The Independent from London, Greater London, England • 44

44 45THE INDEPENDENT Friday 31 OctOber 2014Friday 31 OctOber 2014 THE INDEPENDENT letting imagination go to work in terms of shadows and in the shadows, lurking, in the unknown. always con- tended that what we can shoot is never going to be as scary as what people can Here, Drs Sinclair and Walker with the help of Greg Buzwell, the co-curator of The Brit- ish Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination exhibition, explain why horror tropes terrify: The Isolated Cabin settings are perfect for horror says Buzwell. old castle, remote cabin and the creepy mansion immediately put you back into the past and a more superstitious age; taking you away from modern comforts and easy communication with friends and neighbours. The isolation heightens the sense of fear, while old, dark houses are, by their very nature, full of shadows and dark corners. Hor- ror films with modern settings often work well Alien, for example, is a superb in movie but castles and creepy iso- lated mansions have atmosphere in Dr Sinclair adds: inherently feel safer when connected to others, and in evolutionary terms, our sense of safety was very dependent on packs, groups.

We know less likely to survive alone, and so films exploring isolation, being cut off and removed from all we know really threaten our sense of The Possessed Child The Babadook, a box-office and critical tri- umph this year, occupies the familiar territo- ry of a hallucinatory child, with echoes of The Shining (1980), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Others (2001). One function of horror is to reinforce notions of good and evil and sometimes this is best achieved by subverting the most cherished of societal ide- als, such as the inherent goodness of children. children feature very strongly in Gothic Buzwell says. is something about innocence cor- rupted that is particularly disturbing it runs counter to all our safe and civilised views of the world. Evil in adults is, sadly, all too com- mon, but evil in children still has the power to genuinely shock.

We, as adults, always feel protective towards children. The idea that we may actually need protecting from them is deeply disturbing and a gift for novelists and a complete contradic- tion to our belief Dr Sinclair agrees. The Evil Doll The demonic doll from last smash The Conjuring, who also gets an airing in this Annabelle, is a direct descendant of Chucky from Play (1988), who in turn is the progeny of Hugo, the dummy in Dead of Night. hugely disturbing to watch cherished childhood sym- bols like dolls, books or toys subverted into a sinister Dr Sinclair says. are images that conventionally comfort and reassure, and it really challenges our assumed sense of safety, our nostalgic memories of fun and laughter, confronting us with the idea that we trust them after The reason that such a successful horror device is because we want to be challenged, to be kept on our toes, to be reminded that we trust anything.

always been something compelling and cathartic about plots where trust is betrayed, because we feel like preparing ourselves for future traumas and betrayals by enduring this one, second-guessing future Dr Sin- clair adds. The Bad Clown The fourth series of American Horror Story takes its setting as a 1950s travelling freak show, with a murderous clown as the bogeyman, eerily reminiscent of Stephen 1986 novel (and the 1990 film adaptation) It. The clown is a double whammy of horror: a Ouija boards, demon dolls, evil children and clowns are all classic tropes of horror, and this Halloween releases feature them all. What makes them so frightening, decade after decade? a a a asks the experts to explain why some things just stay scary that not everyone found maths fun, and he gets why. very easy to be put off if you miss a bit or have a year with a really boring teacher.

It can scar you for he says. But Parker kept on loving it, as well as science, later becom- ing a member of his titration team (the competitive analysis of acids is a thing in Australia, apparently). A degree in maths and physics followed, before a move to London to teach. Parker is now the Public Engagement in Mathematics Fellow at Queen Mary, University of London. A few years ago, he took a stand-up comedy course and discovered a growing market for geeky laughs.

He joined the London circuit and in 2011 co-founded the Festival of the Spo- ken Nerd porn for the as one reviewer put it). also part of the insanely popular Numberphile YouTube channel, also launched in 2011, which has a million subscribers and almost 100 million video views. most popular clip is a 13-minute exploration of the number zero that has been viewed 1.3 million times. has been a huge resurgence of maths as he says. great, because once we change that culture of maths and science as things to be endured at school, we can enjoy and celebrate them as incredibly As we leave to meet the photographer, Parker pulls from his bag a scarf made up of rows and rows of ones and zeros.

mother knitted it for he says. all in binary code each row is a letter. Some digits tell you the position in the alphabet, and the others tell you if upper or lower So what does it say? IS FUN, KEEP DOING Mum knits like she Comedian and mathematician Matt Parker takes i on a fun-filled trip to the Science Museum to talk about his first book and why proud of his square roots stand-up and be counted Go figure: Matt Parker, wearing the binary code scarf knitted by his mother TErI PENgIllEy i childhood symbol subverted which taps into the idea of the ie that something looks almost right, and almost safe, but not quite. element of disguise, not being able to judge emotions and, there- fore, their intentions toward us is inher- ently Dr Sinclair says. Clowns and masks have the capacity to provoke fear because their make-up conceals their true fa- cial emotions, thus thwarting our instinctual desire to read other minds through their faces.

cripples our ability to judge our security in a Dr Sinclair says. The Hicks in the Sticks The Last House on the Left and more recently Eden Lake all rely on media rep- resentations of a class or community that we understand, where we Dr Walker says. The message is brutal: civi- lised society as we know it is a fairly weak, flimsy construct, and we need to stray too far out of our comfort zone to find a bunch of crazed yokels out to get us. very threat- ening to us as animals to find ourselves out of society, isolated the unknown, the sense of being a fish out of water, being unfamiliar with the rules in this new place: this all taps into a very primal fear about our place in Dr Sinclair adds. The Ouija Board really takes flight in the 1850s and 1860s, partly in response to increasing doubts about the existence of God (and thus in an afterlife).

Ouija boards and seances attempted to fill the gap in a world rendered mechanistic by the theories of people like Charles Buzwell says. that sense of needing to know what follows death is a universal concern. I think a lot of films and books about ghosts and spirits really feed into our fear of the unknown, and perhaps death, and what may lie beyond death, is the greatest unknown of the sum oF all Fears i It is a seemingly perverse instinct: paying £12 to enter a darkened room and be subjected to images specifically engineered to terrify you for 90 minutes. The good news is that you a masochist, or (worse) a sadist. The allure of horror movies stems from an entirely natural impulse, honed by millions of years of evolutionary psychology.

Fear keeps us alive and competitive as a spe- cies, compelling us to avoid danger and antici- pate attack, making us fearful of pain, afraid of death, and cautious of the unknown. pumped full of adrenalin and cortisol during a horror says Dr Michael Sinclair, the clinical director at City Psychology Group. or impulse kicks in, our amygdala becomes very active and our heart races. Afterwards, we can feel a genuine sense of But fear can also perform a social function, by reinforcing behaviours that are biologi- cally advantageous, making us wary of outside threats, and prohibiting against socially deviant acts, such as murder and incest. Looking at this crop of Halloween- hooked horror releases, which include a demonic doll, a haunted book, a Ouija board and subter- ranean ghosts, the plots are almost touchingly familiar.

And all the more terrifying for it. Because a successful horror relies on the interplay between the familiar and the unknown. tion or intertextual referencing weaken a horror premise or explains Dr Johnny Walker, the author of Contemporary Brit- ish Horror Cinema: Industry, Genre Society. the familiarity, the force of repetition, the self-referential nature of horror, that reassures us that safe during this James Watkins, the British director whose recent films include The Woman in Black (2012) and the hicks-in-the-sticks nightmare Eden Lake (2008), says that many recent horror films have been gory and nasty. I use these words in a pejorative sense at all but this necessarily the same thing as scary.

Scary is If there were any doubt about the scale of Matt geekiness, consider the way he met and married his wife, Lucie. was running a physics summer school at Imperial College and I was running the programming Parker says. heard a rumour that there was a guy outside who had a watch that told the time in binary. I was that The couple got hitched last July, with wed- ding rings made from an iron-nickel meteorite that had crashed into Arizona tens of thousands of years earlier. have a structure that can only form if the alloy cools over millions of years with no gravity, so you know it have formed on he adds.

Parker, who says that the US sitcom The Big Bang Theory is true to is infectiously enthusiastic about science but particularly maths a subject that he is help- ing to yank from the airless classroom of your memory and revive it for the digital age. To discuss his new book about numbers, published this week, he has offered to take me on a tour of the Science maths and comput- ing room. We meet at the museum in London the day before the Queen popped in to open a new exhi- bition about communication. She made head- lines by using an iPad to send her first tweet. Parker, who is 33, wants to look at the machines that made that possible.

Charles five- tonne difference engine, built in 2002 accord- ing to his 1822 plans, stands as a testament to Victorian, brass-cog ingenuity. this does is trivial compared with what your phone can do, but with com- puters you can never see the Parker says. someone tweets, maths is or complaining about it, they see all the maths going on in their phone and the networks that make that tweet The shrinking of maths into microscopic chips has combined, Parker says, with bad teaching to make it acceptable to dismiss the subject. the one thing still allowed to be proud of being bad he says as we pass a cabinet containing half of brain. one walks around saying, terrible at reading I just read or but people are almost proud of being ignorant of this huge achievement of humankind, the discipline that underpins our Parker, a wants to change that and is part of a growing com- munity of self-avowed geeks who use YouTube and even comedy nights to preach maths to huge audiences.

His book, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, seeks to recon- nect us to the numbers around us with a series of stealth lessons dressed up as tricks, games and puzzles. In chapter 12, to build a Parker does so, to visualise the ever-shrinking circuits that replaced cogs cal- culated a way to make simple circuits using chains of 10,000 he explains. you line them up the right way you can build circuits that can do basic calculations. incredibly slow and hugely inefficient, but you can see Over at the calculator display, Parker looks nostalgically at the 1979 Little Professor, that yellow-and-brown device with a moustache that your show-off friend had at school. Growing up in Perth in Australia, he never got the memo about maths being boring.

dad is an accountant so brainwashed me from a young he says. I even went to school, he would bring me maths activity books as a When he did get to school, Parker realised send in the clowns: masks and make-up conceal true facial expressions, thwarting our instinct to read minds through their faces, as seen in rEx Ouija board meeting: seances are a hangover from Victorian spiritualism Chucky: bad dolls challenge our assumed sense of safety Sweet evil: possessed children subvert societal ideals, as seen in.