Creepy Places

Sensing Psychopathy & the Anatomy of Creepy Places

“Please. Don’t do this.”

The manager’s final plea before Mike Enslin entered 1408.

Arguably my favourite horror movie, 1408 feeds into both my love for horror and my obsession with how spaces can mess with our mind.

In last week’s issue, I brushed upon the difference between scary and creepy.

Where some places make us feel afraid, there are others that make us feel uneasy — the "something’s not quite right here" feeling.

Creepiness lingers. It makes our skin crawl.

It got me thinking about the anatomy of a creepy place — what exactly is it in an environment that can give us the heebie jeebies?

I refuse to believe that horror movie characters are inherently as dumb as they act. We try to warn them not to open that closet, and to go somewhere more public, and to believe their friend who clearly has superior instincts. But they rarely listen.

And as much as we like to believe that we’re smarter, our spidey sense isn’t always reliable.

You ever wonder if after we die we’ll get to pan away from our 1st person perspective & rewatch our life on the big screen?

We'd get to observe all the times when we went to a catastrophic event.

We’d watch ourselves open the door to that crappy motel we stayed at that one time in order to save some cash.

We’d shout at ourselves on the screen, “don’t go in there, you idiot. What are you thinking”.

“I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason.”

― Stanley Baldwin

One of my least favourite tropes in horror movies is the thinker vs the feeler protagonists — where evolution has awarded the feeler with a well honed survival instinct, the clueless thinker looks at them with contempt and always manages to persuade them that they’re irrational.

It’s known as the Cassandra Truth trope.

In Greek mythology, Cassandra was gifted psychic powers by a god who wanted sexual favours in return. But after seeing his dark future, she reneged on their deal. Offended and infuriated, the god then cursed her to live a life full of honest visions that no one would believe.

Just like Cassandra, our gut instincts often fall victim to our curse of logic.

We walk into a place. We feel that something’s off. But because we can’t put our finger on it, we proceed to enter into a den of danger.

Dissecting the anatomy of what makes a place creepy is our way of understanding why we’re likely catching a bad vibe.

Here are 10 elements that make an environment feel creepy.

1. Temperature drops. A common symptom of exposure to creepiness is getting goosebumps and the chills. In a study conducted in 2012, researchers from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands learned that participants who felt creeped out also tended to feel colder and to believe that the temperature in the room had actually dropped. 🔗 / link / So spaces that can simulate those physical reactions (like those with infrequent temperature fluctuations) might be more likely to give us the creeps.
2. Sketchy pasts. In 2013, Frank McAndrew, professor of psychology at Knox College in Illinois, and graduate student Sara Koehnke conducted a survey asking more than 1,300 people "what is creepy?" They found that one of the biggest predictors of creepiness was a feeling unpredictability. There’s a reason realtors are rarely eager to divulge the unnatural deaths that have occurred in a home.
3. Representations of death. Similar to avoiding conversions around homicide homes, other representations of death tend to creep people out too. Occupations like taxidermists and funeral directors were listed among the creepiest professions in McAndrew and Koehnke’s survey. So spaces with taxidermy aren’t likely to create comforting atmospheres.
4. Clowns. One profession which usurped taxidermists’ and funeral directors’ creepy crown was clowns. So spaces with clown paraphernalia aren’t likely to be big crowd pleasers either.
5. Superstition taunts. The Otis Elevator Company reported that 80 to 90% of the elevators they installed in skyscrapers and large hotels omitted the 13th-floor button. If we dig deep we’ll find a bunch of superstitious architecture accommodations for superstitious tenants. So staying in a suite located on the 13th floor or, even worse, in suite 1408 could trigger our dystopian magical thinking.
6. Non-place loneliness. A common theme found in the creepy genre is a separation from others while they’re still in view. In shows like Courage the Cowardly Dog and movies like 1408, the main characters often find themselves in scenarios where salvation seems just out of reach. They’re on a deserted island with a view of the bustling world around them.
7. Uncanny familiarity. Some spaces give us that “something is not quite right here” feeling. It’s a similar feeling to what I described in my last issue on The Paradox of Non-Places. “They are the airports, the hospitals, and the malls where we would feel lonely and creeped out if we weren’t surrounded by other people.” They feel familiar, but the something in its context is out of place.
8. Distant / inaccessible escape. When the exit is all the way across an unfamiliar dark hallway most of us would have to hype ourselves up to find the confidence to start walking.
9. Surveillance. It’s easy to feel on edge when we’re either being watched or we just think we’re being watched. An old portrait painting whose eyes seem to track us across a room is a sure fire way to get some goosebumps.
10. Men. Finally, McAndrew and Koehnke’s survey found that both men and women believed that men were far more likely to be creepy than women. So according to the general population, stick a man in a room and you’ve just upped its chance of feeling creepy 🤷🏽‍♂️