This is an essay about the phenomenon of “aesthetic chills”—you know, the moment when, experiencing a work of art, you feel a rush of physical emotion, a shiver that runs down your spine. Often, it takes you by surprise. It’s where the term “thrilling” comes from, as well as the concept of a “spine-tingling” experience, and also the more jargony term “frisson,” beloved of art critics.

I should explain why I am interested in this niche and technical subject now. There’s a good deal of complaint about how flat contemporary art feels. Whether the problem is the failure of artists to create great art, or the failure of audiences and journalists to recognize (or seek out) great art, or some combination, I don’t know. Whether the key culprit is that art is too shallow and decorative or that it is too disembodied and concept-based depends on who is doing the complaining.

In any case, against the background of jaded sentiment, “chills” seem an interesting topic, since they are associated with particularly intense or memorable moments. What makes art thrilling? Why and when does it feel so?

The more I have looked into the subject of “aesthetic chills,” the more I think that it provides an entryway into talking about aspects of art that are important but hard to classify. The phenomenon tends to manifest at the crossover point between things that we imagine to be in tension: mental and physical experience, positive and negative emotions, the shock of the unexpected and the recognition of the familiar, the objective qualities of an artwork and the subjective state you bring to it, a visceral reaction to what is right in front of you and the sudden flood of memory…

Let’s dive in.

Medium Chills

As the pioneering researcher Avram Goldstein wrote in one of the first papers dealing with the subject, in 1980, “the typical stimulus that elicits a thrill is a confrontation with an emotionally stirring situation or event, such as a natural scene of transcendent beauty, a magnificent work of art or drama, a musical passage, a poignant personal encounter, a rousing speech, or a sudden intellectual insight.” That’s a wide variety of potential “chill” triggers. So, as I’ve been stewing on this essay, I asked friends—mainly people involved with art—what works, in any medium, have given them that type of electric moment.

Kurt Cobain performs with his group Nirvana at a taping of the television program ‘MTV Unplugged,’ New York, New York, Novemeber 18, 1993. (Photo by Frank Micelotta/Getty Images)

If there is one type of example that is most often associated with chills—both in the research I’ve read and in my casual sample—it is music. Here’s a varied selection of musical moments that people have told me give them a chill. It’s eclectic, which I like:

The opera singer Leontyne Price’s final performance, in 1985, singing “O Patria Mia” from Aida, when she hits those impossibly high, longing notes. The Righteous Brothers’s “Unchained Melody” (1955), when the cymbals hit at the 2-minute mark, and the song starts to expand and build relentlessly. Nirvana’s Lead Belly cover, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” (1994), at the moment Kurt Cobain starts to scream and it feels like pain and evil are pouring out of him. The dance track “Fields of Dreams” (2013) by Gabriel Ananda, when the drill/siren sound hits in the middle and it feels like the drugs are peaking. Lil Wayne’s “Mona Lisa” (2018), when the narrative snaps into focus and Wayne starts to rap in berserk double time. Olivia Rodrigo’s “drivers license” (2021), when the whispery chorus-verses break out into the bridge’s full flood of teenage heartbreak, with its PG-13 F-bomb.

Close up of actress Janet Leigh as ‘Marion Crane’ screaming in film Psycho (1960). (Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images)

After music, movies were the second-biggest source of chill-inducing anecdotes. Bill Pullman’s “we will not go gently into that good night” speech from Independence Day (1996) and Idris Elba’s “we are cancelling the apocalypse” speech from Pacific Rim (2013). The shower scene in Psycho (1960), when the shock of the killing collides with the shock of losing the character you thought was the protagonist. Shelley Duvall’s Wendy discovering what Jack has been writing on his typewriter in The Shining (1980). Spike Lee’s Mookie making the decision to throw the garbage can in Do the Right Thing (1989). The build to the climactic bloodletting in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven (1992)—the “I’ve killed women and children” monologue. The “last dance” scene in Charlotte Wells’s devastating Aftersun (2022), when Sophie hugs the memory of her father for the last time. The moment early in Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest (2023) when Sandra Hüller as Hedwig Höss is trying on a fur coat and lipstick that you realize where they came from, and the magnitude of how twisted the situation is hits.

Again, very eclectic.

But what I noticed from the answers that I got was that, even among my friends who are deeply into visual art, the first examples that came to mind were not from visual art. Why is that?

Punctuation Marks

As almost all of these examples show, “aesthetic chills” usually hit at a moment of punctuation. “Thrills are invariably associated with sudden changes in mood or emotion,” according to Goldstein (who died in 2012 at 92). The suddenness seems important, as if the chill registers the sharp change between two distinct emotional tones. You may get a chill when a song switches into a new register. In a narrative, chills often manifest around a twist, or a revelation, or a heroic overcoming—at a moment when your brain shifts how it is feeling about what is unfolding.

Photo of Leontyne Price as Leonora in La Fuerza del Destino. (Photo by Ron Scherl/Redferns)

In the same paper, Goldstein noted that “subjects told me, what makes a certain musical passage able to elicit thrills is some association with an emotionally charged event or a particular person in the subject’s past.” This is sometimes the case for me personally (though not always), and it’s usually not a clear and clean link in thought. It’s more like some turbulent bubbling-up of emotional associations, and the chill is almost like your body registering them before your brain can step back and examine the association.

Here’s something embarrassing: The most reliably chill-inducing piece of media—any media—for me personally remains the trailer to The Social Network (2010). Famously set to a girls-choir version of Radiohead’s 1992 “Creep” (it’s why every trailer for a decade was a minor-key cover), it begins with a full minute of screenshots that have nothing to do with the film but that evoke the experience of growing up on social media (posts recording people going through the stages of life, status updates asking questions into the void, weddings and graduations and sicknesses glimpsed in the feed), before disclosing that it is a David Fincher movie about the shenanigans surrounding the birth of Facebook.

The “aesthetic chills” phenomenon often feels like a circuit being jumped, an unexpected electric connection being made between opposed poles. What I think makes this particular clip work so efficient for me is that it syncs up multiple kinds of such circuit-jumping moments. The prelude very deliberately connects with personal memories; it’s cut so as to rapidly accelerate from hushed normality to a rush of dramatic peaks; the music not only builds to an eerie crescendo—a classic musical cue for a chill—but, being a cover, offers the uncanniness of the familiar rendered unfamiliar.

The Chills Matrix

I know this seems a trite example, so let’s admit one more thing about The Social Network trailer that makes it work so well. Recalling it recently for a New York Times essay about the low state of contemporary movie trailers, entertainment journalist Esther Zuckerman noted that “before seeing it I was skeptical that a film about the invention of Facebook could be at all interesting.” I’d say the same.

Because “aesthetic chills” manifest around revelations or twists, you have to guess that this being-taken-by-surprise effect itself contributes to some part of the trailer’s impact (notably, the dialogue in the trailer very specifically emphasizes the realization, both for its characters and its viewers, that a thing—Facebook—that once seemed trivial and beneath consideration has taken on demonic importance).

The shiver is like your body poking you to register the contrast between what your brain expects to feel and what your emotions are feeling. It reflects the reality that sometimes emotion hits us most powerfully when we aren’t consciously expecting it, and therefore regulating it.

Strangely, this suggests that sometimes art that isn’t expected to be “good” can be a more effective chills-delivery system—exactly because its emotional power sneaks up on you. One thing I came up against in my informal survey about chills is the persistent confusion of “chill-inducing” with a judgement of high quality. The first answer people would give, when I asked about what they found chill-inducing, would actually be something that they thought was important, when on interrogation, it hadn’t really inspired a literal chill of the kind I was fishing for. Conversely, people would often preface their real answers with, “This may sound stupid, but…”

There’s a database called ChillsDB, the “gold standard” of “chills-inducing” media (assembled by researchers trawling Reddit and YouTube and finding the most-common references to the words associated with the physical experience of chills). A 2023 paper looking at the material contained in it found that one of the pieces of media that most reliably generated “aesthetic chills” for experimental subjects (topped only by a choral version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah) is a 5-and-a-half minute YouTube video made by a French cinephile who goes by Slyfer2812, called “We Think Too Much and Feel Too Little.”

In essence, this is a montage of cathartic movie moments held together into one meta-catharsis by plaintive, steadily building piano shimmer. It begins with gravelly voiced Al Pacino from the obscure-to-me 2012 film Stand Up Guys, intoning, “They say we die twice: Once when the breath leaves our body, and then when the last person we knew says our name,” and builds to Charlie Chaplin’s final exhortation for world peace from 1940’s The Great Dictator. (That clip, on its own, ranks very high in every paper I’ve read testing ChillsDB’s archive of media.)

It’s not a mystery why so many snippets of famous actors in tearful embraces and moments of rapture might conjure the kind of visceral emotional associations that cause chills. But what stands out to me is how incoherent the video is. The shock “Red Wedding” scene from Game of Thrones (2011–19) is a personal all-time “chills” moment, all on it’s own—but what’s it doing here in such proximity to Reese Witherspoon’s broken-hearted backpacker from Wild (2014), breathing “I miss you” into the silence? Or Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking comforting his wife in his synthesized voice, seconds away from Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow, dismissing the suggestion that the Age of Pirates is past?

Yet, as bemused as I am by it, “We Think Too Much and Feel Too Little” absolutely has its promised effect on me. And I kind of think it works because of, not in spite of, how off-the-wall it is. It’s as if the collision of so many disparate elements adds to a sense of strangeness that makes big vulnerable emotions that I usually find hammy and calculated in their #OscarMoment form take me by surprise.

If I were to extract a theory from all this of the factors that trigger “aesthetic chills,” it would be this: A rush of emotion, presented in a novel way, connected with an intense personal feeling, and found in an unexpected place. You probably do not need all of those factors, but that’s the four-cornered space within which it operates.

In the second part of this essay, I’ll look at visual art specifically, and try to answer why it doesn’t often serve as a vehicle for chills—but also look at when it does, and how it can.

This is the first part of a 2-part essay on “Aesthetic Chills.” Part 2 is here.