My recent conversation with Dr. Mathias Clasen on Mind Tricks Radio podcast got me thinking about one of the strangest pleasures in fiction: our fascination with the end of the world. I’ve been especially interested in this topic lately because of the publication of my own post-apocalyptic novel, When Earth Blinked, which is set in Hawaiʻi after a global catastrophe. So speaking with Dr. Clasen, who studies horror, fear, and speculative fiction, gave me a chance to step back and think more broadly about why these stories have such a powerful hold on us.
On the surface, post-apocalyptic stories should repel us. They ask us to imagine plague, collapse, isolation, violence, starvation, moral breakdown, and the loss of everything familiar. And yet we keep returning to them. We read them, watch them, teach them, argue about them, and sometimes even find comfort in them. One reason may be that these stories give shape to our worst-case thinking. Human beings are not just reactive creatures. We anticipate, imagine, simulate, and rehearse. We wonder what would happen if the systems we depend on suddenly disappeared. What if there were no police, no doctors, no grocery stores, no internet, no rules?
There is also a seductive side to collapse. Civilization is wonderful when the plumbing works, the lights turn on, and someone else knows how to fix the sewer. But modern life can also feel cluttered, bureaucratic, alienating, and strangely disconnected from basic human needs. In the post-apocalyptic imagination, everything gets stripped down. Food. Shelter. Trust. Danger. Loyalty. Survival. The genre asks whether life would become more terrible if society collapsed, or in some unsettling way, more authentic. Most of us would not really want to live in a ruined world, but the fantasy of starting over has obvious emotional power.
What makes the best post-apocalyptic fiction work, though, is not the disaster itself. It is the psychological realism underneath it. The plague, zombie outbreak, nuclear event, alien invasion, or ecological catastrophe is usually less important than what people do afterward. Do they become selfish or generous? Do they cling to morality when morality is no longer enforced? Do they form new communities, exploit the weak, protect the vulnerable, or discover parts of themselves they never had to face before? The genre is powerful because it turns human nature up to full volume.
That may also be why frightening fiction can sometimes feel useful rather than merely disturbing. Stories of collapse allow us to practice fear, uncertainty, and moral imagination from a safe distance. They do not simply indulge dread. At their best, they help us think about what matters when everything else falls away. Post-apocalyptic fiction may be about the end of the world, but it is often most deeply concerned with what remains human after the world we know is gone.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kaplan:
Mathias, welcome to the show.
Dr. Clasen:
Thanks so much, Aaron.
Dr. Kaplan:
I’ve been really looking forward to having you on this show. As you know, I just recently published my own novel in the post-apocalyptic genre, so I’m kind of into this subject right now. Somehow your name popped up all the way in Denmark, far away from where I live, as an expert on this field. I am really excited to talk with you about this.
Also, thank you so much for meeting me. I know it’s later over there. It’s about a 12-hour time difference. Thanks so much for staying up and having this interview with me in your evening.
Dr. Clasen:
Not a problem. I’m a bit of a night crawler, so this is actually my prime time.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah, I guess apropos for somebody who studies and researches fear and scary stuff, being a night person makes sense. I saw a bunch of your photos that were really fun, with you posing with zombies and all sorts of crazy stuff. You seem like kind of a fun person.
To start with, I like to get to know my guests a bit more, and you certainly are an interesting one. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you got interested in this subject matter, especially in an academic setting.
Dr. Clasen:
Well, I’m 48 years old and an associate professor in literature and media at Aarhus University. I think I was a pretty scared kid. I remember distinctly being a child and being afraid of everything, not just the things that were around me, but all the things that were in my imagination. This would range. I grew up in the 80s, and I’d be nervous when we had these air raid sirens that would go off once a week to test the system. I was afraid of nuclear bombs. I was afraid of monsters. I was afraid of ghosts. I was afraid of everything.
I did not enjoy being scared. I remember taking home from the library a book of ghost stories, and it scared me so badly I had to flip the book around so I couldn’t look at the cover.
Dr. Kaplan:
Oh no.
Dr. Clasen:
I don’t even remember what was on the cover, but it’s like there’s an episode of Friends, the comedy show, in which Joey reveals that his favorite book is The Shining, and when it gets too scary for him, he will put it in the freezer. I feel him. That was how it was for me.
But then something happened to me, as it does for most people in adolescence, where suddenly I started being oddly attracted to scary stories, horror movies, scary books, and so on. What really turned me on to scary stuff was a TV adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, apropos of the apocalypse. I saw it on a now obsolete medium called a laser disc. You might remember that.
Dr. Kaplan:
I do.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah. I saw The Stand. It’s a six-hour, I think, show on laser disc, and it totally blew my mind. It revealed to me what horror can be and the peculiar imaginative potential, I think, of the what-if, of the wild scenario. And so that, for me, kicked off a lifelong fascination with the fantastic: science fiction, horror, fantasy.
As it turned out, I was fortunate enough and stubborn enough to be able to make a career out of my personal fascination with the peculiar appeal of frightening stories in particular.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. Well, how does that play out? You’re affiliated with and an associate professor at this university. How do you teach this stuff?
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah. Well, so I’m in an English department at Aarhus University. It’s a huge research-intensive university with, I think, 10,000 staff and 40,000 students. But I’m in the English department. And when I get a chance, I will construct elective courses. I just recently taught a course on the American nightmare, looking at horror and literature and movies, especially from the Second World War up until now, and investigating with the students how horror stories index widespread social-cultural anxieties.
I’ve also taught courses on apocalyptic fiction. But sometimes they’ll ask me to teach a course on a literary survey from Beowulf to postmodernism or Shakespeare, so I do whatever I’m asked to do. But occasionally, I get a chance to sneak some horror into it.
Dr. Kaplan:
Does the U.S. sort of have a corner on the market of post-apocalyptic horror types of genre, or do you see that in Europe and other places too, at the same level? That’s a really good question. You just think with Hollywood and our culture, you’re very aware there’s a lot of violence that shows up in our culture. And it kind of makes some sense that we would produce a lot of stories in that area.
But I don’t know if there are European filmmakers—and I know there’s some obviously—but it’d be just kind of an interesting thing. As you mentioned, the nightmare in America, I can’t imagine there’s a nightmare in Denmark type of equivalent, but maybe there is.
Dr. Clasen:
Well, it’s interesting at that sort of national level. We don’t have in Denmark a strong tradition for apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic fiction. But then on the other hand, a lot of people here really love frightening entertainment. And Norway, in contrast, has a very rich tradition for horror movies. And Norway is just about the most affluent, peaceful, safe country you can find. The police officers don’t carry weapons. That’s kind of Norway in a nutshell. And they have this really rich tradition of horror.
So I don’t think there’s necessarily a very direct causal relationship between the sense of crisis or even trust levels in a society and its fascination with horror. But I do think that Anglophone culture, so the U.S., but also the UK and to a certain extent Australia, I think that there’s a really rich tradition there for post-apocalyptic fiction that goes back a hundred years and more. I mean, there’s some British post-apocalyptic stories from around the turn of the century that have become classics in the genre.
Dr. Kaplan:
I’ll have to ask you later for my show notes to just give us sort of a list of your favorites in both film and literature and maybe post those, because people might be interested in that.
But it’s interesting what you’re talking about, about Norway being an affluent country but still having a strong fascination with the genre. And I think that starts getting into some of the psychology behind why this genre is so appealing to people. And maybe we can get into that a bit, because I’m really interested in hearing some of your thoughts about it.
You’ve written—I read a chapter of yours which was really fascinating—about the psychological appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction. And tell us, Mathias, sort of at the broadest level, why are people captivated by stories about the end of the world?
Dr. Clasen:
It seems a little bit paradoxical in the same way that it seems paradoxical that so many people are attracted to horror stories. But I think stories about the end of the world are probably just about one of the most predictable and natural outputs of the human imagination.
And I happen to think that the human imagination is the superpower of our species. For anthropologists, it’s been a long-standing game to sort of try to figure out what it is that makes our species, Homo sapiens, unique in the animal kingdom. Is it our language, opposable thumbs, is it our culture? Not really. I mean, you can find cumulative culture in other species. You can find birds that have syntax in their way of communicating.
But what I think is unique to humans is our extremely well-developed imagination, which allows us to create scenarios and, through imaginative simulation, try out different scenarios, including horrifying ones.
Probably everybody has at some point in their life had this fantasy of being all alone in the world. I think for most people, it’s an ambivalent fantasy. There’s a very famous Danish children’s story from, I think, the 1940s, written by a child psychologist and based on his conversations with thousands of kids. And it’s about this boy who wakes up in his apartment in Copenhagen and he calls for his mom and she doesn’t answer. And then he goes into the apartment and he’s all alone. And he goes down onto the streets of Copenhagen and he’s all alone.
And so that sort of is a wish-fulfillment fantasy for him, because all the shackles of norms and rules and laws and so on, they have all disappeared. So he walks into a candy store and eats all he can. He walks into a bank and stuffs his pockets with money. He joyrides a tram and crashes it. But then gradually that wish-fulfillment fantasy turns out to be a nightmare because he’s all alone.
And yes, there might be good things associated with it, but he comes to realize that humans are an intensely social species. We depend on other people. And I think there’s a built-in ambivalence of sociality for humans in that we can’t live with other people, but we also can’t live without them. And most of our problems have to do with other people. A human being that is thrown into the world does not survive. And even an adult could not have a fulfilling life in isolation from other people.
That’s an ambivalence that very often makes itself into post-apocalyptic fiction, which, as I tried to suggest, is, I think, a very natural output of the imagination. I think the appeal is partly in imagining what it would be like if everybody had disappeared, or most people had disappeared, or the infrastructure that sustains our everyday life. What if it crumbled? No plumbers, no teachers, no police. What would life look like? Would it be more authentic? Because for somebody like me, whose day-to-day life consists of a lot of mindless bureaucratic work, what if what I had to worry about had to do with kill or be killed?
Dr. Kaplan:
Getting back to the jungle.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, I could see how there’s a natural tension built in there, because on the one hand, none of us like all these rules and all the strict, rigid things that we have to follow. It’s annoying and it takes up so much time and energy, and we’d rather be doing other things. So I guess it’s natural to sort of imagine, what if all of that went away?
But along with that comes no civilization, no people, no groups. I mean, I guess new ones form, and that’s part of what post-apocalyptic stories sometimes go to, like how do humans reinvent themselves in new sets of rules, and then what happens when you have problems with that. But it’s an interesting tension that you talk about. I think it’s really fascinating.
Dr. Clasen:
I think the tension grows out of the basic conflict in human life, which is inherent to the domain of sociality. I don’t think there’s any escaping it. I do think you’re right that post-apocalyptic fiction gets right at that tension and dwells in it and wrings interesting imaginative effects from it.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. And it also sort of starts the story with a blank slate. So you can sort of recreate in the genre any type of new system or lack of system that you want. I think that’s one thing that’s really interesting about it.
Mathias, you argued in the chapter that I read that the genre of post-apocalyptic fiction taps into a very human tendency toward worst-case thinking. Are we in some deep sense or deep way wired to imagine catastrophe?
Dr. Clasen:
I think so, yes, in a very literal sense. So the imagination is finally getting serious, sustained scientific attention as a psychological and neurological reality. And scientists are beginning to understand the neurobiological underpinnings of imagination and to tease apart its constituents.
And one model suggests that the imagination consists of three elements, really: simulation and perspective-taking, or theory of mind, and mental time travel. And so mental time travel is when we travel in time. We think back to things that happened in the past or we try to imagine possible futures. Perspective-taking is when we try to see the world from other people’s perspective. And simulation is just creating scenarios in our minds.
I think for most people, but some people more than others—I mean, there are individual differences in the degree to which we are prone to worst-case cognition—and that’s not just parents of teenagers who will, if anybody listening has a teenage kid or has had one, they will recognize this scenario where the kid promised to be home at 10 o’clock and then it’s 10 o’clock and you haven’t heard from them.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, you imagine everything going wrong, right?
Dr. Clasen:
Exactly. Anything that can go wrong, you’re imagining happening to your child.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Clasen:
Really, it’s not about statistical probability. It’s about imaginative explosiveness. So you can imagine kidnappings and they’re probably being tortured by a satanic cult and cut up and eaten and whatnot.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, Mathias, it’s interesting because, as a psychotherapist, as a clinical psychologist, I spend a lot of time talking with people about irrational thinking, and we are examining things like what are the statistical probabilities of things happening that they’re feeling anxious about or thinking irrationally about. So that’s a big part of therapy.
But it’s almost as if the genre, the post-apocalyptic type of genre, purposely goes against that. It’s like, no, let’s look at that worst-case possible scenario that could happen and let’s play this out and see what happens. So clearly people like to go in that direction with their thinking. They tend to do that.
Dr. Clasen:
Yes. And I think that might actually be its own form of therapy. So I don’t have any clinical training at all, but I think it might make sense that post-apocalyptic fiction and other kinds of difficult or aversive or frightening fiction could function as a kind of exposure.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah.
Dr. Clasen:
Like a Buddhist monk imagining their own death to prepare for that scenario, which is going to come. I’m not a huge fan of spiders, and that’s one of the most common and indeed, in my part of the world, deeply irrational phobias.
Dr. Kaplan:
Spiders are probably too cold in Denmark for spiders to be running around all over the place.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, exactly. And what spiders we have are really small. But so I was in therapy for arachnophobia a long time ago, and the therapist told me that one thing I did intuitively, which I shouldn’t do, is the moment I saw a spider, I would turn away and run away when my anxiety level was at its peak. But she said, I need to be in that situation until anxiety starts going down, and then I can—
Dr. Kaplan:
Is that classic exposure therapy? Yes.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah. Right. I think it probably could work on other levels as well for letting these worst-case scenarios play out. Let’s see, how bad can it be?
Dr. Kaplan:
Mathias, you just gave me a great idea, and that’s that maybe I should prescribe my book to my patients as a form of exposure therapy.
Dr. Clasen:
I like that.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. No, that’s really, really interesting. And it’s a paradox because the genre, it’s terrifying, but it’s also strangely appealing. And we talked a little bit about this. Can you give some other reasons why the collapse of civilization sometimes doesn’t feel frightening, but oddly seductive to some people?
Dr. Clasen:
I think one primary reason for the appeal of the end of the world as we know it is that it’s a fresh start. And I think that goes back to the whole biblical tradition of the apocalypse, which is also not really the end of everything, but a fresh scrubbing the slate clean.
I think there’s so much crap that accumulates with civilization. I mean, if you stop 100 people on the street and ask them what is wrong with the world today, they will all have a long list, probably. At the same time, we’re getting older than we ever have been before, and the science of medicine is mind-blowingly advanced. And there are so, so many good things about being alive today, but also bad things.
And so what to do about it, if not just grab a sword and slash through the Gordian knot? And so I think that’s part of it, this sense of starting over. But also, I think there’s this exhilarating, if possibly dangerous, allure in the prospect of breaking free of the shackles of society and propriety and all the things that hold us back.
Sometimes in my country, we have a very strong set of norms around standing in queue. You don’t cut in front of somebody else in a queue. And it happens maybe once or twice a month when I’m in the supermarket, somebody cuts in front of me and I have these deeply disturbing—you would probably call them homicidal ideations. It’s kind of very elaborate scenarios. And I don’t act on them because it would be wrong and I would go to jail.
But what if I lived in a post-apocalyptic society in which it was the law of the jungle and I could mete out punishment as I saw fit?
Dr. Kaplan:
Things are a lot simpler. You just sort of do what you need to do or want to do. And nothing is saying you have to follow these rules and guidelines, even if it’s not a homicidal impulse per se. But I would imagine that maybe there’s some kind of an appeal to like, all I need to think about is how to get my food and eat it. And I don’t have to worry about anything else really, except maybe hordes of zombies trying to kill me.
But that aside, the things that I need to worry about are much, much simpler. I don’t have to think so much about, am I doing this right or wrong? I’m wondering if that sort of ties into what you’re talking about.
Dr. Clasen:
I think it does. I think what we’re really talking about is a sort of—I don’t want to go all Marxist—but a kind of late modern alienation. I think for many people, it often feels as if we’re distanced from the things that matter, and that so much of what we spend our time on is really, at the end of the day, pretty meaningless, whether it’s in our jobs or—imagine if, going back to a more primitive, but also possibly more authentic stage, where what we had to worry about, as you suggest, would be to stay alive.
And probably only on the level of fantasy. I don’t think most people would really actually want to live as hunter-gatherers, die by the age of 30, where a toothache could turn into a lethal infection. But I think there’s a kind of imaginative appeal in just playing with that scenario of a return to a more primitive, but also more, in a sense, authentic and dramatic form of existence.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, obviously a lot of post-apocalyptic stories wrestle with morality and ethics. What do people do under this situation? And as somebody who studies this and teaches this, what can we say about human nature and how human nature is challenged and how it’s depicted in the post-apocalyptic genre?
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, that’s a great question, because I think it also touches on something that I think is crucial to post-apocalyptic fiction and indeed other forms of speculative fiction, which is that no matter how far out the central premise, the what-if is, the best such works tend to have a very high degree of what I would call psychological realism.
So yes, maybe it’s about monsters from other dimensions or far-out pathogens that suddenly make people explode in showers of blood and bone, or there can be unrealistic ideas in post-apocalyptic fiction. But the people tend to behave in psychologically plausible ways. They tend to interact with each other in socially plausible ways. And they tend to be confronted with dilemmas and wonderings that are relevant to somebody living in the real world and not a post-apocalyptic world.
And I think the most basic conflict that tends to play out in post-apocalyptic fiction is a conflict between agency and communion, or selfishness and other-directedness, or egoism versus altruism. And I think that’s the most basic psychological conflict in human life, which is, do I try to get ahead or get along? Where do I put my investment? Am I focused on helping my group or just myself?
And generally speaking, in fiction, the bad guys are deeply antisocial and selfish, and the good guys tend to be self-sacrificing and other-oriented. And that goes, I think, also for post-apocalyptic fiction.
Dr. Kaplan:
I think that’s exactly right. And usually post-apocalyptic stories are set up that way, that there’s some kind of an antagonist or a bad guy or something, and he or she or they or whatever it is is representing that worst part of human nature, and that the other side of that is rallying for it.
And also, I think—and tell me whether you agree with this or this makes sense to you—that there’s oftentimes a lot of moral ambiguity between both the antagonist and the protagonist in these stories, because there’s no more rules and people have to survive and they have to figure things out. And so that’s also what kind of makes this genre really interesting, because there’s a lot of blurring of boundaries between all of the characters. And oftentimes the most interesting antagonist has some redeemable value to them that you can empathize with.
Dr. Clasen:
No, I think that’s exactly right. And that’s actually one of the things I really enjoy about post-apocalyptic fiction. I think that’s really also an element of psychological realism, in a sense, that you will find characters who are like you and me, because nobody in the real world is purely good or purely bad. We all contain selfish impulses as well as altruistic impulses.
And as you will know, some psychologists have talked about the myth of pure evil, this idea that pure evil is a distortion, it’s a bias, it doesn’t exist. Everybody considers themselves the protagonist of their own stories, and even people who do things that we would call evil usually have good reasons for doing it.
But I think in post-apocalyptic fiction, there tends to be these morally nuanced characters. Of course, you will have your ultra-evil cannibals. That’s kind of an old post-apocalyptic trope, that the people who start eating other people are the really bad guys. But I think you’re right. And I think it’s the same thing that has been characterizing the best TV shows over the last, what, century, like Breaking Bad and stuff like that, where the protagonist is in fact a sort of antihero, which makes that character more psychologically realistic and so compelling because it’s somebody we can mirror ourselves in.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think that when people are watching post-apocalyptic films or reading the genre, are they sort of rooting for things to work out? Whoever the character is that they’re identifying with or looking at, are they sort of saying, okay, this is a really trying and difficult situation and we’re wanting to see a good outcome here? What does one do in this situation, or a group of people do, and how do they survive it and thrive in it? Is that ultimately what people want to see fulfilled psychologically?
Dr. Clasen:
It could be. That’s a good question. I think it also depends on what the author is trying to do, because as you will know, an author has a lot of power in manipulating—that sounds negative—but directing the reader’s moral allegiance. You can do things in terms of point of view or giving access to certain characters and providing explanations for why they do as they do to make it more or less easy for a reader to adopt the moral perspective of that character.
But I think this sense of becoming invested in the post-apocalyptic world and becoming invested in how things turn out for characters for whom you root, or at least that you care about, that you find interesting, I think that’s a major appeal here.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. You know what I did in my book, When Earth Blinked, it’s told from the first person, first of all, and I did that intentionally because I wanted the readers to be able to really get inside the head of the main character. And the main character is autistic. He’s on the spectrum. And so he sort of sees things in very odd ways. And he’s trying to navigate a world that is devoid of people. There’s very, very few survivors, and he’s trying to make sense of it. And he has a hard time because of his own perspective being on the spectrum.
But I think told from the first person, it helps the reader kind of get into the character’s head and try to enter his world a little bit, which makes him a lot more interesting. I think that if the story was told from the third person or a different perspective, it wouldn’t quite work the same way. So I don’t know if I succeeded at that, but that was the attempt that I made with that.
Dr. Clasen:
That’s really cool. I think that’s the first time I’ve heard of a post-apocalyptic story told from the perspective of an autistic person. That must have been quite a challenge.
Dr. Kaplan:
It was very interesting because he sort of reflects all of his experiences during his journey in the story from the perspective of somebody who sees things differently than a person who wasn’t on the spectrum would. And so he has an odd take on things, an odd experience of people. And I don’t want to get too deeply into the book today, but that was sort of the intention.
And I’m just reflecting what you were saying about the author’s manipulation of the way the reader experiences the book. And I think that makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Clasen:
I’m trying to think back to, have I ever before read a post-apocalyptic story told in the first person? I think it’s usually a third with some psychological access. I think maybe because most post-apocalyptic stories that immediately spring to my mind tend to have a fairly large cast. Maybe it’s just because I’m rereading The Stand by Stephen King right now, but also like Station Eleven or On the Beach, Earth Abides, Empty World, some of the classics.
Dr. Kaplan:
Interesting. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense because I think probably a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction is creating a new society or culture in some way or another that the main character or characters are trying to integrate with or putting up against or whatnot. And so it makes sense that there would be kind of an ensemble cast. That may not always be the case, but I think authors are probably trying to recreate a new world with new people, with a new set of rules or whatnot. So that’s part of the reason why.
So the post-apocalyptic genre, you suggest that the stories make existential questions especially vivid. Why is post-apocalyptic fiction such a powerful vehicle for asking what gives life meaning?
Dr. Clasen:
Part of it really has to do with the almost inherent stripping away of all this superfluous stuff of civilization. I mean, I love civilization. I just had a problem with my sewer just yesterday and a guy came and fixed it for me. And it occurred to me that he was really one of the heroes of civilization. Without systems for dealing with body waste, we would be in a bad place.
Dr. Kaplan:
Right. So we’d have to deal with our own waste.
Dr. Clasen:
Exactly. And I’m certainly not equipped to do that. At the same time, you and I are having a conversation in real time over thousands of miles. So civilization comes with good stuff, but also with the alienation, I think, that we can sometimes feel.
And so post-apocalyptic fiction, by definition, depicts a world in which the things we know crumble. It doesn’t even really matter which kind of scenario we’re looking at. I mean, there isn’t a lot of nuclear post-apocalyptic fiction because the world is pretty screwed in case of a nuclear holocaust. There are some. Alas, Babylon is one example, and On the Beach by Nevil Shute is another. But Nevil Shute’s book is pre-apocalypse more so than post-apocalypse.
So I think most traditional post-apocalyptic stories depict a world in which infrastructure crumbles and the institutions that normally sustain human life crumble. And so what is left is very basic needs: to stay alive, figure out what it all means, why carry on in a world that’s decimated by disease or overrun by zombies or whatever the case may be. So I think that’s what I had in mind when I suggested that these existential questions become very salient in post-apocalyptic fiction.
Dr. Kaplan:
Sure. It’s no secret that we’re living in a world with all sorts of very scary things happening, whether it’s war and the possible escalation of war—and that’s happening in a lot of areas, and some areas very close to where you live—of pandemics, climate change, social instability. Fears of people in the U.S. these days are using the word fascism very frequently. I don’t know if that comes up there, but just political groups taking over and dominating and harming people.
So there’s a lot going on right now. And I’m wondering if post-apocalyptic fiction serves an important purpose or becomes more salient when we’re facing real things that are happening in the world.
Dr. Clasen:
I think so, yes. I think so for sure. I think post-apocalyptic fiction and other kinds of frightening fiction, whether it be dystopia or supernatural horror, I think they’re not just or even necessarily a symptom of social crisis. I think they are a means of dealing with crisis.
And I can make it very concrete with reference to a scientific study that my colleagues and I conducted. This was in the early dark days of the COVID pandemic, so I think in March 2020, when societies all over the world were closing down and most people lived in a state of more or less explosive dread because we really didn’t know back then. It’s hard, luckily, to remember what it was like.
Dr. Kaplan:
People are just sort of repressing those memories at this point. It’s like it didn’t even happen.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, exactly. But it was really scary back in those days. Streets were empty and driving to those test centers where medical people in hazmat suits would jam Q-tips into your nose to see if you were infected. Nobody knew exactly.
But anyway, so we conducted a study to see if people who watched a lot of scary movies had increased psychological resilience, and to see if people who had watched a lot of what we call prepper movies, so movies about the apocalypse, movies about zombie invasion, alien invasion, catastrophe, whether they felt better prepared because the pandemic shared certain features with post-apocalyptic stories.
Dr. Kaplan:
Oh, absolutely.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah. A lot of what we saw, we had never seen before in the real world because it’s been a long time since there was a pandemic of that size. But most of us had seen it thousands of times in the eye of the imagination or on a silver screen. We’d seen similar things, maybe with zombies, but still: societies closing down and shortages of—well, nobody predicted the toilet paper shortage, but other stuff.
Dr. Kaplan:
Right.
Dr. Clasen:
But the really interesting thing about that study was we found that people who would watch a lot of scary movies actually experienced fewer stress symptoms. They were doing a better job of dealing with the pandemic and its stresses, I think because they had more practice in emotional self-regulation, essentially.
Dr. Kaplan:
That makes a lot of sense. And that’s a fascinating, fascinating study. You could say, though, that it’s a bit counterintuitive, because one might have the hypothesis that having less exposure to the end of the world and apocalyptic types of stories, you would be having less imagination of this absolute catastrophe happening. Like, it’s just an outbreak of a flu or something like that. We’ll deal with that and that’ll be done.
But when you watch a lot of the type of genre, you’re imagining, oh, there is such a thing as an apocalypse, and everybody dies and turns into zombies or whatnot. So that’s not what your study found, obviously. So that’s really interesting.
Dr. Clasen:
It is. But I do think that the study is interesting in that it showed us that horror movies might sensitize you to danger. And if you watch too many slasher movies, you might get a sort of twisted estimation of the odds of being killed by a mask-carrying stranger with a kitchen implement. On the other hand, though, you might be better at coping with feelings of stress, feelings of anxiety.
Dr. Kaplan:
Is it a desensitization or is it a feeling-prepared type of phenomenon, do you think?
Dr. Clasen:
I think it’s both, actually. And I think it works on several levels. Desensitization, maybe not in—I don’t think people really get jaded from watching scary movies or reading post-apocalyptic fiction. I think they get better at coping. Just like you can’t train yourself to not feel the burn of a Carolina Reaper chili pepper, but you can build an ability to predict what it’s going to feel like and know what to do to not throw up if you eat a chili pepper like that.
And I think something similar is taking place when people watch or read a lot of scary stories. It’s not that they don’t get scared anymore. I mean, just recently I was in a hotel room all alone and I had made the classic mistake of only bringing a Stephen King book with me, which I normally don’t do when alone because I know myself. So I still get scared, but I’m better at coping with being scared.
Just like if you give a lot of public presentations, you will still have increased heart rate and get sweaty palms and so on, but it won’t be as debilitating once you’ve done it many times. There’s a desensitization in a sense where you get better at coping with feeling difficult emotions.
Dr. Kaplan:
I’ll tell you a funny story about the preparation part. Once you brought up ghost peppers, I used to be famous when I was younger among my friends about being able to eat really, really spicy food. And I would take these wads of wasabi, which is basically the green radish in Japanese food that you eat, and I’d make these massive wads of wasabi and eat them, and I would just wow everybody.
But what I realized, and they didn’t know this, and I’m going to let the secret go because I don’t think I’m going to be doing this anytime soon anymore. But I would put the wasabi in my mouth and I would swallow it as quickly as it went into my mouth, so it wasn’t lingering on my tongue. But then I’d pretend to chew and chew and chew, even though it wasn’t in my mouth anymore.
So anyway, it’s a point that I figured out how to handle the wasabi without actually harming my mouth from it. So maybe the preparation of how to deal with a zombie apocalypse or whatnot, by preparing for it, gives you some strategies or techniques and you feel a little calmer about taking on the challenge. I don’t know. That memory just came to mind from what you were talking about the ghost peppers.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, that’s awesome. Because I think one of the things you do—when we did a study actually in a haunted attraction where we tried to figure out what the guests do to regulate their own fear—it turns out that they’re very actively engaged in either trying to suppress or maximize fear.
And the things they do can be divided into three categories. So they employ cognitive strategies for emotion regulation, they employ behavioral ones, and social ones. And the cognitive ones are the most frequently employed ones and the most effective ones. And they include doing things like reminding yourself that it’s just a movie, it’s just a story. And that’s the classic thing you do also if you watch a scary film with a kid. You will help them sustain the psychological distance between themselves and the stimulus so that they don’t get overwhelmed, for example by saying, it’s just ketchup, it’s not real blood.
And so I think that’s maybe the parallel here to you swallowing and pretending to chew is when you watch a scary movie or read a really scary book, you can just remind yourself, it’s just a construction, it’s an aesthetic artifact, it’s not real.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, yeah, Mathias, once again, I see some interesting parallels here to the world of therapy, because a lot of what we do is restructuring irrational cognitions. And so part of what you’re talking about is, somebody is really scared by something, you find ways to reframe what’s actually happening to mitigate the fear that person is feeling. And that’s true with any situation.
I’m going to go up and I’m going to do some public speaking and I’m anxious, and then I’m going to fall apart and look like an idiot and everybody’s going to hate me. Well, no, there’s ways we can reframe that. That’s not likely to happen. That worst-case scenario, it’s just not realistic most of the time. So I think there’s a lot of overlap in what you’re talking about with the cognition part.
And what about the behavioral?
Dr. Clasen:
So behavioral ones, they were actually—so these are strategies used by people in a haunted attraction, which is a peculiar context where you’re running from people with chainsaws and all kinds of things. So the cognitive ones were, for example, self-distraction is another one. People started thinking about other things, but also the reframing that you mentioned, just reminding yourself of the non-dangerous nature of the stimuli.
Behavioral ones included guests purposefully trying not to start running if they were afraid. I think they might have had some intuition that there’s a kind of feedback loop, that if you’re afraid and you start running, then you kind of make yourself more afraid, and you run faster.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah, right. It’s kind of Jamesian thing.
Dr. Clasen:
Yep. And also breathing, controlling your breathing, was a relatively frequently employed fear-suppression strategy. But also closing your eyes, which is a terrible strategy. It’s a go-to strategy for a lot of people when they get scared by a horror movie. They’ll close their eyes, which is just about the worst thing you can do because you block the stimulus in one modality, which is the visual one, but you still get the auditive one, the sound, and the sound is jet fuel to the human imagination, which can produce images that are worse than the most advanced CGI.
If a horror movie is really scary, close your eyes. You might not see the things on the screen, but you will still hear the sounds and they can produce very, very powerful images in your mind.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. Well, also closing your eyes, again, from a psychological standpoint, from a therapeutic standpoint, closing your eyes is sort of like a form of avoidance. And so usually we’re trying to teach not to avoid things. We’re trying to teach expose yourself to the things that you’re afraid of, and that’s more helpful.
But the behavioral strategies in the House of Horrors you were talking about, are we saying that those were mostly helpful or mostly not helpful for people? Well, not running, I guess.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, sometimes they have to run because there’s a guy in a bloody pig’s mask with a chainsaw who chases them, so most people run.
Dr. Kaplan:
That’s part of the whole gig.
Dr. Clasen:
It is, yeah. But we didn’t really get a good measure of the effectiveness of the different strategies. We did find that they could be employed in both directions. So that if you want to make yourself more scared, you can tell yourself, this is real, the zombie in front of me is real. Whereas if you want to make yourself less scared, you do the opposite thing.
With the exception of proximity strategy in the social domain. So getting close to other people, that can work in both ways. So you might find comfort in moving closer to somebody in your group, but you might also get infected with their fear if they’re more afraid than you, because fear is contagious. So that’s the one strategy that kind of works in both ways.
Dr. Kaplan:
Yeah. Oh, that’s so interesting. Wow. But that’s really fun research you do, man. I want to move over there and join your department and do some of this research. It’s really interesting stuff.
Dr. Clasen:
You should come and do a kind of sabbatical. I mean, we do these haunted house studies every year. We’ve done so for 10 years now. And the craziest one was only a few years ago when we got blood samples from the guests to look at the activation of their immune systems, chased by the killer clowns.
Dr. Kaplan:
Wow. Wow. That is such cool research.
Dr. Clasen:
That was fun.
Dr. Kaplan:
Okay, Mathias. So before we close out today, I’d like to hear maybe three or four, however many you want to talk about, of your favorite either film or novel forms of post-apocalyptic fiction. Tell us what some of your favorites are and why.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, that’s difficult.
Dr. Kaplan:
I know there’s so many. I’m sure there’s a ton of them that you love.
Dr. Clasen:
Well, okay, everything that comes to mind for me is literature. Generally speaking, I’m a literature guy more than a film guy. And if I had to spend the rest of my days on a desert island, I would bring books, not a DVD player, because I think literature can do things that to me are more interesting than what movies can do. And I think maybe that’s especially so in the more imaginative genres.
I mean, The Stand by Stephen King, that’s one of my favorites. It’s an epic post-apocalyptic story about a flu, like a super flu that’s been engineered by the American military, and then through an accident breaks out and kills 99.9% of the American population. And then we follow the survivors who are attracted by representatives of good and evil, as a kind of—King himself called it a tale of dark Christianity.
And I think the most interesting characters are the morally ambiguous ones, who don’t quite know whether to go to the dark side or the bright side, and for whom the struggles of post-apocalypse become sort of a furnace in which their moral systems are forged. So that’s a favorite with me. I’ve read it many times.
I also love Earth Abides by, I think it’s George Stewart. I think it’s from the late 1940s.
Dr. Kaplan:
It’s an early one.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah, it is. Also about—and that one is interesting to me because there’s almost a longing for destruction that kind of goes through that book. Not in a nihilistic way, but there’s a sense of the post-apocalyptic world being a better world. So it’s about a lot of people dying from a disease again, and then kind of Mother Nature getting a chance to come back.
I think the third one I want to mention is called Empty World. I think the author is John Christopher. And it’s a book from the 1970s that used to be taught in British primary education, even though it’s really scary. And we follow a teenage guy who’s sort of emotionally numb because he has lost his entire family in a traffic accident. And then everybody dies because of a disease. And he finds a Jaguar and he kind of runs through the deserted British countryside looking for other people, and eventually finding somebody to care about, and then becoming sort of emotionally whole again.
I think it does what I like about post-apocalyptic fiction, which we’ve talked about, and how it may be patently and by definition unrealistic, or at least counter-empirical. But at the core of the best post-apocalyptic fiction, there is this moral truth and psychological truth. And there’s something real, there’s something real and valuable, which I think shines through in those three works that I would point to.
Dr. Kaplan:
Earth Abides is definitely on my reading list, and I’ve got to get to that. And I haven’t heard of the third one you talked about, so I’ll have to take a look at that one too, because that sounds really fascinating. But that’s really great.
And Mathias, as I said, jot down 10 titles or something for me in your free time when you get a chance, and I’ll attach them to the notes because it sounds like you’re just really—boy, you teach a class in post-apocalyptic fiction. It sounds like you’ve done that before.
Dr. Clasen:
Yeah. Yeah, it’s been a couple of years, but I have, and that was a lot of fun. I think the students really connected with the material.
Dr. Kaplan:
I’m sure. Well, I think I would love to take a class like that. That’s amazing.
Well, this has been a really fascinating conversation. Obviously, I’m personally invested in this topic at the moment, and so I was really excited and happy that you agreed to come on and speak with me. And clearly you have a lot of knowledge and passion, and you’re doing amazing, fun research in the area. So thank you so much for all of that.
Do you have any final thoughts you want to leave us with today?
Dr. Clasen:
Well, maybe one thought, which is that it’s so weird to me that speculative or fantastic fiction for a very long time has kind of struggled with being looked down on as something—I mean, there’s a very long cultural tradition of frowning at stories of fantasy and science fiction and horror, even though that kind of fiction is in a sense the purest output of the human imagination, which, as I said earlier, is the superpower of our species.
And I just think there’s a bizarre kind of disconnect between the lack of respect, culturally speaking, those genres often receive, the way in which they’re often placed at the bottom of a sort of cultural value hierarchy, on the one hand, and on the other hand, just how important that stuff is. So I think it’s high time that we kind of renovate those cultural hierarchies of value and bestow upon speculative fiction a more esteemed place, maybe.
Dr. Kaplan:
Well, I agree. Absolutely. You’re speaking to the choir. And I hope you continue to promote that idea, for sure, and continue the research and the great work you do.
Yeah, Mathias, thank you so much for coming on and speaking with me today on this subject. It’s really fascinating. I’ll have to have you on again. And I know you’ve got, you said, a partner in crime, a researcher you work with. So it might be fun to have you guys on and talk about a variation of the subject in the future.
Thank you so much for joining me today. Really appreciate it.
Dr. Clasen:
It’s been a pleasure. Thank you.
Discover more from Aaron Kaplan, Ph.D. -Psychotherapy and Evaluation and Services
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.