While film genres often describe stylistic features, this seminar proposes an approach based on the emotions that different themes stimulate in the viewer. These are all fundamental emotions for our survival as a species, and the pleasure we experience when watching movies can therefore be explained as the reward for training these emotions. Recent cognitive science shows how the human brain, and partly the body, responds to what we see on the screen as if it was real.

We will study the attachment theme in children’s movies, the choice of mate in romantic movies, the male bonding in action and war movies, the fear of creatures with sharp teeth and the hide-and-seek mechanism in scary movies, and the capacity to feel sorrow connected to individual or tribal loss in tragic movies.

Key traits of movies stimulate basic innate dispositions that trace back to what was fitness enhancing before the exodus from our ancestral home in the Pleistocene savannahs of East Africa more than 50.000 years ago. Nowadays, the real dangers to life might be traffic accidents or lung cancer. Nevertheless, we see few movies about cars or cigarettes, while a movie about shark attacks appeals strongly to our instincts.