Is it “Spooky” or “Scary”?

The Test

Each image in the study contained familiar Halloween tropes: ghosts, pumpkins, occult symbols, and figures drawn from folklore and horror.

The question wasn’t “What do you like?” but more “What feels safe to look at?” The resulting clusters of dots revealed three emotional registers: spooky, scary, and a curious neutral middle.

Parameters Overview

Audience Perception Maps (APMs)

Visual Findings

Spooky – The Comfort of the Uncanny

The “spooky” board glowed with warmth.

Participants gravitated to images that felt friendly in their eeriness: gentle ghosts, smiling pumpkins, and soft line work that evoked presence without threat.

Color was key: Burnt oranges, creams, and parchment yellows carried nostalgia. Strong positive reactions came to works that felt illustrative, textured, and intentional, as opposed to photorealistic or heavily digital. These tones and treatments recalled handmade decorations, storybook illustrations, and folklore rather than fear.

The emotional pattern was clear: spooky equals belonging. It is darkness rendered as community ritual, approachable, symbolic, and slightly nostalgic.

All together, the perception of spooky celebrates aesthetic eeriness—the haunting as a visual experience rather than an emotional threat, something that returns each autumn and stays safely within the frame.

Results at a 75% threshold:

Scary

Scary – The Loss of Safety

The “scary” images carried a different kind of charge: unease through distance and dehumanization.

The atmosphere across these images was cold, ascetic, and isolating, emphasizing detachment rather than folklore.

Visually, these works were marked by high contrast and low warmth. Black, white, and desaturated red dominated, while orange and parchment were absent. Textures were sleek or digital rather than hand-worn, and many compositions relied on hard geometry to structure the unease.

Common motifs included eyes as symbols or disembodied forms, suggesting surveillance or omniscience; masks and veils, erasing personal identity; and distorted humanoid figures. Even the line work seemed aggressive, with black rays, cracks, and shattering light radiating from within the composition.

The emotional response was one of psychological threat. The viewer felt watched, or absorbed into something inhuman. Unlike the friendly ghosts and pumpkins of the “spooky” set, these images denied comfort or humor. They evoked the uncanny as existential rather than seasonal. The loss of human control became the essence of fear.

In short, participants defined scary as that which obscures or erases humanity: figures that look back without faces, symbols that suggest an infinite gaze, or settings stripped of warmth. Fear here is no longer playful. It is ontological.

Neutral – The Aesthetic Middle

Between charm and dread lay a middle zone of detached fascination. These images resembled occult diagrams, taxidermy studies, or mythic hybrids—dark in subject but emotionally restrained.

This set shared a formal precision with the scary board but was softened by rich palettes and decorative framing. Deep golds, navy blues, and bone whites gave the work an archival elegance. Each element signaled dark intelligence, the occult as taxonomy, but not terror. Viewers recognized danger as subject matter but encoded within intellectual aesthetics. Mythic creatures, inscriptions, and ritual diagrams implied scholarship rather than fear.

Neutral images blurred moral and emotional direction, defined by distance and containment—the supernatural presented as artifact, not presence.

The neutral captured the academic side of darkness, where horror becomes design and folklore becomes system. Participants admired the craftsmanship and symbolism, but it was not emotionally charged enough to be either comforting or threatening.

Patterns Across The Spectrum

Across all three, participants weren’t reacting to monsters; they were reacting to how human the image felt. The more an artwork retained warmth, imperfection, or personality, the more it read as “spooky.” The moment that warmth disappeared, “scary” began. 

Spooky is about presence within safety, scary is about absence within power.

“Is something here with us?” vs “What if we are not here anymore?”

The Visual Language of Fear

What separates spooky from scary isn’t just how something is drawn; it is how the human is treated within it. In the “spooky” images, people or figures might appear as ghosts, skeletons, or symbols, but they are still open to us—expressive, readable, even friendly. In the “scary” ones, the human form is obscured: masked, veiled, half-seen. We recognize it but can’t quite reach it. That distance feels dangerous.

Design amplifies the shift—curves versus geometry, texture versus glare—but the deeper divide is emotional. Spooky speaks in texture and warmth; scary speaks in precision and absence. Together they reveal how design governs emotion before meaning ever forms. The way a picture feels decides how close we are willing to get to it.

Previous Studies and Results