Why are we as humas so attracted to things that scare us, like horror movies, watching true crime, going to ‘haunted houses’?
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I don’t have a great answer, because I don’t like roller coasters or haunted houses, but I do love horror movies, and my wife (who absolutely does NOT like horror) has asked me why I like them, and I have been thinking about it and trying to put it into words.
The best I have come up with is this.
I don’t necessarily like horror so much as I like certain elements and tropes that primarily occur in horror. Ii think the best horror, or rather than parts of horror that I like the best, are the parts that acknowledge the continued existence of the unknown, that we haven’t really got it all figured out yet. In some of the bordering genres, where the unknown appears, it’s treated differently. In mysteries, the unknown must be untangled and made known. In action/suspense/thriller, the unknown is revealed and it is only unknown to cause tension. In horror, the unknown is allowed to stay unknown. Humans are able to stumble into something bigger and scarier than they are, something utterly beyond their understanding, and they don’t necessarily figure it out, and that’s only really treated as okay in horror. The closest another genre comes to that is fantasy, which is also a favorite of mine.
Being presented with escape-able danger give us a rush of adrenaline which makes it pleasurable. It appears that this evolved to cause us to enjoy chasing each other as children, which leads us to practice evading threats. If the threat actually catches you, the joy turns to trauma. So the term “horror” is actually a bit of a mistaken name for that genre.
This is why, if you noticed, the best horror movie characters are escape-able. Jason and Michael Myers move extremely slowly, Freddy Krueger can’t hurt you until you fall asleep. This lets the avoidance stage, the pleasurable part, last longer. When they actually catch characters, it’s usually characters who have done something wrong like underage smoking, etc so that we don’t feel that bad about their punishment (this is called schadenfreude and is another thing we enjoy), and it’s used establish the threat for the most emotionally powerful part of the movie, the climax, where they chase the character we care about most, who escapes.
True crime can also be very educational since we’re learning about dangers that are too much of a threat to personally experience.
Several reasons, it seems:
Vicarious Experiences and Threat Mastery
Horror movies are a risk-free way to vicariously experience threats and rehearse one’s responses to those threats.
Plus, after people get through a horror movie unscathed, they may feel a sense of accomplishment and mastery over the threat they’ve experienced, which then leads them to feel more confident in their ability to handle other anxiety-provoking situations.
Excitation Transfer Theory
The theory proposes that horror media stimulates elevated levels of physiological arousal because of the fear they induce; when the media concludes, that arousal then intensifies viewers’ feelings of relief and enjoyment, leading to a euphoric high.
Studies have backed up this theory, at least for male viewers. For example, one study found that the more distress male participants reported and the more arousal they experienced while watching a horror film, the greater their delight after finishing the film.
Curiosity about the darker sides of Human nature.
Another study found that our enjoyment of horror movies can be explained by the fact that they satisfy our curiosity about the dark side of humanity, again, in a safe environment.
https://www.verywellmind.com/why-do-people-like-horror-movies-5224447
The brain likes pushing us to experience potentially dangerous situations in a relatively safe way, so that if we experience those situations in the future we will be able to deal with them better.
Back in caveman days that meant getting into stick fights with your brother or watching from a distance as the grown ups hunted down a mammoth.
Nowadays it is a bit more divorced from it’s original intention of helping you survive in the wilderness but we still crave it in the same way. Also even today it’s probably still helpful in that way. Watching true crime for example can teach you to be wary of certain risky things like getting into a strangers car and so on.
When scared your body releases a lot of chemicals. Those are addictive and can be pleasurable once you remove the actual threat of harm.
I’d say it’s a minority of the human population who are attracted to such things. Maybe a small minority.
I belief has always been that these kind of “negative” topics are more popular in stable, wealthy countries because it allows people to “vacation” in tragedy or horror they get their feelings that might not be otherwise triggered by their stable environment and then get to go back to life as usual.
For others life gives them enough of those scenarios that they’d rather escapism.
Could also be the whole “I smack my head against the wall because it feels so good when I stop” kinda thing.
Most people arent. It’s kiinda like being really into feet, or being degraded Some people are wired different, so something that would make the average person feel bad, makes another person feel good.
True crime is different in that, being real, it exposes a part of life that most people aren’t gonna be involved in.
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