10 Tricks Horror Movies Use To Scare You

We as humans are programmed to fear things that are unlike ourselves in nature and appearance, a left-over evolutionary preconception that used to protect us from things like snakes or big cats in the wild.

Part of this includes the way things move, which means that even if a monster looks like a human, it will still strike fear in our heart if it moves in a way we can’t reconcile our schema with. A fantastic famous example of this is the ‘crawling down the stairs’ clip from genre favourite The Exorcist. People all over the world still cringe as they watch Regan descend the staircase in a crab-walk; the clip still drums up feelings of unease and disgust even decades after it was first released.

Things like this prove that a monster doesn’t have to be gory or alien-looking, it just needs to have something about it that is eerily removed from humanity. Of course it does help to look a bit gross, taking Gabriel from the recent James Wan flick Malignant, for example. His face is all sorts of messed up but the creepiest thing about him by far is how his joints appear to move in the opposite way than they should.