Even though horror movies trigger negative feelings such as fear and disgust, they are quite popular among many viewers. Similar to actual threatening stimuli, a horror movie activates the sympathetic nervous system, resulting in increased cardiovascular function, alertness, and shallow breathing among the audience.1 Folks who perceive this to be exciting and desirable may find horror movies enjoyable.
Neurobiology of Fear
In contrast to neutral scenes of a horror movie, scary scenes strongly activate the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), thalamus, and visual areas of the brain, which are involved in regulating emotional states and anxiety.2
Amygdala activation occurs in response to threat signals that induce fear, instead of sustained anxiety. Scientists observed a similar mechanism in people watching horror movies. They hypothesized that highly reactive amygdalae could induce thrill and enjoyment in horror films. There is a possibility that the amygdala becomes increasingly active with greater stimulation, and an individual’s experience intensity correlates with the degree of amygdala activation while watching.3
The Thrill of Watching Horror Movies
The horror genre is a fictional art form that focuses on deliberately inducing fear. The key behavioral, psychophysiological, and mental impacts of horror movies include the following.4-6
- Behavioral: Watching a horror movie may cause an individual to shiver, startle, close or shield their eyes, tremble, scream, or heave.
- Psychophysiological: An individual who is watching a horror movie may experience an altered heart rate that can cause fainting, called vasovagal syncope. The strength of the fear response determines the changes in heart rate. Typically, the heart rate increases for a short duration, followed by a decrease.
- Mental: Horror movies can trigger fear, empathy, and thoughts of disgust. For some movie-watchers, horror movies cause sleep disturbances and trigger anxiety.
Scientists have proposed several explanations for why some folks enjoy the scare of a horror movie, including evolutionary and psychosocial theories.
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Theories that Explain Human Attraction to Fear and Excitement
As a survival instinct, fear can motivate people to seek quick escape from potential threats.7 However, folks who enjoy horror movies deliberately and proactively seek fear instead of escaping it. Scientists have proposed different theories to explain people’s attitudes towards enjoying the scare induced by a horror film.
Evolutionary theory
Scientists proposed that certain objects or conditions that once posed a threat to human ancestors continue to trigger fear responses because of evolutionary predisposition.8 Spiders, for example, are a staple in horror movies, although only 0.1-0.3 percent of spider species cause significant morbidity or mortality in humans.9 The fear triggered by seeing spiders in a scary movie could be associated with evolutionary conditioning that activates the fight or flight response for survival, although the viewer is not in any real danger.10
Excitation transfer theory
According to this theory, the audience derives enjoyment from the invocation of fear and suspense.11 Subsequently, when the suspense ends and the threat resolves, the negative feeling converts to euphoria. In contrast, if proper resolution does not occur, the residual negative effect increases to dysphoria.
“If you’re visiting a zoo, and you’re standing next to an alligator cage or tiger cage or whatever, and if the animal suddenly jumps at you, you get this big, big, strong startle response, and you probably jump back off a bit, because that’s the ultimate automatic response,” said Lauri Nummenmaa, neuroscientist at University of Turku. “Your brain thinks that this might be life threatening, and you better get away. But in a while, you’ll calm down because you’re outside [the cage]. Higher order cognitive systems can dampen the fear.” Similarly, the scary stimuli in a horror movie may transfer excitement into enjoyment through fear resolution when the movie ends.
Gratification theory and personality traits
Some individuals with sensation seeking personalities enjoy the horror genre because the jolt of horror is exhilarating and invigorating for them.12 These individuals seek out horror movies because of the thrill they experience from the fear crafted by the movies is enjoyable and satisfying.
The sensation seeking personality trait encompasses an individual’s willingness to take risks to experience different, novel, complex, and intense sensations.13 Besides sensation seeking, empathy and curiosity are also important traits that determine an individual’s preference for horror movies.
Empathy constitutes cognitive and emotional components.5 An empathetic person is more imaginative towards fictional situations and sensitive to the emotional welfare of others. High sensation seekers and low empathizers are less frequently scared while watching horror movies and enjoy these movies more. Additionally, curiosity drives some people to watch horror movies; morbid curiosity combines interest, excitement, and fear related to unpleasant events such as death, and often correlates with both sensation seeking and horror movie enjoyment.1 Psychologists have also correlated dark personality traits such as sadism, psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism with enjoyment while watching horror movies.5
Benign masochism hypothesis
This hypothesis states that watching horror movies is an adaptive behavior, as it prepares an individual for a theoretical negative stimuli that may occur.14 While watching these movies, people may experience strong emotions that they have not previously experienced but may in the future, such as a feeling of fear or despair when relationships break, a loved one dies, or even encountering a bear in a forest. Consciously or subconsciously, people might be drawn to horror movies to practice and prepare for those feelings that they may experience in real life. “Horror movies or drama or comedies, they give us a chance to experience or rehearse these kinds of strong emotions in a safe environment,” explained Nummenmaa.
FAQs
Why do people like horror movies?
- Some people enjoy the negative feelings that are induced while watching a horror movie such as fear and anxiety. Several personality and cognitive traits such as sensation seeking and empathy determine whether an individual finds a horror movie enjoyable.5 Horror movies also provide people with the enjoyment of scary stimuli without the risk of adverse situations.
What is the psychology of fear?
- Psychological theories propose fear to be a basic and universal human emotion.15 It is a response to an imminent threat that prepares an individual to make an appropriate decision whether to fight or flee. An individual experiences fear in the mind, which may trigger many physiological reactions such as shivering, screaming, anxiety, and changes in heart rate.
What is evolutionary psychology?
- Evolutionary psychology is a branch of science that deals with human behavior.16 It is based on natural selection that shapes psychological characteristics underlying behavioral adaptations to environmental conditions to increase the odds of survival and reproduction. Both cognitive psychologists and evolutionary psychologists focus on explaining human behavior through internal psychological mechanisms.
- Kiss BL, et al. The role of excitement and enjoyment through subjective evaluation of horror film scenes. Sci Rep. 2024;14(1):2987.
- Straube T, et al. Neural representation of anxiety and personality during exposure to anxiety-provoking and neutral scenes from scary movies. Hum Brain Mapp. 2010;31(1):36-47.
- Kirk PA, et al. Anxiety shapes amygdala-prefrontal dynamics during movie watching. Biol Psychiatry Glob Open Sci. 2023;3(3):409-417.
- Harris RJ, et al. Young men’s and women’s different autobiographical memories of the experience of seeing frightening movies on a date. Media Psychol. 2000;2(3):245–268.
- Martin GN. (Why) do you like scary movies? A review of the empirical research on psychological responses to horror films. Front Psychol. 2019;18;10:2298.
- Cantor J. “I’ll never have a clown in my house”—Why movie horror lives on.Poetics Today. 2004;25(2):283–304.
- Mineka S, Öhman A. Phobias and preparedness: The selective, automatic, and encapsulated nature of fear. Biol Psychiatry. 2002;52(10):927-937.
- Öhman A, Mineka S. Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychol Rev. 2001;108(3):483-522.
- Gerdes ABM, et al. Spiders are special: Fear and disgust evoked by pictures of arthropods.Evol Hum Behav. 2009;30(1):66-73.
- Landová E, et al. Attentional, emotional, and behavioral response toward spiders, scorpions, crabs, and snakes provides no evidence for generalized fear between spiders and scorpions. Sci Rep. 2023;13(1):20972.
- Zillmann D, et al. The effect of suspense and its resolution on the appreciation of dramatic presentations. J Res Pers. 1975;9(4):307-323.
- Greene K, Krcmar M. Predicting exposure to and liking of media violence:A uses and gratifications approach.Commun Stud. 2005;56(1):71–93.
- Zuckerman M. Behavioral expressions and biosocial bases of sensation seeking. Cambridge University Press; 1994.
- Clasen M, et al. Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media. Evol Behav Sci. 2020;14(3):213–230.
- Adolphs R. The biology of fear. Curr Biol. 2013;23(2):R79-93.
- Martin RA, Ford TE. The physiological psychology of humor and laughter. The Psychology of Humor (Second Edition). 2018;173-204.
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