Following philosopher of art David Davies, I argue that our “inquiry concerning the arts should be informed by our best understandings in those sciences that bear upon the cognitive and perceptual capacities exercised in the generation and reception of artworks.” Unlike Davies, I claim it is often difficult to discern the best science. I give several reasons for this, chief among them being that scholars of the arts pursuing natural-scientific explanations often fail to take into consideration the critical discourses about these explanations within the branches of science they are drawing upon. This is due, I suspect, to the overconfidence in science that Wittgenstein diagnosed. I illustrate this by critically examining the application of evolutionary psychology to film. In the first section, I introduce the main tenets of evolutionary psychology and point to problems that can bedevil this natural-scientific paradigm. After demonstrating in section two that many evolutionary explanations of cinema are implementation accounts that reveal little about our engagement with film, in section three I show how the problems with evolutionary explanations addressed in section one arise in the work of film theorists Torben Grodal and Rikke Schubart on horror and other genres.