, like John Jarratt and Peter Weir, have been experimenting and trialling ideas about recreational fear for decades, and in the process they’ve tapped into something deeply psychological.”
Dr Harrison has been thinking about how our brains make sense of visual information for years. He says horror movies offer a fascinating window into aspects of psychology that scientists are often not able to test in the laboratory.
“Filmmakers create audio-visual landscapes that immerse the viewer’s mind in a new world, but viewers are unlikely to confuse reality with the film they’re watching.
“The audience knows the scary thing is only happening on a screen. So why should it scare us?
“Countless horror films use dark lighting, jump-scares, violent murderers or monsters – all ingredients found in celebrated horror cinema – but many of these films do not rouse the fear response and may even be boring to some viewers.
“Effective horror requires that our experience of the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The goal of cognitive neuroscientists like me, is to understand how the brain combines these different parts to produce such a visceral experience that is enjoyable to some, but aversive to others.”
There’s a lot less debate about whether Wolf Creek is scary, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.
Thirty years after Picnic was released, director Greg McLean’s film introduced the world to ‘Mick Taylor’ (also played by John Jarratt) and his trusty knife, slashing and severing his way to global prominence, leaving a litany of thrilled and horrified audiences in his wake.
But as Dr Harrison points out, even Wolf Creek uses clever psychology to scare us long before the ‘horror’ plays out on screen.
“Our brain is constantly trying to make sense of the environment. It likes certainty,” he said.
“But the information that comes through our senses isn't always crystal clear, so our experience of the world is our brain's best guess of what is going on.
“There is a moment in Wolf Creek at the campfire, where Mick looks over at his ‘companions’. His face suddenly shifts from a smiling larrikin to a ‘Holy s**t, something bad is about to happen’ face.
“It creates this sudden feeling of uncertainty about what is going on in the mind of this character. The brain doesn’t like being in this state. We, the audience, no longer know what his motivations are, and when we don't understand somebody else's motivations, we probably should be a little bit worried about any interactions.
“We know how to react if someone's happy or clearly angry. But when there's uncertainty, it seems to give rise to this other feeling of being unsettled.”
You can find the clip on YouTube, appropriately titled “Wolf Creek campfire scene – psycho look.” It ends with Jarratt breaking the tension in an even more unsettling way, with his now infamous laugh.
The facial expressions, the laugh, the overall feeling of dread you get just from hearing Mick talk, are all tiny pieces of a puzzle designed to generate fear that Jarratt and Greg McLean worked painstakingly hard to piece together.
“[On Mick’s laugh] I spent months working on it,” Jarratt said.
“I told Greg McLean that I wanted to find a chuckle that was like the Jaws music - something that’s recognisable as a laugh but when you hear it… you know sh** is going to hit the fan.”
There’s another intangible but terrifying element to Mick Taylor that Wolf Creek leans into.
He feels eerily…real.
According to Jarratt, that’s because he IS real. Or at least based on a real person.
Just not the one everyone thinks.
“I studied up on psychopaths leading up to the role, including Ivan Milat. Everyone compares them, but Mick’s nothing like Milat.”
“Mick is actually an impersonation of my father – or at least his mannerisms. I just added some psychopath into the mix.
“He was this tough as teak bloke from the bush – a coal miner – and in fights all his life. He took no prisoners. But he was also a very funny man, and so is Mick.
“If he wasn’t a psychopath, he’d a be fun bloke to be around at the pub!”
Not everyone is fond of Mick Taylor.
His cold-blooded and creative brand of cruelty has horrified as many audience members over the years as it’s thrilled.
Dr Harrison explains that research into recreational fear has indicated there could be a sweet spot in scaring people, where the audience is sufficiently thrilled but not so frightened they’re unable to enjoy the release of tension.
“We need our emotional fear response to be triggered, but not to the extent that it overrides our other emotions.
“And different people have different sweet spots.”
Jarratt recalls one viewer during a Wolf Creek’s screening who fell firmly in the ‘too scared’ basket.
“I was at the Melbourne premiere and there's a girl in front of me who is not handling it at all, she's watching it through her fingers,” Jarratt said.
“And along comes the scene where I sever the spine with the knife and she makes this terrified noise and turns her head to get away from it – and looks right at me! (laughs) There was all this screaming going on.”
But as evidenced by sequels (the third instalment Wolf Creek: Legacy is slated for release in 2026), a streaming series, and the hundreds of Mick Taylor fans who’ve approach Jarratt over the years… for a lot of people Wolf Creek does hit that sweet spot.
So why do some of us love watching horror movies? What is it about watching a maniac charge around the bush and killing for sport, that people enjoy?
“I think it's primitive,” Jarratt said.
“It’s the same reason people go on roller coasters. You get that primitive fear of falling off a cliff, without the horrible splatter at the bottom. Every instinct in your body is telling you you're about to be turned into a squashed version of yourself. But you don't.
“With horror films, you experience the feeling that these characters are going through, and it feels explicit and realistic. You get to feel what it's like to be shot by a psychopath, without being shot by a psychopath.”
Dr Harrison said that kind of thinking is very much in line with current conversations in the psychological sciences field.
“Ultimately, as scared as we are in the cinema, we know that Mick is not going to jump off the screen and attack us, so it allows us to simulate those incredibly negative emotions and maybe it helps us understand ourselves better.
“It's a safe space for us to explore very dark topics; a form of morbid curiosity.
“I'm constantly trying to convince people to see scary movies, because I do think there is something cathartic about being scared… and then leaving it at that cinema, going home and getting on with your life.”
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