The Sixth Sense

The Sixth Sense is one of the most popular movie, even today. It is one of the most classic horror movie , however, it is a horror movie that does not uses Computer Generated Images (CGI) that most horror movie today uses to create scary images to scare the audience. The sixth sense uses more of makeup and the ambiance as well as music to capture the attention of the audience and scare them. The movie was very good and at some point pretty scary. Hence, this grabbed my attention. I am curious on why am I feel this feeling of fear from just a movie and I know that the contents of the movie isn't real but my body goes into an automatic response of fight/ flight.

Hence, I did a little researching on fear from a evolutionary perspective, according to Boyer and Bergstrom (2011) and Marks and Nesse (1994), fear is a defense mechanism of humans to detect dangers, thus, the fight and flight system triggers subconsciously trying to protect him/herself from potential dangers. However, this does not the answer of why people are afraid of a movie which in logical sense, it does not threaten anyone's safety but why is the flight or fight mechanism still triggered. 

According to (Marks & Nesse, 1994), evolutionary research found that fear takes root from our ancestors, somehow fear can be inherit from our ancestors through memories in our DNA or cultures. That explains, why in general people are afraid of snakes or spiders as it is a threat back in our ancestors time. While, Ghost or horror movie does not post any threat but the idea of a ghost or supernatural phenomenon scares people in general because there is a lot of uncertainty and unknown. People are afraid of the unknown because it is a problem for an individual to predict or understand whether there is any threat that might come to them. It is very interesting that even a movie that seems harmless can tell us a lot of our ancestry roots in a evolutionary psychology perspective. 

References

Boyer, P., & Bergstrom, B. (2011). Threat-detection in child development: An evolutionary perspective. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 35(4), 1034-1041. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.08.010

Marks, I., & Nesse, R. (1994). Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology And Sociobiology, 15(5-6), 247-261. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0162-3095(94)90002-7