A string of horror films has hit cinemas lately — Insidious: The Red Door, A Quiet Place Part II, Whirlpool: The New Escape-Room Game and more — drawing crowds of horror fans to buy their tickets and pile in. Some people savour the rush a horror film delivers; others are plainly frightened yet keep coming back for more. So why do people chase the sensation of fear, even happily paying to get "spooked"?
Why "fear" matters
When it comes to fear, most of us would rather steer well clear, keeping our distance from anything that frightens us. Yet the world is also full of people who love watching horror films, riding roller coasters or taking on extreme sports — they tend to chase the jolt of excitement that fear brings. So what kind of feeling is fear, really? In fact, fear is a self-protective mechanism that evolved over time, an emotion passed down to us because it once helped our ancestors flee from danger. In the distant past, when people faced a threat to their lives, the sensation of fear could fire up the brain to produce the fight-or-flight response, instantly raising adrenaline, muscle power, focus and more, so we could react in a flash and improve our chances of survival (Nummenmaa, 2021). In evolutionary psychology, this kind of fear pushes us to head off danger early and avoid serious injury or death, which is why the mechanism has stayed with us to this day.
The hallmarks of a horror film
You may not have noticed it, but horror films actually draw on a number of techniques to crank up how startled the audience feels, making the experience more intense and more absorbing. The scholar Mariani summed up three hallmarks: building tension, building relevance for the viewers, and a sense of unrealism.
Horror films often build tension through sound and imagery, putting the audience right alongside the protagonist as they try to escape what terrifies them. More than that, horror films usually carry a richer palette of emotions — dread, fright and shock, dismay, panic and anguish, gore and the like — heightening the sense of tension on screen.
Next, horror films tap into things the public widely recognises as "scary" to build relevance and strike a chord. This can be broken down into more universal fears (such as the dark and death), historical fears (such as nuclear war), the fears of a particular group (such as school bullying), and fears at the personal level (such as social anxiety). Speaking of scary things, we cannot leave out the theory of the Uncanny Valley put forward by Masahiro Mori in 1970. The theory notes that what people fear most are the creatures that seem human yet are not — because they have the basic features of a human while also looking distinctly off, they stir our most primordial fear of strangers, so our affinity for them suddenly drops and we feel revulsion or unease. By contrast, creatures that are entirely non-human (such as cartoon characters), or ones that look almost perfectly human, cannot stir feelings nearly as strong. This also explains why horror films so often choose zombies, clowns and similar figures — they fall squarely into the "uncanny valley"!
The sense of unrealism in a horror film helps create a kind of psychological distance for the audience, so they do not fixate on the rights and wrongs of the plot. Horror films are usually accompanied by music and effects that heighten the emotional atmosphere and the sense of fantasy, which in turn cuts down the time the audience spends on rational analysis and lets them focus more on the sensations on screen. Beyond that, the scholar Carroll pointed out as early as 1990 that the unreal settings in horror films allow viewers to detach for a moment from the familiar social patterns they know, helping them imagine living in a different world while offering a safe stage on which to explore the fears of the unknown.
The psychology of horror: the scarier it is, the more we want to watch?
No doubt many people are curious about why some of us love watching horror films and keep watching them right through. The psychologist Zillmann (1978) proposed excitation transfer theory, noting that people produce a range of emotions when facing different stimuli, and that our arousal in response to one thing can amplify how we feel about the stimulus of another. Put simply, the suspense and fear in a horror film stir up our negative emotions about the danger on screen, and this also amplifies our craving for the eventual outcome. So when that danger is finally resolved, the negative feelings that have built up over time turn in an instant into a sense of release, leaving us with a happiness like a weight lifted from our shoulders. This explains why watching a horror film can feel so pleasurable.
Another psychologist, Paul Rozin, proposed the theory of benign masochism, which explains why people are forever doing things that make life hard on themselves — eating spicy food, listening to heartbreak songs, watching horror films and the like (Rozin et al., 2013). The scholar explains that these things do indeed cause us pain and distress at first, but once we realise that the pain poses no real danger, we gain an extra sense of satisfaction. So once we are certain that the events in a horror film are not actually real, that thrill of excitement comes to replace fear (hedonic reversal), giving us the motivation to keep watching (Clasen et al., 2020).
Fear is a sensation we are born with, and everyone experiences it differently. In the world of horror films, some see them as purely entertainment, while others see them as a reflection of the dark side of human nature that leaves people cold. So whether it is the shocks on screen or the reflections in the plot, we each have our own definition of and expectations for horror films — which is why, whether you love them or fear them, there is no need to force yourself to embrace fear just to fit in with the crowd!
References
Carroll, N. (2003). The philosophy of horror: Or, paradoxes of the heart. Routledge.
Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2020). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, 14(3), 213.
Rozin, P., Guillot, L., Fincher, K., Rozin, A., & Tsukayama, E. (2013). Glad to be sad, and other examples of benign masochism. Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 439.
Mariani, L. (n.d). ” Why do we pay to get scared?” The paradoxical lure of horror films. Cinemafocus. http://www.cinemafocus.eu/Studi%20sul%20cinema/Horror%20-%20English.pdf
Mori, M. (1970). The Uncanny Valley (Bukimi No Tani). Energy. 7(4),33-35.
Nummenmaa, L. (2021). Psychology and neurobiology of horror movies. Nummenmaa Lab.
Zillman, D. (1978). Attribution and misattribution of excitatory reactions’. In: JH Harvey, WI Ickes and RF Kidd (Eds.), New directions in attribution research, Vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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