5

Soundtracks Fuck You Up In Ways You Barely Notice

Movie scores began back in the silent era, as a means to drown out the sound of the projector and get the audience to shut the hell up. But they've come a long way since then. After all, can you imagine Star Wars without John Williams' triumphant score? Or Deep Blue Sea without LL Cool J's song about how he's basically a shark himself because he's wearing a fun hat?

Ironically, as they become more sophisticated, soundtracks have also evolved to tap into the more primitive side of our brain. Take the shower scene from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which may have terrorized a generation and likely caused a huge societal surge in BO, but is still nothing without the music.

Paramount Pictures
If you don't believe us, watch this while listening to this.

4

Movies Trick Our Brains Into Accepting Stunt Doubles

TriStar Pictures

Since stunt work is far too dangerous to risk the precious resource that is our nation's movie stars, productions often utilize stunt doubles, subbing out the delicate actor for a skilled professional whose life is presumably meaningless in comparison to that of a celebrity. That means that for a good chunk of the running time, the person you're watching on the screen isn't the star you paid to see, but rather some anonymous dope in a wig.

Summit Entertainment/Yahoo UK Movies Features
Team Gerald 4ever.

3

Suspenseful Movies Make Our Brains Turn Off The Outside World

We all know that feeling. You popped in an episode of Breaking Bad, and the next thing you knew, you were jobless, surrounded by a Stonehenge-esque monument made of pizza boxes, and knee-deep in your own feces, wondering what the hell happened to the time. Suspense-filled shows and movies seem to have a way of drawing you in, making you forget about the reality of the world, not unlike most cable news shows.

"Ugh, get your shit together, Jessica Jones."

Well, it turns out that this is a measurable phenomenon. Recruiting a bunch of test subjects presumably looking for a research project that didn't involve shooting lasers at their genitals, a cognitive psychologist at Georgia Tech studied the effects of suspense movies on the human brain. The experiment called for subjects to be shoved into an MRI machine to study their brain patterns as they watched different movie scenes -- mostly from the oeuvre of master of suspense / torturer of women Alfred Hitchcock. The scenes were bordered by a flickering checkerboard pattern -- it was kind of like watching a video while simultaneously playing chess after you ingested your weight in mushrooms.

To simulate the effect, kindly spin your monitor around for five minutes.

2

Movies Make Us Emotional Because Our Brains Are Gullible As Hell

New Line Cinema

When you think about it, the fact that movies even work on us is pretty weird. How can a two-dimensional image of a bunch of strangers trick your brain into thinking you're going on some kind of adventure? Why do we laugh at comedies? Why do we cry when, in real life, you clearly don't give a shit that the lady in The Notebook has Alzheimer's? It wouldn't have any effect on your life if George Bailey tossed himself off that bridge and widowed his wife on Christmas. So why all the emotion?

Paramount Pictures
Seriously, fuck that guy.

It turns out that movies are exploiting something our brains evolved to do. According to neuroscientist Jeffrey M. Zacks, your brain "treats what it's seeing on the screen as if it were real," the gullible sap. More to the point, in what he calls the "mirror rule" humans are compelled to behave how those around us do. Unless you're some kind of sociopath, when someone cries, you yourself become sad. If someone's laughing, you're likely to join in, even if you only overheard the end of the joke and have no idea what's so funny. It's how humans have evolved not to seem like total D-bags when interacting with others.

1

The Polar Express Sucked Because We Instinctively Fear Death

Warner Bros.

The Uncanny Valley (as we've covered in the past) may sound like a shitty D&D campaign or an annoyingly trendy dream pop band, but it is in fact the term we've assigned to the creepy way something can look almost human, but not quite. This is why most androids are terrifying and Disney World's Hall of Presidents seem like they're going put aside partisan politics to leap into the audience and stab you in the face.

Walt Disney World
It was a mistake to equip them with realistic balls.

But easily the best example of the Uncanny Valley in cinema is The Polar Express, the story of a boy's trip to the North Pole to see Santa as told by a screensaver-like animation of a bunch of characters who vaguely look like hollow shells of Tom Hanks. Society as a whole seemed creeped out by this movie, but probably didn't understand why. Well, here's a fun explanation: What's the ultimate thing that looks like a person, but isn't alive? Dead people.

Yep, a lot of researchers have theorized that the human horror of the Uncanny Valley is linked to our fear of the sick, or even corpses. We evolved to fear corpses because they're packed with diseases, and we had to learn to avoid potential carriers of that stuff.

Warner Bros.
Or conductors, if you will.

Even putting aside our fear of catching sickness from dead people, remember that we also fear plain old death. Scholars believe that Uncanny Valley inhabitants can "elicit fear because they can provide a conscious or subconscious reminder of death." So the next time you're forced to sit through The Polar Express with your family during the Christmas season, remember that the reason Tom Hanks is so freaky is because your brain is telling you he's a festering corpse, and to stay the hell away. Hopefully, psychologists can now turn their attention to even greater mysteries, like why the fuck do elf versions of Aerosmith show up at the end of this movie. Seriously, why did that happen?

Warner Bros.
He looks more alive than the real Steve Tyler, but that's not saying a lot.

Also check out 4 Flawed Life Lessons Movies Accidentally Taught Us and 6 Mind-Blowing Easter Eggs Hidden In Famous Movies.

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