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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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.
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