Tag: ESIC

Why has it become so difficult to spot who’s the villain in Disney films?

Why has it become so difficult to spot who’s the villain in Disney films?

January 15, 2020

This is a guest post from Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, originally posted on the Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture blog. Read his article, co-authored with Sarah Helene Schmidt, in ESIC 3.2: “Disney’s Shifting Visions of Villainy from the 1990s to the 2010s: A Biocultural Analysis.”

Disney’s animated villains have always been wholly and irredeemably evil, with very few exceptions. They care for nothing but money and power and relish the suffering of pretty much anyone but themselves.

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

The Psychology, Geography, and Architecture of Horror: How Places Creep Us Out

October 7, 2019

This is an Open Access article by Francis T. McAndrew (Knox College), from the forthcoming issue of Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, Vol. 4.1. ESIC 4.1 will be available in 2020.

Why do some types of settings and some combinations of sensory information induce a sense of dread in humans? This article brings empirical evidence from psychological research to bear on the experience of horror, and explains why the tried-and-true horror devices intuitively employed by writers and filmmakers work so well. Natural selection has favored individuals who gravitated toward environments containing the “right” physical and psychological features and avoided those which posed a threat. Places that contain a bad mix of these features induce unpleasant feelings of dread and fear, and therefore have become important ingredients of the settings for horror fiction and films.