FEAR | Terror - May 2017

The FACE of TERROR  :  
Secrets from a Haunted House

KEY CONCEPT: Extreme Fear is notoriously hard to depict, both for animators and actors.

Figure 1. This woman is not acting. She is truly terrified!

Unlike the other cardinal expressions, good reference material for the face of terror (the level of fear I’m discussing here) is scarce. There are few candid photographs that clearly show a very frightened person. 

The reason for the lack of photographic reference is obvious – situations which are dire enough to solicit terror are fortunately rare, and rarer still are photographers who are detached enough to take useful photos.   It’s far easier to find terrific pictures of anger, sadness, joy, and even surprise.  The movies, usually a reliable source of reference material, are not particularly useful in this case, as even good actors rarely achieve a convincing configuration in Figures 10, 11 and 12 below.

The good news is that there is a terrific resource for faces of extreme fear, with hundreds of examples and excellent photo quality, on the website and Flicker account of Nightmares Fear Factory, a haunted house in Niagara Falls, Ontario.  The folks at the Fear Factory have a hidden camera located in a room where something extremely frightening jumps out at visitors, and the fear the camera captures is impresssive.  It’s a marketing gimmick; we never see what is so scary, and who isn’t curious as to what it could possibly be?  Undoubtedly it drives a fair number of tickets sales, and they’ve been making their photos public for years. 

Many of these images are now available in high-resolution format, and they represent the best reference material I’ve ever found for the details of a person in terror.  Below I compare some of the  excellent faces from Nightmares Fear Factory with examples from other sources which provide little in the way of good information.  Additionally, in user tests, the Fear Factory faces get the highest scores for recognition of any images I've tested.
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The bottom line is – you have to be really, really scared to look the way these folks do, and we know the "Face of Terror" when we see it.  

Figures 2, 3 & 4. These three terrified customers were photographed in the Nightmares Fear Factory.  The woman on the left tested at 96%, from 50 viewers, for her expression of fear  -- that's  as good as it gets.​

I have included Figures 2, 3 & 4, three splendid examples of the "Face of Terror" from the Nightmares Fear Factory photo library because they are so instructive. For most of us, there is no way to voluntarily open our eyes that wide, but it happens automatically when we are truly scared.  It is even possible that, given the extreme amount of eye white displayed, the eye is pressing slightly forward, literally bulging out of its lids.  Note that the mouth is opened nearly to the maximum, and is stretched sideways – unlike in the expression of surprise, where it is relaxed.  

Figure 5. A group of terrified friends photographed in the Nightmares Fear Factory. The clearest expression of fear is on the face of the man second from left.

In Figure 5, I have included a full-frame example of some very agitated visitors to the Nightmares Fear Factory.  Look at their body language, equally expressive as their faces; no one who is that frightened would fail to react with their body and hands in some self-protective way. 

Figures 6, 7, 8 & 9. Not-so-convincing actors posing the expression of fear for Psychology department researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden.

There are many online databases of posed expressions for the use of face researchers.  Above, I have included a group of actors who were asked to pose their best version of fear. As you can see, they are far less convincing than the haunted house subjects above. Without the hyper-wide eyes or the screaming mouth, these expressions simply do not register, and score very badly in user tests.  

 Figures 10, 11 & 12. These Hollywood film stars are attempting to look very frightened; none of the poses shown here are very effective. ​Figure 12 is from "Kong: Skull Island. " We see the two actors at the moment the enormous head of Kong has just emerged out of the fog, directly in front of them.  Their reactions are far too mild and ambiguous for the circumstances.

Compare the faces and body language of the Hollywood stars with any of people in the haunted house. With the actors, their eyes are not nearly wide enough, their mouths are too relaxed, and they are not making any sort of protective gestures with their arms, hands or bodies.  

Figure 13. Bugs Bunny - Is he afraid or ​ surprised?  Viewers weren't sure.

Figure 14. ​Dash in "The Incredibles" -​ not convincingly terrified.

Figure 15. Author-altered Dash is one ​scared cartoon character. Viewers were sure!

Animators confront a unique problem when depicting frightened faces.  Since the most crucial component of fear are the extra-wide eyes, this creates a posing challenge with characters whose eyes are already opened as wide as possible. Both Hyper-Alert characters above, Bugs and Dash, were confusing for my multiple-choice testers, with Bugs striking more people as surprised than frightened, and Dash doing a bit better with a fear reading of 62%.  So, how do you express the "Face of Terror" when the eyes are already maxed out?  The answer: you alter other details.

To improve the fear readability with Dash, I created an oblique slant for the upper margin of his eyeball, and altered his mask to suggest oblique eyebrows. I also opened his mouth much wider, and widened it sideways.  As a result, Dash's fear score improved from 62% to 88%, a dramatic difference.  

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Credits:: Figures 1-5: photographs take in the Nightmares Fear Factory, located in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada - www.NightmaresFearFactory.com; Figures 6-9:  actors from the Karolinska Institutet, Department of Clinical Neuroscience, Psychology section, Stockholm, Sweden; Figure 11. Brad Pitt & Cate Blanchett in "Bael, " directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, produced by companies based in the United Statess and Mexico, and distributed by Paramount Vantage (2006);  Figure 11: Jeremy Renner in "The Bourne Legacy," directed by Tony Gilroy, produced by Relativity Media, The Kennedy/Marshall Company and Captivate Entertainment and distributed by Universal Pictures (2012); Figure 12. Brie Larson & Tom Hiddleston in "Kong: Skull Island," directed by Jordan Vogt-Roberts, produced by Legendary Pictures and Tencent Pictures, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures; Figures 13 & 14. animated cartoon characters: Bugs Bunny, created in 1940 by Leon Schlessinger Productions, now the official mascot of Warner Bros. Entertainment; Dash in "The Incredibles," directed by Brad Bird, produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Walt Disney Picturess (2004).