The horror genre is not one easy to fall in love with. Scary movies developed out of a number of sources: folktales with devil characters, witchcraft, fables, myths, ghost stories, Grand Guignol melodramas, and Gothic or Victorian novels from Europe by way of Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo or Irish writer Bram Stoker, and American writers Robert Louis Stevenson and Edgar Allan Poe. People who have two copies of one version of the gene are more easily disturbed when viewing unpleasant pictures, the scientists discovered. Not unexpectedly, the horror films had a lot of harsh and atonal screams. “Screams are basically chaos,” Fitch says. They had 34 volunteers answer a questionnaire assessing how much they liked novelty and then conducted brain scans.