It’s a familiar scene: a darkened room, a TV glowing with the soft hum of eerie music, people in comfortable pajamas holding their breath, waiting for the inevitable—the defining scream of a woman murdered on screen. We know it’s coming, that her end is near, yet we keep watching. We stare, sometimes we cover our eyes, but rarely do we turn the movie off.
Why is that? What makes us so fascinated with the gore, the darkness, and the fear? Maybe it makes us feel more alive, lets us face our fears from the comfort of our homes, and reveals our inner monsters. Or maybe we simply live off the fear, chasing it like an adrenaline rush we can’t resist.
Do we watch horror movies purely because of the thrill and a desire to seek out adrenaline? Maybe it’s similar to our willingness to seek out roller coasters or our fascination with riding them over and over again, even though they might scare the daylights out of us. They create an irresistible pull that lures us in, one jump scare at a time.
Associate professor Haiyang Yang, a behavioral scientist at John Hopkins University, explores the factors that drive our decision-making and how they relate to choosing scary content. He believes that irregular ‘stimulation’ is one of the driving forces behind our captivation with horror, as the movies tend to evoke strong emotions of anxiety, fear, happiness, and joy. Yang notes that we tend to feel our strongest positive emotions when we have just experienced strong negative ones, illuminating why we find scary movies so thrilling.
Yang also explains that horror is a safe way to satisfy our curiosity and explore the “dark side” of humanity. We are watching these terrifying movies from the safety of our own homes. There is no real risk.
A zombie apocalypse: unlikely.
Possession: rare.
Killer clowns: possible, but once again improbable.
Besides the literal sense of safety they create, horror movies also provide an avenue to explore humanity’s darkest moments: the ideas of mortality and violence, without any real-world consequences.
I find this idea equivalent to our interest in true crime, watching crime documentaries, and seeking out cases in which violence has occurred. The same questions can be asked: why do we really have an interest in true crime? A similar answer, because we are curious, we want to explore this dark side of human nature- our own real-life monsters in a controlled way.
While Yang explores the more physical aspects of why we watch horror, Stephen King, in his essay “Why We Crave Horror Movies,” explains the psychological and moral dimensions of the ‘macabre. ‘ King implies that we are all a little insane, each of us possessing our own monsters, which, without an outlet, might escape into the real world. In his own words horror ” … keeps them down there and me up here.” King establishes the idea that our fascination stems from a deeper inherent nature, interest in fear, the morbid, and the taboo. A sort of mirror of real life, where people can reflect, witness, and acknowledge their own personal demons. A space where we take the grotesque and make it not only acceptable, but even admired.
But what does this mean? Is watching and consuming horror a bad thing? Should we stop? Does it say something about our morality if we don’t? Or am I being too introspective, and is horror simply just make-believe with no deeper meaning or purpose besides providing entertainment?
In my opinion, when we sit in the darkness of our living rooms watching these scenes unfold, we aren’t just entertained. We’re exploring the dark recesses of our minds. It reminds us that while these fictional monsters exist, the real ones we should fear might come from within.