What Seizures Can Tell Us About Horror Movie Music

Jody Smith on How Music Affected His Brain and Epilepsy

Horror Music/Brain Relationship

Try to imagine yourself watching a horror movie. A handful of panicking adventurers are walking through a dark hallway, deep inside a spooky tomb. They are moving slowly and silently to not awaken the resident monsters. What sounds are most impactful for the viewer in that moment? The background music would usually just be a stable tone, with any modulation serving to increase the tension. If the music rises in pitch, you anticipate something happening without on-screen cues. Our adventurers are walking, completely ignorant of the impending doom that the music has cued you in on. In fact, the high-pitched tone that movies use to get us shivering is thought to activate the same genetically hardwired response pathways that a wailing child invokes.

But what really gets us jumping out of our seats is the sudden percussive sounds. Suddenly, one of the ignorant adventurers stumbles into an artifact and accidentally knocks it over. The sound of the crashing artifact is enhanced by the deep slamming of drums. The sound might be enhanced with the suddenly audible percussive beat of a heart, which triggers our pulse to quicken. We know that sudden slam we heard did not result in a death, but we’re prepared for the inevitable doom of the monster coming out to consume our adventurers. Something bad is about to happen, so although we’re preparing for the next slamming sound that signals that the funny guy is dead, we’re never actually ready. We still always jump, despite knowing that the movie sound has no impact on our own safety at all.

Despite being certain that there is no real danger, you find your body jumping to react to some imaginary threat that your consciousness is certain isn’t even there. Neurology can illuminate the mechanics behind this phenomenon. The tension buildup has activated our right amygdala, which is the part of our brain dedicated to harm avoidance. The sudden sound is processed in your auditory cortex, which sends a signal to your right amygdala: “SUDDEN LOUD!” To which your amygdala simply assumes “SUDDEN LOUD BAD” and initiates an immediate physical response. Before your evolved brain knows what’s happening, your reptilian brain has begun the “fight or flight” response. Movies are able to manipulate that mechanism to get us to jump in our seats by simply providing context to music. We have to have some tension in order to build us up into being scared.

Contrast the horror context to an epic battle scene where our hero is casually knocking enemies aside with his gigantic hammer. With no tension built up to get us scared, we could hear the same slamming noise as a hero swings his war hammer, killing the bad guys, and we certainly aren’t jumping in fear. Similarly, what would dubstep’s drop be without the context of the buildup?

Seizure Phenomena

My epileptic focal seizures made me feel like the main character of a horror movie, music included. My seizures consisted entirely of emotional sensations, so I didn’t even know that I was having seizures at all. All I knew was that, sometimes, the drums in my favorite songs would briefly feel more impactful than usual. The beat would suddenly catch my full attention, almost as if the beat were the thumping of an approaching monster. I told myself that this experience must simply be an anxiety attack. I learned later that this brief sensation was actually an epileptic seizure in my right temporal lobe. Those seizures followed that same neurological pathway that horror movie music plays like a fiddle. With the right amygdala overstimulated by my seizures, my fight or flight reaction would begin and I would feel the same tension. That tension would trigger my auditory cortex to hone in on potential threats in my environment. That’s all the context my brain needed to make any percussive sound into a threat. Even the percussive sound of the drums beating in my favorite music was threatening enough to call my attention. I didn’t know why I was so focused on and impacted by percussive sounds; I just was.

Seizure Trigger

Eventually, my brain seemed to learn that percussive sounds were bad. That same music that caught my attention would go so far as to trigger a seizure. I would be driving and listening to the Ting Tings list the set of labels and names which are, in fact, not her name, and the percussion would suddenly become as impactful as the thumps of an approaching T-Rex. The episodes were so consistent that, when my doctors asked me to demonstrate a seizure for observation, I opened up Spotify and asked Skrillex to overstimulate my brain. He, of course, loudly obliged.

Noisy neighbors that were once a simple nuisance became a threat to my health. When my downstairs neighbors blasted the latest top 40 songs, the bass and percussion were all I could hear. That might have been a mild annoyance for some, but for me, those sounds were the perfect way to trigger seizures. While Drake and Rihanna were arguing over who was indeed “Too Good” to whom, all I heard was the thumping of the T-Rex downstairs. The isolated percussion frequently triggered my amygdala enough to kick off a seizure. By then, I had clearly understood that the monster wasn’t real, but I couldn’t manage to convince my amygdala.

Surgery

Ultimately, I opted for surgery to resolve my seizures. With the help of a neurosurgeon, I had 10% of my brain removed, including the entire right amygdala. I came out of surgery mostly unchanged, except for the gaping hole that is the lack of anxiety. My right amygdala was entirely gone, so my brain could no longer process the anxiety that once was both the cause and effect of the seizures. Thus, in the two years since surgery, I have not had a single seizure. I can now proudly stare a speaker in the face as it blasts “Old Town Road” and all the bass that comes with it. It’s music again, and I proudly stare into flashing lights and thumping bass to prove that I’m me again.

— Jody Smith