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.
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