I grew up afraid of everything: death, the dark, my own face in the bathroom mirror.
I eventually learned that my bottomless fear contradicted several anxiety and anxiety-related disorders that I had treated as an adult with therapy, medication, and an unlikely third remedy: voracious consumption of horror movies.
Infection helped me get through the first night of quarantine in 2020, and Daddy's head helped me release pent-up tears on the anniversary of my father's death. I felt my own unspeakable rage and grief mingling with the Graham family's anger and grief. dining table V hereditaryand my hopelessness and meanness during a particularly difficult period turned into a senseless murder in a breathtaking stretch of the Australian outback in Wolf Creek.
While this type of catharsis is counterintuitive, I'm far from the only one who relies on it.
Dark cops, as researchers have dubbed us, use “horror as a tool to navigate a world they find scary,” says Matthias Klasen, co-founder of the organization Recreational laboratory of fear at Aarhus University in Denmark. And, according to the laboratory, we get great pleasure, self-knowledge and personal growth from this activity. conclusions.
Contrary to popular belief, their research shows that fear seeking during exercise (such as watching a horror movie or visiting a haunted house) is associated with more sustainability among adults and, if age appropriate, less risk from childhood anxiety.
As humans, “we make predictions all the time,” Klasen says. “In some ways, horror is a formalized worst-case scenario that is a natural product of how we cope.”
Why do we look for fears?
Besides the “dark cop” archetype created in the lab, there are two main categories defined by earlier studies These are the “adrenaline junkies,” who are motivated most by the physiological arousal—the rush—they get from fun and scary activities and the subsequent mood boost, Klasen explains, and the “white knuckles,” who work not for the sensation during, but for the feeling of accomplishment after.
Regardless of the motivation, “at the core of recreational fear is learning,” says Mark Malmdorff Andersen, another co-founder of the Recreational Fear Lab. This is an opportunity for people to deal with fear, a part of our human “emotional palette” that many of us don't experience in everyday modern life. “As we become more familiar with these conditions, we think they essentially become more predictable” and less overwhelming, Andersen explains.
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“For people like me, turning to horror to suppress anxiety can teach our brains to better predict fear signals and suppress overwhelming physiological signals,” says Andersen. Because anxiety can make someone overestimate threat or underestimating your ability to cope, watching horror movies can help you reframe “the comparison that says, 'This is the worst,'” says Greg Siegle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh.
Separating fact from fiction
Despite its restorative effect on people like me, horror has a reputation for doing just the opposite. Much of the concern about the effects of fear-seeking entertainment (that it is traumatizing or corrupting) is little more than a “folk belief” stemming from “a very long cultural history of deep suspicion of scary mass entertainment” that then found its way into early research into the psychology of horror, Klasen says.
In Victorian England, for example, there was a lot of nervousness about “penny horror films,” serially published sensational crime stories or horror films. “In the eyes of interested intellectuals,” fans of such stories, who were often from working-class backgrounds, “would become criminals, sadists and whatnot if they read these bloody, gory stories,” Klasen says. Instead they Literacy levels have increased.
A similar moral panic erupted in the United States in the 1950s as comic books, especially horror and crime stories, became popular. widely smeared for allegedly influencing children to delinquency or homosexuality (then considered a mental disorder), and in Britain in the 1980s more “nasty video» Horror films are banned due to fears that they will incite young people to violence.
In contrast to this baseless panic, horror can be a barometer of collective suffering and a tool for overcoming it, says Adam Lowenstein, founding director of the Institute at the University of Pittsburgh. Center for Horror Studiesopened in September. “Some of our greatest horror films coincided with some of our most traumatic moments in history,” he explains, pointing to the classic monster films that emerged during the Great Depression: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), Mummy (1932) and Wolf Man (1941). With this year's commercial hits like Sinners And Weaponhe says we're experiencing another “horror renaissance.”
Aren't scary things traumatic?
From a clinical perspective, “fear” and “trauma” are different, says Siegle. The latter has a significant impact on a person's long-term functioning and is a rare result of recreational anxiety. He quotes study He and colleague and sociologist Margie Kerr conducted a study measuring people's brain waves and reporting emotions before and after going through a “pretty extreme” haunted house. “They overwhelmingly said they loved it,” he says. “Of course it was scary, but it was uplifting, positive and joyful for them.”
Of course, the people who voluntarily go through a haunted house are a self-selecting group, and trauma can occur when someone is exposed to something against their will or goes beyond their limits. That's why context and consent are an important part of the recreational experience of fear, says Kerr, who also helps design haunted attractions. “You agree to suspend your disbelief and enter a new world, but [know] there’s always the possibility of leaving in the background,” she says.
Staying in the scary sweet spot
According to scientists, to get the most out of a scary chase, it is important to find a “golden mean” between too much fear and too little fear. laboratory research. Storytelling can help.
If you are in a haunted house, your brain may register that your palms are sweaty, your heart rate is increased, and your breathing is rapid and shallow. “The story you tell yourself at that moment plays a big role in determining whether you run away from there or go to the next room to see what awaits you,” says Siegle.
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“We get our physiology, our basic reactions, and then the rest is our history“And what we do is to interpret and use our reactions to that emotional information,” he explains. If you want to get the most out of fear like I do, Seagle suggests telling yourself that you're scared but excited and want to challenge yourself—so you won't die from that scare. With the right narrative, addressing fear can help you “understand your own response to distress,” he says, “and where you are actually safer than you might expect.”
