By: Belousov Gleb Scary Movie Project

While watching the movie Get Out, I experienced multiple psychological principles of

sensation and perception. The two first principles I experienced were top-down

processing and perceptual set. Because of my perceptual set which, among other

experiences that I have, include the common knowledge that often the black

character in a horror movie will die first, I was always afraid that the main black

character of the film may die at any moment. I experienced Top-down processing

since the knowledge that I had before watching the film created fear in me.

There is another thing in the film that used multiple psychological principles of

sensation to scare me. These were jump scares and similar tricks used in horror

movies like slow apparitions of something hiding in the dark, so the viewer can

barely see it. Firstly, jump scares scared me and caught my attention by surprise. My

attention was concentrated on the jump scare because I wasn’t expecting it,

therefore I was in a state of perceptual arousal. Also, I noticed that I was less aware

of things surrounding me when my attention was concentrated on a jump scare. The

principle of selective attention explains why this happened. According to this

principle, even if a gorilla appeared in my room at that moment, I wouldn’t notice

it(1). What concerns the slow apparitions of something hiding in the dark, this

method that is used in cinema scared me using signal detection, difference threshold

and subliminal stimuli. The first and the last worked in pairs since I was able to notice

the thing hiding in the dark at one specific point in time which corresponded to my

absolute threshold, and I was scared of this because I knew that this thing was

hiding in the darkness before when I wasn’t aware of it; that the thing in darkness

was a subliminal stimuli before being noticed. Therefore, I was afraid to understand

that the darkness was hiding something unnoticeable to me which is the main reason
people are afraid of the dark, they fear that there are some subliminal stimuli in the

darkness(2). The difference threshold worked differently. In the movie, there were a

few scenes where the charger of the main character was unplugged by someone. It

represented a sufficient change for the main character to understand that someone

is trying to isolate him from the rest of the world. There were other hints to this, but

for Cris Washington, they were below his difference threshold, so they were smaller

than the noticeable difference.

After watching the movie, I noticed that my perception of my surroundings changed.

For instance, the curtains in my dark room began to look like some moving and living

things. I can explain this using the priming and context effects. I watched a horror

movie where there were scenes of scary things hiding in the darkness, therefore I

was predisposed to perceive anything in darkness as a danger which is described by

the priming effect. Also, since it was dark in my room the context was similar to the

contextin the movie, so the same curtain in my room was perceived by me differently

depending on whether there is light in my room or not. This is the context effect.

The last perception effect that affected me when I watched Get Out was visual

capture. While watching this film, I was looking back at my curtains sometimes.

Once, I looked at the curtain because the wind made it move. Simultaneously, one of

the characters marched in the film. I was unable to see the screen at that moment,

so I thought for a moment that the sound of the steps wasn’t coming from my

computer, but from my curtains. I think that it can be explained by the concept of

visual capture because the visual information that indicates the movement of the

curtains made me hear the footsteps from the same direction.

(1) Daniel J. Simons, “The Monkey Business Illusion”, YouTube, 28 April, 2010

(2) “Nyctophobia (Fear of the dark)”, Cleveland Clinic, March 28, 2022
Surroundings :

Me and first scene of the movie: