Why do people love horror films?

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

0:30at Whole Foods Market. Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com slash af

1:04There's an old disused factory on the east coast of Denmark where, as the seasons turn and the nights start drawing in, people gather for an experience that's traditional at this time of year. Which way?

1:21Getting the pants scared off them. You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service. I'm Anand Jagatia, and this is what happens when an unsuspecting radio presenter and his producer get ambushed in the dark at a haunted house. By men who are covered in blood and wielding chainsaws. As you can hear, we were terrified. But we were also having quite a lot of fun. And that's the paradox at the heart of this week's question. Hi, I'm Maria. I'm originally from Indonesia, and I lived in Taiwan for many years. Why do people love horror films? I am interested because I don't like being scared and I'm sure most people do not either.

2:07But my husband really enjoys horror films and wants me to watch them with him. I close my eyes or live altogether in the middle of the movies because scary images sticks in my brain and come out as nightmares. Maria says that in Taiwan, the supernatural isn't something to be taken lightly. In Taiwanese culture, we believe in spirits and want to keep them happy. So they go back to their own world. Taiwanese do not welcome the spirits. Every time I watch the horror movies, then it makes me feel like I don't feel safe anymore. Maybe the spirits came out before their time and come to my dreams and give me nightmares.

2:47Since people are so afraid of ghosts, why do they watch ghosts and horror movies? Thanks, Maria, for your excellent question. We're putting out this episode on Halloween, a time when I like nothing better than to curl up with a ghost story or watch a scary movie. But why on earth would that be enjoyable? Fear is supposed to be bad, right?

3:14Hi. Hello, welcome. I'm Mark. Nice to meet you, Mark. I'm Anand. Nice to meet you. Hello, I'm Matthias. Hey, Matthias. Thank you for having us. Well, luckily for us, there's a research lab in Denmark that's dedicated to understanding why people frighten themselves for fun. The Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University. If you look in a psychology handbook, say, for first semester psychology students, and you go to fear, then it will say something like that fear is an evolved response that have the function of keeping humans away from things that they perceive put them in danger, really, right?

3:51Mark Anderson is one of the directors of the lab. It's often seen as an evolved emotion. A lot of psychologists would claim that it's so-called basic emotion that we all share. It's universal. And it's something that's really designed to keep us alive in a way by making us run away from dangerous stimuli. And what is obviously missing from that conception of fear is that humans also seem to really love that emotion. I mean, if you look at the horror industry, if you look at Halloween, if you look at just the billion-dollar industry that horror and the induction of recreational fear represents, then there's obviously something flawed with our conception of fear.

4:35It seems that in a lot of cases, humans and also other animals can enjoy this emotion in some contexts. And that's really what's at the foundation of what we are interested in. Why is it that humans can sometimes enjoy this negative emotion and at the same time feel reward while doing so? The people that say, you know, I don't like horror films, if you ask them, you'll often be able to identify some other place where they do enjoy recreational fear. Like, no, but I do actually enjoy the roller coaster. Or, well, I don't like horror films, but I actually do like the thrill and excitement and fear that can be elicited in, say, a thriller, for instance, right?

5:15So why do people, some people like me, enjoy horror films and other people like our listener Maria from Taiwan can't stand horror films? The main hypothesis in our lab is that the reward from watching horror comes from learning, essentially. Learning understood in a pretty sort of wide sense. So there are evidence from cognitive science that if you are able to reduce uncertainty in your environment, then that is typically a rewarding feeling for humans. And reducing uncertainty, something that's unpredictable to your organism, is essentially the same thing in many cases as learning about your environment.

6:05When you learn something new, then you can better predict what's going on around you. So according to Mark, learning about our surroundings, or to put it another way, reducing uncertainty, tends to feel good. And the same thing might be going on when we watch scary films. And that's one of the key mechanisms that horror uses, is that it generates a lot of unpredictability, like a jump scare for instance. and then quite quickly thereafter you reduce that uncertainty and like oh it was I didn't die it was just you know and then the environment becomes predictable for you in a sense so one hypothesis is that the reason that some people enjoy horror movies and other people don't is that some people hit that sweet spot of being able to extract useful information from it and And for others, it makes the world even more unpredictable than it was before.

7:01It makes sense that fear could be tied up with learning. It is, after all, an emotion that's there to teach us things. Often, that experience is unpleasant, so that we avoid the scary thing in future. But sometimes, it's enjoyable. Mark is saying that when we watch a horror film, we know something scary is going to happen. But we don't know when. It's uncertain. When the monster suddenly jumps out, it might be frightening, but the uncertainty is resolved, at least for now, which, given the monster isn't real, we find rewarding. And Mark's lab does have evidence for this idea, which was collected in the haunted house you heard us screaming in earlier.

7:44We did a study a few years ago in the haunted attraction where we hooked people up with heart rate monitors, and then we asked them about the relationship between enjoyment and fear. And what we found was this inverted U-shaped relationship where high enjoyment was sort of often seen in moderate amounts of fear. Too high amounts of fear would show a decrease in enjoyment, but also too low amounts of fear would show a decrease in enjoyment. An inverted U-shaped relationship is what you'd see if you plotted the two things on a graph. So as the amount of fear goes up, at first the amount of enjoyment goes up, But eventually, it peaks.

8:26And after that, any more fear reduces enjoyment. On a graph, that's like an upside-down U. That inverted U-shaped curve is something we also see in studies of curiosity, studies of play and studies of learning, that humans generally, they like to seek out information that is moderately unpredictable for them, moderately surprising. And if you're able to hit that sweet spot of what to you is moderately surprising, then our prediction, you could say, is that that's where you would maximise enjoyment. That's where you can learn the most, essentially, from these dystopian situations that you're exposed to in horror.

9:08So for fear to be enjoyable, it has to hit the sweet spot. Not too scary, but not too dull either. And Mark says there's something else that backs up his theory. People tend to seek out horror films in response to uncertainty in the real world, as happened five years ago when all our lives got turned upside down. A telling example that we often talk about is that during the COVID pandemic in 2020, when all the countries were sort of shutting down and we were figuring out what this virus was, I don't know if you remember, but there was a lot of uncertainty in people in general, right? People were quite scared.

9:46And something really interesting happened. If you looked at the consumer patterns of movies, you might imagine that people in that state of uncertainty would want to watch comedies or feel-good movies. But the horror market absolutely exploded during that period. And the most watched horror movie during that period was a horror movie called Contagion, which is a horror movie about a virus that kills everyone, right? That is sort of one really illustrative piece of evidence that this is really about learning and something that's relevant to humans often. And the thing that can be deemed relevant can be everything from the experience of a different physiological state that you don't get to enter that much as a human, at least a modern human, and the exploration of these dystopian narratives, like what would happen if a deadly virus was unleashed on humanity.

10:39Watching horror films could be useful in that it lets us practice our response to scary situations in a safe way. And there's some evidence that this actually works. So there was a study conducted from our lab that looked into the stress responses of horror fans during the pandemic. And in that study, it was found that horror fans wasn't as stressed out by the pandemic as non-horror fans, which could indicate that horror fans have built up a resilience. In other words, they've learned about these, You know, they know that people are going to drive down to the supermarket and buy all the toilet paper because they've seen that happen in all these zombie movies and what have you.

11:20They know what the physical state feels like because they've entered that state many times. It's not as unpredictable a state for them as it is for someone who hasn't experienced that before. So I think that that's another piece of that puzzle that supports this sort of learning narrative. As well as giving us some insight into how to survive the apocalypse, could horror movies help us in day-to-day life too? We do think there is a kind of transference of, you know, skill. Matthias Klayson is Mark's fellow co-director at the Recreational Fear Lab. So from watching horror movies and training yourself to be in that kind of bodily state, maybe practicing your ability to regulate your own emotions, keep fear and stress down, accurately interpret what's going on in your body, Those are general skills that presumably can be transferred to other stressful situations in real life, like facing a job interview or going on a date or giving a public presentation.

12:18Public speaking, that's always the one, isn't it? It always is. That's the one that sends a shivers down my spine, yeah. Well, if you think public speaking is scary, you haven't been to a Danish haunted house. About an hour away from Aarhus is Dystopia, an immersive horror experience set in a creepy old fish factory, full of actors trying to scare the living daylights out of you. Dystopia, your worst nightmare.

12:52The Recreational Fear Lab has been collaborating with the Dystopia team to try and understand why willing guests pay good money for this experience and seem to enjoy it. So naturally, me and my producer Jonathan had to pay a visit ourselves, and Mark and Matthias were only too happy to come along. For the next two hours, we were grossed out, disturbed and frightened silly by all kinds of things. You feel the knife and you feel the blood. You feel the knife moving over your skin. There was blood and gore. I really hope all of you make it out alive. There were freaky witches. Thank you.

13:36A real-life snake. Is that a snake? That's a real snake. You just swear your loyalty in there. Is it real? Yeah. So if you betray us, I will make him bite you. And some very creepy children.

13:53Not to mention screaming. There really was a lot of screaming.

14:02But despite that, the whole thing was really quite fun. It's not the sort of thing you typically do with academics. And after we finally emerged from the horror into the car park, it was hard not to feel like the four of us had become closer. Horror has a social dimension as well, right? And I feel like we went into it as strangers and we've come out of it as friends. Would you agree? Absolutely. Yeah, you come as strangers and you leave as friends. Yeah, I feel like we've been through an ordeal together and that's definitely bonded us. In fact, the bonding power of fear is something Mark and Matthias are particularly interested in.

14:39and they've done experiments on people at the haunted house to investigate it. We published a study recently where we looked at what's called interpersonal synchrony. And interpersonal synchrony is a phenomena where humans synchronize in their physiological responses. So it's been found, for instance, that spectators to a firewalking ritual synchronize their heart rate with the person that actually walked on fire in this ritual, if they were related. if they were a family. And so we did something similar here where we asked participants which other members of the group in the Haunted attraction they knew.

15:21So typically in dystopia, people go in in groups of four to five, and typically it's like a couple of strangers and a couple of friends that go in. So we asked them which of the other guests they knew, and we asked them about how emotionally close they felt to the ones they knew. And what we found was that people that are very close, so like a partner, a very close friend, synchronize significantly more. So their hearts beat more similarly as they experience, in this case, a haunted attraction or recreational fear. And we also found that they tended to have a higher or more intense fear experiences.

16:00One interpretation of this finding is that shared experiences with people that are meaningful to you amplify those experiences. And that's something that previous research have also indicated. Given horror is such a social phenomenon, I'm wondering if there are certain kinds of people that are drawn to it. Is there a horror personality type? That's a good question, because we once did a study looking at basic personality differences and trying to see if there's a horror movie fan personality profile. There's not. So there are neurotic people who are horror fans. There are extroverted people who are horror fans.

16:38They're introverted. They're emotionally stable. You know, all kinds of personality profiles can characterize a horror fan. But we have found that there are different kinds of horror fans in the sense that some horror fans we call adrenaline junkies, and they enjoy, you know, the bodily stimulation, the kick of being frightened by a film or a video game or whatever. But there's another kind of horror fan that we call the white knuckler. And that's somebody who enjoys horror, but sees it more as a kind of personal challenge in making it through a frightening experience with their mental health intact.

17:12Very often kind of clenching their fists so that their knuckles go white, hence the name. And then we have found a third type of horror fan that we call the dark coper. And that's somebody who uses horror as a way to deal with a world that they perceive to be frightening. Relatively often it seems struggling with some kind of mental health problem, generalized anxiety, maybe depression, and using horror as a means to self-medicate, a way to feel better. So those are three basic types of horror fan. Adrenaline junkie, white knuckler, and dark coper. I love those categories. I think I may be a mix of all three.

17:50It depends on the day. So to answer listener Maria's question, there are all kinds of reasons why people might watch horror films, even though they find them scary. But what about those people like Maria who hate scary movies and yet end up sitting through them anyway? Are there any coping strategies they can use? That's what we'll be hearing about next. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic and bursting with flavour. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt. Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese.

18:31Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever, proteins, and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts, or spending time on month-end clothes, it's time to get Brex AF, a Gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com.af.

18:59You're listening to CrowdScience from the BBC World Service, the show that aims to reduce uncertainty in an enjoyable way. I'm Anand Jagatia, and this week we're trying to understand why fear can be fun. Even babies enjoy being scared. Just think of peekaboo. We've heard that fear is quite a complex emotion that helps make the world less unpredictable, which could explain why we enjoy it. But it's all about hitting that sweet spot. For listener Maria, horror films shoot way past it. And she's been wondering about which of her senses they trigger the most. According to our brains, the sound is scarier than the visual.

19:42So what's the role of sound in creating fear? Here's Matthias again. That's a great question because many people have the intuition that if you're finding a horror movie slightly too scary, you should cover your eyes. That's about the worst thing you can do because, yes, you block the visual stimulus, but the auditory stimulus still reaches you and tends to engage your imagination, which produces horror that are way worse than anything you can put on a screen using even state-of-the-art CGI. The thing about sound, though, for horror, is that it's a really difficult signal to block. I mean, you can cover your ears, but especially low-frequency sound can still reach your nervous system by making your bones vibrate in a very literal way.

20:29And allegedly, some horror movie directors have experienced with infrasound, which is sound at very, very low frequency that you don't consciously register, but that still makes you feel deeply uncomfortable. maybe for very deep ancient evolutionary reasons where from back at a time when deep rumblings could indicate oncoming dangerous weather or huge animals. So sound is hugely important and if somebody is watching a scary movie at home where they have control and they are finding it too scary they shouldn't look away, they should turn down the sound. That's a much more effective coping strategy.

21:08So there you go, Maria. Matthias says that it could be the sound of horror films that scares you more than the visuals. So take his advice and maybe stick your fingers in the ears next time your husband makes you watch a scary film. Speaking of scary sounds, how does this make you feel?

21:32Kind of creepy, right? Well, someone who has been looking into the power of sounds that can put a shiver down your spine is BBC Nature Bang presenter Becky Ripley. Hi, Becky. Hi, Anand. What kinds of sounds do we tend to find scary or uncomfortable? Yeah, so evolutionarily, any sound that is distorted makes us feel really uncomfortable. And that's kind of because in an evolutionary context, a human or animal voice that overblows the vocal system is something like a scream. And that's basically when you force air across your vocal cords too fast, the system goes into this sort of non-linear chaotic phase.

22:10Like if you were to look at the sound wave, it would be really big, overblown, like zigzaggy lines. And it's these non-linear distorted sounds that really trigger us, not only because they come from fear, but they actually also cause fear for the person hearing it. Right, got you. So they're the kinds of sounds that we might make if we were scared, but also they sort of, they make us feel scared as well. Exactly. And I think that's partly because we're a social species. You make that sound when you're scared as an alert call and then another member of that group will hear it and be like, oh gosh, I should probably be scared.

22:44So your investigations into the sounds that we tend to find scary led you to speak to a horror film music composer. Yeah, I spoke to this brilliant man called Mark Corvin. He's scored films like The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Black Phone. and he's amazing because he doesn't just stick with the conventional instruments to do it. So he took me on this tour of this amazing homemade contraption that he keeps in his studio and it's a central feature of all his film compositions. And it's called The Apprehension Engine. Basically, it's a wooden box and it has various contraptions attached to it. I wouldn't call it an instrument.

23:26It's really a collection of rude sounds. So first up, we have just a long metal rod. I call it the clacker, and it just makes a clacking sound.

23:42Goes on like that for quite a while. And I also bow it.

23:50And then I have a single guitar string that I play with in E-bow and with lots of distortion.