What’s your favorite scary movie?
Whether it’s a grotesque slasher like Halloween, a highbrow haunting like The Shining or a family-friendly spookfest like Goosebumps, there’s a good chance that it centers around relatable characters encountering perilous safety hazards and experiencing severe injury, death or something even weirder. That’s why, in addition to being a fun spooky-season activity, watching scary movies can be an entertaining way to exercise an effective safety tool: looking at others for patterns that increase risk.
Just like watching someone speed up and down a ladder can remind you to avoid rushing and maintain three points of contact when doing the same thing, watching movies and TV can be moments of free learning. Human factors are at the heart of storytelling, and when it comes to seeing how dangerous they can be, horror stories can sometimes be the most instructive.
The 1996 slasher classic Scream is a perfect example. Set in the fictional town of Woodboro, the film follows a set of high schoolers as they are terrorized by a movie-obsessed killer in a ghostface mask. Unlike ghost stories or weird tales of the paranormal, every hazard that the teens in Scream have to face is based in the real world, meaning that what we see on screen, however improbable, could feasibly happen to us. And if that’s got the hairs on your neck standing up, it’s already working. You’re feeling fear, a powerful human factor at the heart of horror.
The fear factor
Fear is a natural response to the unknown. When we encounter something we don’t understand, it can feel threatening to our sense of order, and we naturally react to that threat by making quick assumptions in order to restore a sense of equilibrium. When hazards are present, assumptions can be dangerous, causing us to rush, focus on the wrong thing, enter the line of fire, or lose our balance, traction and grip. That’s what makes fear such a useful tool for the killer in Scream, who turns human factors against his first victim, Drew Barrymore’s Casey.
Most preventable injuries happen at home, and that’s where we find Casey in the beginning minutes of Scream. It’s night, so she’s probably already tired, and she’s alone (or so she thinks), waiting for her boyfriend Steve and popping some popcorn on her parents’ gas stove. Receiving a phone call from a mysterious stranger, she leaves the popcorn unattended, which should be a big red flag for us viewers. Whether it’s the late hour or the complicity of being at home, Casey is already in a state that makes her prone to taking her eyes and mind off task. The caller soon reveals himself to be a stalker and begins threatening Casey, who makes a number of assumptions that lead her to her death, clutching the phone until her final breath. By the time her parents get home, she’s become the film’s first victim and the house is filled with smoke from the blazing popcorn.
The first sequence in Scream is an example of how human factors can pile up, multiplying the threats facing us. If we want to learn from the on-screen sacrifice of Casey, the lesson is to address how we respond to the fear of the unknown. According to Joshua N. Raub, a pharmacist writing for the medical journal PubMed, our response to the unknown can either sharpen or blunt our intuition. “The important factor is whether the fear motivates or paralyzes your efforts to learn.”
Raub cautions against forming opinions instead of taking time to learn the truth about a situation. While it’s too late for Casey, if you are afraid of an as-yet-unknown hazard wreaking havoc at your home on a dark night, an antidote to that fear can be learning about how human factors lead to critical errors, and some of the measures you can take to preventing them from burning your popcorn … or worse.
Leading indicators for horror movie protagonists
Watching others for patterns of risk, especially in the context of a horror movie, will inevitably lead you to some conclusions about what characters should and shouldn’t do if they want to stay alive. This instinct is reflected in Scream’s most enduring scene, in which the character Randy Meeks, played by Jaime Kenedy, lays out his three rules for surviving a horror movie: never have sex, never take drugs or drink alcohol, and never say “I’ll be right back.”
Randy distilled these rules after watching for patterns in countless horror flicks, and given the killer’s known love of movies, it makes sense that they would be useful during the house party that provides Scream’s climactic setting. But rules like Randy’s make the assumption that horror movie victims commit those cinematic sins on purpose rather than as a subconscious reaction to a variety of human factors they might be experiencing. A better way to mitigate the damage done as a result of those rule infractions would be to set some effective leading indicators that adhere to OSHA’s SMART acronym: Specific, Measurable, Accountable, Reasonable, and Timely.
The good news is that Randy has already identified his goal, which is to prevent deaths resulting from horror movie rule infractions. SMART leading indicators will help him observe trends indicating the likelihood of those infractions, and allow for intervention. As an example: if Randy wants to prevent alcohol and drug use at a house party that he expects the killer to attend, he can set up a reporting system in which participants report their stress levels before, during and after school for a few days. If he notices that stress and fatigue is increasing, he can stage interventions to alleviate those human factors before the party, making folks less likely to imbibe when trying to unwind in the presence of Woodsboro’s masked terror.
With a hazard like Ghostface on the loose, Randy’s data-driven mind can be a major asset when it comes to staying safe. Sadly, as an unpopular teenager with no authority to put a system in place to track his peers’ leading indicators, he really can only keep himself safe. But when it comes to your facility, whether it’s a movie villain or a more common form of hazardous energy, leading indicators can give you the insights you need to keep people safe when things get scary.
Blame can’t prevent sequels
A side effect of having rules like Randy’s in place is that they open the door to blame. And horror movies like Scream show us just how tempting blame can be when fear is at play. Whether it’s from hindsight or the privileged perspective of being an audience member, distance from an incident can make its numerous contributing factors seem more obvious to us than they did to the people involved. When we point to a victim in Scream and declare, “They shouldn’t have said they’d be right back,” we imply that we would have known better in their situation. But that’s a comforting myth. The characters on screen don’t know they’re in a horror movie so they can’t possibly see the errors they are making. And as we saw from Casey’s demise at the beginning of the film, most of the time it’s not our conscious actions that contribute to our gravest errors. Instead, it’s the human factors that influence our subconscious.
Blaming the victims of the ghostface killer in Scream does nothing to prevent his rampage. And in fact, blaming the killer doesn’t do much either. Like all the best movie monsters, Ghostface has a penchant for returning, again and again, to prey on young people by exploiting their assumptions and expectations. There are five sequels and counting in the Scream franchise, and while they all end in pointing the finger at the people behind the mask, the carnage continues, betraying a deeper cultural element at play.
So next time you’re watching a scary movie and the fear strikes you, instead of pointing at your TV and yelling, “Don’t go in there,” remember that it’s not their fault. And while the people you’re watching may be doomed, a critical mind and an understanding of human factors can keep you safe on this side of the screen. Happy Halloween!