To generate unease in a creative Halloween or scare type experience you basically attack the senses with an aim to evoke the feeling of unease through one thing, the unknown. Setting a scene for a scare it is the unknown that people “suffer”.

Fear is an emotional response to the threat of danger, harm or pain. In the human body it’s a direct catalyst for a biological dose of adrenaline, gets the heart pumping and clouds the brain receptors into a knee-jerk reaction of ‘fight or flight’ or a shock that freezes you to the floor. Some people thrive on it, others will avoid it like a wet-nosed puppy on a nudist beach.

But for the sake of this creative blog post we’re going to focus on how you best create fear by prompting people to think about the unknown. Important to note we’re not talking about disgust which is a different prospect, a bit more macabre and gruesome – the blood n guts kind of stuff.

Targeting sight. To generate fear through sight (remember, not disgust), you basically deny the viewer a clear view of what might be the threat at hand. Block their vision completely, scare them straight, right? Not entirely. Complete darkness for example, can strike fear but can also generate comfort (meditation, sleep, flotation etc). The masters of fear never deprive you of your full sense of sight, they feed you small nuggets of visual info which upset or deny you the feeling of familiarity in your surroundings. They move or place something in your peripheral vision that doesn’t belong. This makes your mind generate threats from your own unknown outcome, the unease we’re looking for. Usually they’ll drip feed you the visual triggers and build to a crescendo where they’ll go for the final reveal, inducing the shock we talked about earlier. (Blair Witch Project anyone?)

Sound operates along much of the same lines, you deprive the ears of sound to stimulate or heighten the sense. If you remove it completely you lose the unease, it can become relaxing. However, if drip fed small audio queues your mind creates the visual, if this doesn’t match to what you can see, you’ll create an unknown. Or you could simply shock the system with a loud noise (personally I think that’s cheating though, loud noises are a cheap scare!). The beauty of sound is that once you remove sight, sound prompts the mind to paint its own picture, pairing a memory to as close a visual match as it can.

Here’s a perfect short film example of how the two operate in tandem but also independently. If you watch with just sound and no sight, it’s scary. If you watch with just sight and no sound, it’s still scary. If you watch with both, well, give it a spin...

Touch, smell and taste operate more on the physical shock side of fear. You don’t really fear something you might taste or smell, you’re more likely to be disgusted by something unpleasant you have though. Touch fear is a reaction – someone or something taps or grabs you from behind when you weren’t expecting it. Removal of familiarity.

The masters of fear are the ones who manage to deprive you of large chunks of your senses at intermittent intervals, slow feeding you nuggets of information through sight and sound, mixing them up at will and constantly changing the unknown, allowing you to paint your own worse-case-scenario before tearing it up and creating their own.

Well, that’s me sleeping with the light on tonight anyway.

- GC