Why Do We Enjoy Being Scared?

And why our sense of fear provides us benefits.

There is nothing better than a great horror movie. There is something about a foreboding atmosphere, creepy music and shadowy figures in the background that elicit simultaneous fear and joy. As we anticipate something terrifying, our heart begins to race while our breathing speeds up. If the movie is well-directed, you might even yelp when the ghost or monster appears. While fear itself is unpleasant under any other circumstance, millions of us love horror movies.

I often wonder why we enjoy sensations and movies that terrify us. Intuitively, it does not sound like it makes a lot of sense. Fear evolved to help us respond to potential threats within our environment. While fear is conserved in the animal kingdom, our enjoyment of it may be unique. Is this something that cropped up by chance or a feature that our entertainment allows us to experience?

While our response might be a little different than a mouse, many of the same brain circuits are activated. Yet we might be the only organisms that subject ourselves to fear for recreation. The horror genre is rife with monsters, slashers and gore. But we go back to watching the latest Halloween movie every year to scare ourselves. Some evidence suggests that these scares might benefit us beyond providing enjoyment.

As we fall down this fascinating rabbit hole, we learn about why we might have developed this emotion. These clues will help us understand ourselves and our obsession with the horrific and macabre.

What is Fear?

Fear is an emotional response to our environment. We collect information from the environment through our sensory organs, mainly our eyes and ears. This information is transformed into electrical signals and related to our brains. Different regions of the brain then use these signals to assess danger within the environment. If anything odd, strange or downright dangerous detected, it must react! An almond-shaped region in our brain, called the amygdala, helps us evaluate and respond to these signals.

If perhaps, our senses detected enough clues indicating a lion, our amygdala might activate.

Over the history of psychology and behavioural neuroscience, many theories of fear emerged. Early theories proposed that fear might be a reactive response, like a reflex. Newer paradigms acknowledge fear as a central state. It is more than our behavioural responses to danger. Nor is it the way we feel in such a circumstance.

Fear involves the intermingling between our inner state, external stimuli and our physiological responses. Fear causes our conscious experience as well as our response to it. We might still be terrified several hours after watching a horror movie.

As a central state, fear helps animals assess their situation and determine the ideal course of action. A monkey might be hungry and eye some tasty bananas. However, if a lion is stirring nearby, the monkey needs to evaluate its fear against the reward/need for food. Individuals that responded appropriately to their environment lived to procreate and pass on their genes.

Fear plays important roles in not just our motivations but also the way we might experience pain, how we respond to aggression and how we navigate reward and punishment.

Why Do We Like Being Spooked?

The way we experience fear is unique, but only a few psychologists delved into understanding our obsessions with the horror genre. One explanation involves a theory of emotional transfer. Many films build suspense and anticipation through audio and visual cues. Once the feelings of suspense or anticipation are resolved, the audience experiences a euphoria.

However, many horror movies do not resolve themselves neatly. The protagonist is not guaranteed to survive the movie either. This throws another wrench into the emotional transfer theory. Perhaps then it’s these feelings of destruction and unpredictability that draw us to these films. These feelings might provide us with well-needed gratification. Still, this isn’t consistent with what we know about the biology of fear.

Perhaps identifying why certain people enjoy and others are disgusted by these films could give us a better explanation. Sensation and thrill-seeking associates well with how much we like horror films. By exploring risky stimuli that expose us to the state of fear or danger, we might gain enjoyment. Interestingly, different aspects of sensation-seeking determined how much they enjoyed a horror film.

Other individual studies found that other emotional traits such as low-empathy correlated with the enjoyment of these movies. It is quite reductive to say that people who love horror movies have low-empathy based on this one study. While we might not understand exactly why some people love horror movies, we can look for benefits.

Sensation-Seeking and Resilience

Is there any benefit to watching these movies then? Perhaps the dozens of potential zombie scenarios prepared me for something else. While it’s unlikely we’ll face zombies anytime soon, we’ve found ourselves in a pandemic situation. Interestingly, people who seek out horror films showed more mental resilience and preparedness in the face of the crisis.

Perhaps playing out these scenarios or experiencing them vicariously through the screen teach us to prepare for hardship. This study suggests that simulating these events provides us with benefits when it comes to our mental health and preparedness. We might be the only organism on this planet capable of playing out these scenarios and benefiting from them.

We might be hard-wired to seek the excitement within the screen, having adapted fear to our benefit. The amygdala is well-connected to many other regions in the brain, making it plausible that they might help reinforce resilience or preparedness. If you’re aching for some thrills at home, just throw on a horror movie!