Stranger Things Part 2, Dark Triad

Netflix has released images from the final hours of Stranger Things, which drop July 1. Two episodes totaling nearly four hours make up Volume 2 of the drama’s fourth on the streamer. Episode 408 will clock in at 1 hour, 25 minutes, while 409 will run 2 hours, 20 minutes. Last week, Netflix released a teaser for the final s4 hours of the drama created by The Duffer Brothers. During Netflix’s Geeked Week, Ross Duffer said he and his brother can now put the young stars in a lot more danger. Season four, up until this point, has been markedly darker than several of the preceding seasons. While the show always had one foot in the macabre, season four has been even harsher on the harried Hawkinites. A lot of this horror can be attributed to this season's newly introduced enemy, the villainous Vecna.

A trait consistently found to have a negative correlation with enjoyment of watching a horror film is empathy (Tamborini et al, 1990; Johnston, 1995; Lynch & Martins, 2015). People who report through self questionnaire higher empathy tend to sympathize more with characters they see on screen who are in danger than people with lower empathy (Davis et al., 1987). Therefore, viewers who are very empathetic should have the most negative effects when watching horror movies and would be expected not to enjoy them. Consistent with this, a meta analysis of experiments using horror movies showed that empathetic concern was negatively correlated with enjoyment of frightening and violent media (Hoffner & Levine, 2005). These robust findings of high sensation seeking and low empathy predicting horror movie enjoyment have led to my hypothesis that scoring high on Dark Triad traits can also be used as a predictor for horror movie enjoyment. Low empathy and high sensation seeking are both tendencies found among the personality types of the Dark Triad. The Dark Triad was identified as such in 2002 by Paulhus and Williams as three personality variables that are distinct but have some overlap and are all considered anti-social. These three traits are psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism. While narcissism and psychopathy were both originally identified as clinical personality disorders and identified as such in the DSMIV, they also exist at the subclinical level. Psychopathy is usually considered the most dangerous of the Dark Triad traits (Rauthman, 2012) Psychopaths by definition have low empathy (Del Gaizo & Falkenbach, 2008; Mahmut, Homewood & Stevenson, 2008) and would therefore be less likely to empathize with victims in horror films. Psychopathy is of particular interest to the study of horror movies because of their noteworthy relationship with fear. Psychopaths are often characterized as having no fear (Hosker-Field, Gauthier & Book, 2016) Source: digitalcommons.bard.edu