Key Takeaways
- Horror movies help us practice facing scary situations in a safe way.
- People enjoy the excitement of fear because it ends with relief and happiness.
- Those who like horror often look for new and intense experiences.
Horror is one of the most enduringly popular film genres in many areas around the world. While many people willingly buy tickets to the latest release, in our daily lives we often try to avoid anything that frightens us. So why would we pay to watch a movie that induces fear and terror?
Here we explore several of the theories behind why people like horror movies. We also dive into who tends to gravitate toward movies designed to provoke feelings of fright, along with the ways in which these types of films can actually be therapeutic.
Reasons People Like Horror Movies
No single explanation provided by scholars accounts for every reason people enjoy watching horror movies. Below are among the most well-established explanations offered to explain this phenomenon.
Vicarious Experiences and Threat Mastery
Horror scholar Mathias Clasen suggests that a tendency to love horror can be traced back to the constant danger our ancient ancestors experienced in the environments where they lived. Constant vigilance was required to avoid becoming the prey of a larger or more deadly animal.
These long-ago experiences have granted people a highly responsive, albeit mostly unconscious, threat detection system. Because horror movies do such a good job of simulating threatening situations, this means our emotional responses to them are similar to those we’d experience if we encountered a real-life threat.
Because we don’t encounter real-life threats as often as ancient humans, going to horror films can be a novel experience that lets us put our innate threat detection system to use. This not only makes horror movies more attention-grabbing for audiences, but it also allows them to experience things like post-apocalypse, alien invasions, and the threat of an attacker in a safe environment.
In short, 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.
In our everyday lives, we don’t encounter scary situations all that often. But if we do encounter something threatening or dangerous, it attracts our attention.
Excitation Transfer Theory
One of the earliest psychological theories to explain people’s enjoyment of horror movies is Dolf Zillmann’s excitation transfer theory, which was developed in the 1970s. This theory proposes that our enjoyment is created by the negative affect created by the film followed by a positive affect or response when the threat is resolved, leading to a euphoric high.
More recent studies suggest that excitation transfer theory is still alive. One was published in 2017 and looked at permadeath (the idea that once a character dies in a video game, the game starts over from the beginning) in the survival-horror game DayZ. It concluded that permadeath was appealing to players due to excitation transfer.
Exploring the Dark Side of Humanity
Other studies theorize that our enjoyment of horror movies comes from a morbid curiosity about subjects like death and terror, also referred to as the dark side of humanity. One piece of research found that people with higher levels of morbid curiosity are more likely to watch horror films, less likely to be scared after watching them, and generally watch these flicks alone.
According to this theory, horror movies let us vicariously explore the nature of evil, both in others and in ourselves. They also allow us to grapple with the darkest parts of humanity in a safe environment.
Who Likes Horror Movies?
Not everyone enjoys horror movies. In fact, there are many who stay away from the genre as much as possible. Psychology has provided some insight into the individual differences that make someone more likely to enjoy horror films.
People Who Seek Sensations
Numerous studies have demonstrated that those high in the trait of sensation seeking tend to enjoy horror. Sensation seeking is the tendency to look for novel, risky, or intense experiences. People high in this trait tend to experience positive emotions when they have intensely stimulating experiences, even if those experiences are negative.
High sensation seekers are wired to enjoy the stimulating experience of horror films in a way people low in this trait are not.
People With Lower Empathy Levels
Research indicates that people lower in the trait of empathy tend to enjoy horror movies because they are less impacted by the suffering depicted onscreen. Not everyone agrees with this, however.
Some researchers contend that our empathy toward a real person is not necessarily the same as the empathy we feel for a fictional character. The problem is that this is difficult to determine in studies, making it hard to know if and when true empathy occurs.
People Belonging to the Male Sex
More than any other individual difference, sex is most predictive of enjoyment of horror films, with males tending to enjoy scary and violent movies far more than females. This difference can be at least partially explained by the fact that females tend to experience greater fear and anxiety than males.
In addition, females tend to be higher than males in the trait of disgust sensitivity. This could lead them to dislike horror movies that depict blood and gore.
Horror Movies as Therapy
There’s a growing body of research that suggests horror movies could be used in clinical settings to help people with anxiety or trauma. For instance, one study found that people who watched horror movies were less psychologically distressed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and those who were fans of the apocalyptic subgenre of horror felt more prepared for additional waves of the pandemic.
This suggests that people who consume horror develop the ability to cope with stressful and anxiety-provoking situations.
If this is the case, watching horror movies and other media could be used by mental health professionals to help people with anxiety develop emotional and behavioral strategies to cope with their fears, which could ultimately make them more resilient in general.
While people who don’t enjoy horror may not find this beneficial, for those who like the genre, watching horror movies could be akin to exposure therapy. More research needs to be conducted to determine if this approach is effective and, if so, in what instances.
