How Horror Movies and True Crime Can Make You Happier

22:53That's why they're listening to podcasts about him and watching Netflix series about him and so on. Yes, exactly. You know, it's a different subcategory, but it's still this interest in things that are violent or dangerous, right? So are some serial killers interested in violence? Yeah, I would say probably, right? They are violent individuals. They're probably going to be interested in violence. But it's short-sighted to think that because they're interested in violence, that caused their violence. So the idea is when the costs of learning about a threat are low, it's super advantageous to pay attention to it and become curious about it, which is where horror movies and podcasts and video games and all this stuff comes from.

23:29We've been talking about how like younger individuals, like the young gazelles and things like that are learning about the lions. But there's also something the animals do a lot that lets them learn, which is specifically about play. And so kind of explain what play is and why it's so powerful for animals evolutionarily, right? Play has been kind of a tricky topic for people who study animals because it doesn't have a good definition because we're not really sure what play is or what it's for. But the best definition that I've come across for play is that play helps animals safely or more safely practice either events or rehearse events or interactions that they might experience later in life.

24:07And that makes a lot of sense, right? So for example, with dogs, dogs engage in rough and tumble play. This involves usually them rolling around, kind of chasing each other. This is like what wolves do as adults. Wolves are chase predators, if you will. So they don't really stalk their prey. They kind of, once they see them, they chase them. And this is what, if you have a dog at home, this is what they do. They like to play fetch. They go and they chase things, right? Cats also engage in play, but they engage in a very different kind of play. So when cats play with each other, they do tend to kind of stalk each other.

24:39They do tend to kind of hide and jump out at each other. And this is exactly what cats do to their prey, right? They're stalker predators. So there are these kind of species specific types of play that you see. In humans, we do a lot of group play. You know, you see kids on the playground and like you can give them activities to do, but if you just let them do their own games or come up with their own way to entertain themselves, oftentimes it will involve some sort of group play or social dynamics because that's what humans do. We engage with each other. And so kind of playing with that or practicing that is something that you see among little kids.

25:15And you've argued that one of the kinds of play we do is more specifically scary play. Give me some examples of this in humans. Humans are a little unique in that they tend to play a bit longer in life. But of course, kids are still sort of the perfect players, right? Like they would spend almost all their time playing if they could. One thing I found really interesting, because I don't study kids, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but I had an experience with kids that just made me realize, wow, kids are very morbidly curious. So when I was in my master's degree, I used to do these science summer camps for kids.

25:49And I was, you know, a young 20 something didn't have kids, didn't really know how to like, teach young kids turns out they have very short attention spans and need a lot of time to play, right? This is me growing up in Oklahoma, this is a summer camp, Oklahoma summers are very, very hot, can't always go outside and play because it's too hot, right? And so I had to learn how to play games with kids in this very confined area. And so the game has a 20 something that I could come up with that I could think of for large groups of people was the game mafia or werewolf. So if you haven't heard of this before, they're kind of variations on the same game.

26:24But really, the idea is that you have this group of individuals who live together in a town. And there's some kind of predator or dangerous person. In the case of mafia, it's two mafia members. In the case of werewolf, it's two werewolves. And the story goes, each night the town goes to sleep so the kids cover their eyes and two individuals who are pre-selected as mafia members come out and they choose someone to kill right and then the town wakes up and they're told so-and-so was killed last night by the mafia you have to get justice which humans love justice as well you have to figure out who the killer was so there's a lot of things in this game again humans play social games where there's social deception there's justice there's all these things that we do as adults that you practice as kids.

27:04So I was playing this game with the kids and in the game, there's a narrator and I was playing the part of the narrator. And because the kids were pretty young, I was trying to be as PG as I could with a game about killing people and then hanging them for their crimes. So I would just say, you know, the mafia came out and they, they, so-and-so died and yeah, now you need to find justice. After a couple of rounds, some of the kids asked if they could be the narrator. So I said, sure, you can be a narrator. So I let them narrate. Well, it turns out the kids, when the town would go to sleep at night and the mafia would come out, the mafia were incredibly violent.

27:36I mean, there were these horrible stories about how so-and-so was murdered and their guts were pulled out and they were thrown in the lake and their heads were chopped off. You know, all these terrible things that were happening. And the kids loved getting justice for that. They loved finding someone that they could hang for these terrible crimes. And so the story just became this horrible scene from like the worst horror movie that you could imagine. And, you know, later when I reflected on that, I was like, wow, kids are incredibly morbidly curious. And you see this in their games, too. You know, like oftentimes there's a bad guy and he's out to get you or kill you or hurt you.

28:08Even if you look at games that look pretty innocent, games like hide and seek or tag. Tag is a game about a predator out trying to get other people and get them. Hide and seek is about a bunch of people hiding from a predator who's out to get them. Right. They're playing these games that involve danger in a safe way and in a way that they kind of learn. how to hide, how to run, how to interact with people, how to engage in social deception or how to spot social deception. There's a lot of elements of threat or danger in the games that kids even come up with themselves. And this is also true, not just in their games, but in so much kind of kid related culture.

28:42I remember learning things like, you know, that song, Ring Around the Rosie. What's it about? Like, it's about the plague. It's about the plague. You know, you look at Grimm's fairy tales where there's, you know, predators and dangerous things happening all the time, it seems like we forget that kids are just super morbidly curious, which raises this question, like, if they're really engaging in all this stuff, does it actually help them learn? Or does it help us as adults learn? And I wanted to turn to one of the natural experiments that you had a chance to look at when a real dangerous thing did happen to us.

29:12And that was during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeah. So in early 2020, I had this great study set up. This was my first like big study for my PhD. I curated this cabinet of morbid curiosities and I had an eye tracking kit that people were going to use when they inspected. It was a very cool study that I've been planning for a long time. I started participant recruitment in March or February of 2020. And then like a week later, the school shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. And so like everyone else, I kind of had to pivot my research and figure something else out because now I couldn't do this project that I had been planning.

29:48So I thought, okay, well, the world is like in a very weird place right now. We're afraid because there's this new virus we don't know a lot about that's seemingly like very dangerous. There's this lockdown that nobody's ever experienced. And we're kind of told we can't go out and do the things we're normally able to do. Everything about the world was pretty scary in one way or another for most people at that time. And actually, there was an editor at New Scientist who had asked this question to my collaborator, Matthias Claes. And she asked him, are people who are horror fans, are they actually doing better right now because they've practiced this?

30:23So Matthias is a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. He's a horror literature scholar. And he and I have worked together for many years on different projects relating to horror. And I, you know, I messaged Matthias and I said, this is a great idea for a study. Let's do this. And so we teamed up with some other colleagues of ours and we came up with what was honestly like a very simple study. We recruited people and we had them answer surveys about how morbidly curious they were. We had them answer surveys about their personalities. We had them tell us some demographic information. And then we created this psychological resilience scale that measured positive resilience, which is sort of how optimistic you are about your future and about how well you think you can handle the stresses of the future, given what's happening now.

31:05And we asked people what kind of movies they tended to enjoy. Do you like horror movies or romance movies? Are you watching more of these now? You know, you're watching fewer of them. Have you seen any pandemic movies, you know, in your lifetime? What we thought we would find was that people who were horror fans and morbidly curious might be a bit higher in psychological resilience. And that is what we found with some weird caveats. So people who were horror movie fans reported much lower physiological distress during the pandemic. So they were feeling lower levels of anxiety, depression, sleeplessness.

31:40People who were morbidly curious reported higher levels of positive resilience, meaning they were more optimistic about their ability to handle this particular stress going forward. They were optimistic that they could get through it. And then one interesting finding was that people who had seen just one pandemic movie, that's all you had to see was one, reported they were much more prepared for the pandemic and more resilient during it. So our morbid curiosity about scary situations might actually give us a little protection when similar events happen in real life. But what about the everyday scares?

32:10That life stress and work anxiety that so many of us face. Could braving a film like Psycho or The Shining help us handle those too? When we get back from the break, Colton will share how flirting with fear might help us get better at handling our tough emotions. The Happiness Lab will be right back.

32:35I always assumed that scaredy cats like me usually stick to the comedies and steer clear of the thrillers. But it turns out it's not that simple. When people are feeling anxious or stressed out, they're just as likely, if not more so, to grab a scary movie and cozy up on the couch for a good fright. I asked horror expert Dr. Colton Scrivner to break down the research on why that is. You would think that people who are anxious or sort of scaredy cats are the kind of people who would avoid horror. And that, again, on its face makes a lot of sense. If you're really afraid, why seek out something that's just going to make you more afraid?

33:11When I started thinking about this topic of like who goes out to see scary movies, I had that initial thought, too. Well, it's probably people who are not anxious, right? Because why would they do that? But then again, I thought about it a little differently, a little more. And I thought, well, those are also the kinds of people who are going to want to learn about this stuff. They should be actually seeking out information. And so I dug into the literature to see if anybody had tested this. And there was one really cool sort of field study on this. so pre-streaming there were physical places you would go to rent your movies right you would walk into like blockbuster family video you would go into the store and they would have movies everywhere and you would browse and it was it was great it was a lot of fun so these researchers uh i think this was in 2000 i want to say seven or eight they set up like a booth outside of a blockbuster video and as people came into the store they surveyed them on their mood so how were they feeling and And what these researchers wanted to know was, how does your mood affect the kind of entertainment that you want to consume?

34:08So they sat outside this Blockbuster store. People came in and they would ask them, how nervous are you feeling? How angry are you feeling? How happy are you feeling? And, you know, reasonably so. They assumed that people who were anxious would probably seek out something kind of happy to help them get into a better mood. People who were feeling bored might seek out an action movie. So the idea was like you would kind of seek the opposite of what you were feeling in order to get you to this state that you wanted to be in. So the people would go in the store and they would browse, they would pick their movies and they would come out.

34:39And when they came out, the researchers would say, hey, can you tell us what kind of movie? What movies did you get? And then they would note down the genre of the movie. And what they found, at least for horror, was the exact opposite of what they thought. So the people who came in feeling anxious and nervous, those were the people most likely to watch a horror movie. So those findings violate all my intuitions, but they also raise this really interesting question, which is that like maybe scary movies actually can help us become less anxious. And so how did researchers wind up testing that? Well, when I started looking into this, when I started looking into, okay, what does it mean that anxious people sometimes seek out scary movies?

35:19There wasn't much in the literature. And so I actually went to like, Reddit threads and online articles, op eds and magazines, because people were talking about this a lot. real people in the world are talking about this, but academics were not. And a lot of people would talk about how they accidentally discovered that when they were feeling anxious, feel like these are people who have oftentimes like clinical anxiety, or maybe they're just having a really anxious time in their life. They would feel this like strange urge to turn on something scary, even if they were not horror fans, even if they had never been horror fans.

35:54And they discovered that it kind of helped them calm down or get through that. And I thought that was super intriguing. And it kind of matched up with this blockbuster study. So I thought, okay, there's got to be a way to do an academic study on this. And so we created this survey that, again, had a bunch of different statements about why people like horror movies. And we collected these from all over the internet and magazines and, you know, just people talking about why they liked horror movies. And what we found were that horror fans seem to be lumped into kind of three types, right? And these aren't mutually exclusive with each other, but there's sort of three broad types.

36:30There's the adrenaline junkie who does like horror because it kind of makes them feel alive. And this is kind of the classic psychological explanation for why people like scary things that are playful. Same reason that they enjoy roller coaster or skydiving or any other high adrenaline activity. But there's another group that we call the white knucklers because you're just like watching the movie with your fist clench. These are people who are truly afraid, like very afraid of what's going on, but they still choose to do it. So those people were really interesting to us because we wanted to know, like, why are you doing this if you're truly afraid of it?

37:01And then we found this third group that we didn't necessarily expect to find. And we decided to call them the dark copers because these people essentially were telling us that they use scary things to help them get through difficult times in their life. That could be depression. It could be anxiety. It could be kind of thinking about existential problems. And so at the time I was doing these sort of yearly or annual haunted house studies in Denmark. with my collaborator, Matias. So there's this haunted attraction like you go to in Halloween, right? A haunted house near Aarhus where Matias was based.

37:35And so I would go visit him for a few weeks and we would actually go to this haunted house and kind of like the blockbuster study, we would set up this big research tent outside the haunted house where people would take surveys or we would strap them up to heart rate monitors. And we wanted to kind of know like how are these people playing with fear? How are they engaging in scary play in the real world? So we had these three groups identified. We had the survey created. We took it to the haunted house. We had people take the survey before they went in. And then when they came out, we asked them, what do you feel like you got out of this experience?

38:06Like, did you get a mood boost? Do you feel like you learned something about yourself? Do you feel like you've kind of developed as an individual, like you would in therapy or something? And what we found were that there were distinct benefits to these different kinds of horror fans. So people who were adrenaline junkies, They mostly did like it because they got the mood boost. They didn't say that they learned anything about themselves. They didn't say that they developed as a person. They just kind of enjoyed the experience. But what was interesting is that the adrenaline junkies were a really small portion of our participants.

38:36The other probably two-thirds of the people identified, based on our survey, as white knucklers or dark coppers. And these people said that they learned something about themselves and kind of developed as a person. And when you ask them, you know, what do you mean by that? they would say things like, I learned the boundaries of my fear, kind of like what I could handle and what I can't. I learned how I would react in this like high intensity, scary situation that I've never been in before. Some people even explicitly would say, now I know what I need to do better if I'm ever in a situation that's scary like this again.

39:07And usually they were talking not about the literal situation, like a man in a pig mask chasing you with the chainsaw, but they were talking about the emotional situation. How do I handle these emotions that are overwhelmingly negative in many ways. And this relates to a few things that we talk about a lot on this podcast, right? One is this idea that if you want to get good at regulating your emotions, whether that's sadness or in this case, fear, you actually have to practice doing that. And our instinct isn't to practice regulating our emotions. It's to avoid emotions all the time, right? And so it seems like what your participants were doing in this case, or at least kind of ones that identified as white knucklers or dark coppers, they use the haunted house experience and the anxiety that came up there to like practice a little bit coping.

39:47Another reason I love your studies and it fits with the kind of stuff that we talk about on the podcast is that we often talk about the problem of suppressing our emotions, right? When we're feeling anxious, our move is like, oh, shut it off, pretend it's not happening. But a lot of the research suggests that the way you get through a negative emotion like anxiety is to actually feel it. And maybe what better way to feel it than to like really ramp it up in some like incredibly intense haunted house. In a safe way. Exactly. Again, it kind of goes back to this idea of play. I think this is just an example of scary play.

40:17And if the point of play is to rehearse situations, well, situations can be literal. They can be, I need to know how to run or I need to know how to, like, if I'm disoriented, how to get away. Or they can be more psychological or emotional. They can be, if I'm feeling this, how do I recenter myself a little bit and get through this? And so if someone's hearing all these benefits that your haunted housegoers got out of scary play and they're curious about morbid curiosity, what would be some suggestions about dipping their feet in, especially if there's somebody who hasn't engaged in a lot of this scary play so far?

40:50The common mistake that I hear is that people think they need to go out and do like the scariest thing that they could imagine. That's the wrong way to do it, right? Because, of course, that's going to be too much. And that's usually what you hear if you talk to adults and you say, you know, do you like horror movies? And if they say no, you ask them why. Usually the answer is, oh, I watched one when I was a kid that was too scary for me and I just haven't been able to watch them since. But what's interesting is a lot of the people who as adults become horror fans, and this happened during COVID a lot actually, horror had its best two years in history at the box office in 2020 and 2021.

41:23So people were seeking out these like scary experiences for the first time, many of them, and realizing maybe I can enjoy this. But yeah, I think the mistake that people make is that they think they should seek out something really scary that's going to terrify them. What you should do is exactly what developmental psychologists tell us to do all the time, which is kind of go to the edge of what you're able to do, right? The edge of what you can handle. And that's different for everybody. You know, we did this study at the haunted house where we strapped people up with heart rate monitors and we wanted to know, is there kind of like a sweet spot of fear?

41:55Is there this optimal experience, Goldilocks zone? Because that's true for a lot of things. It's true for learning. It's true for flow states or where you're really productive. And so we thought, well, maybe it's true for fear too. And that doesn't seem to be true. What we found in this study was that there's a sweet spot and the sweet spot is a little different for everybody, but it does tend to be kind of like, if you imagine a one to 10 scale, it's like about a seven out of 10. When they were too afraid, their heart rate was too erratic. They weren't having as good of a time. When it was about seven out of 10 on the max, that's when they were really having the best time having the most fun.

42:29And so I think what you should do if you're trying to get into scary entertainment and you're curious if maybe this could help you, start with the easy stuff. Start with stuff you know you can handle, right? And then kind of just go from there and edge up further and further until you get to something that is kind of scary. And you do have to practice that emotion regulation. You're kind of in your Goldilocks zone. You're in your sweet spot. But eventually, your sweet spot is going to move, right? You're going to get better at that. You're going to be able to handle something more. And I think this is what a lot of people are afraid of when it comes to horror movies.

42:56they argue that, oh, well, it desensitizes you to violence or it desensitizes you to these things. And I think it does desensitize you, but not to violence per se, not to real violence. It desensitizes you a little bit to your anxiety and to your fear. And it allows you to actually handle higher doses. This makes me very comforted that we're starting out with baby steps into morbid curiosity as somebody who's really afraid of this stuff. I know, I need to write a My Baby's First Morbidly Curious Experience book. That's definitely the one that I need. My husband and I are inspired by your book.

43:27I've been trying to watch more horror movies and thrillers. And sometimes I'm like, time out. This is too much. We're going to hit pause on this. We're going to watch it again tomorrow. That's what you should be doing. Yeah. It's like, if it's too much, like pause for a second, you know, it's okay to like cover your eyes and portions. Those are emotional regulation skills. Those are tactics, right? Like when people cover their eyes in a scary scene, they're regulating their anxiety and their fear, right? And over time, they might get a little better at that. They do have to kind of like push yourself to peek, right?

43:52You kind of have to like look through your fingers a little bit. I'm a big fan of the turtleneck in horror movies and gory movies. I recently watched The Substance with Demi Moore. Great film, but a lot. But the turtleneck, you can just kind of cover up your eyes, peek with one eye, pull it back up and down. Yeah. But those are skills, right? That's the kind of thing I might need to take in a different form into a situation that's really anxiety provoking or really scary in my normal life. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually you do learn to take more cognitive approaches to emotion regulation, right? Those are like physical things you can do.

44:21You can turn the lights on, you can turn the sound down, you can cover your eyes in scary scenes. But you also are inherently practicing cognitive emotion regulation skills, cognitive reframing, you know, telling yourself how extreme I feel right now doesn't match like what's really happening. So you are practicing those cognitive skills as well. So in order to get like the optimal amount of fun, people kind of regulate their fear, both up and down. So sometimes they want to be more afraid. And so they kind of get into it really and let themselves scream and like, look at the actors and look at the scary things.

44:53And sometimes they cover their eyes and sometimes they tell themselves it's not real. And it's all in this attempt to regulate how afraid you are, how anxious you're feeling so that you can have the most fun. But of course, the side effect of that is you're practicing regulating your emotions both up and down. And so you have more kind of just mastery in general over those negative emotions that we tend to avoid. So safely enjoying a bunch of psychopaths and monsters may not only get your blood pumping in the moment, it may also make you a little bit more resilient in the long run. That's a pretty compelling reason to dive a little deeper into spooky season this year.

45:27Now, I'm not quite willing to give up my turtleneck or keep my finger off the pause button. But this Halloween, I think I'm finally ready to take some baby steps towards embracing my inner scream queen. To my fellow scaredy cats, let me know if you decide to do the same. In the name of a happier Halloween, I challenge all of us to seek out a bit more spooky delight. The Happiness Lab will be on a short break for the next few weeks but we'll be back soon with more holiday related episodes just in time for the season of gift giving so be sure to swing back for more episodes of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr.

46:03Laurie Santos

46:13This is an iHeart Podcast Guaranteed Human Thank you.