How Horror Movies Manipulate Your Brain (2024)

It’s no coincidence that Netflix’s horror series’ are being a huge hit during the quarantine season. With a whopping total of 52 million views on just one of Netflix’s originals, it’s an understatement to say Netflix subscribers love horror🧟.

Whether you’re watching classic horror flicks like Nightmare on Elm Street or Carrie or Netflix’s new supernatural series, The Haunting of Bly Manor, your body has distinctive physiological reactions to the sights 👀 and sounds👂of these scary screen stories.

While many people enjoy having their hearts race 👣 or clutching the seat in suspense, they find themselves scared long after the movie ends. That’s because the brain is wired to treat what it sees as real. It is very difficult to tell the primitive brain to ignore the reality of what it is seeing.

A Brief History of Horror

According to our friend Wikipedia (sorry English teachers 😬), horror is a genre of speculative fiction that is intended to frighten, scare, or disgust. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon defined a horror story as “a piece of fiction in prose of variable length… which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing”.

Horror is often divided into either the psychological horror and supernatural horror sub-genre.

What is a reason or two at the top of your head that summarizes whether or not you like horror? Is it the anticipation😰, the adrenaline rush🏃, or the jumpscares🦘? How does our brain function while we are watching horror, before and after a movie?

How Horror Impacts the Brain

Although horror movies do not directly impact the brain in a positive way, they can have a desensitization 💦 effect. If a person repeatedly watches this genre of movies, they repeatedly expose themselves to these threatening images and over time become less emotionally reactive to the images. This can result in lower levels of anxiety and fear.

How Horror Impacts the Heart

Just like other adrenaline-raising activities, watching scary movies can increase your heart rate. These effects are not unlike what happens while doing other sensation-seeking activities like riding roller coasters 🎢 or sky diving. Horror movies can even affect heart attack risk. If the physical and psychological responses come together at exactly the right time, a heart attack 💔 can occur. Individuals with high blood pressure may be more at risk than others because heart attack and stroke are related to blood 🩸 pressure.

How Horror Impacts the Hormones

Watching horror movies releases dopamine and adrenaline.

Dopamine is a type of neurotransmitter.

Your body makes it, and your nervous system uses it to send messages between nerve cells. These releases can actually trigger someone to faint or have a panic attack, especially someone with PTSD. PTSD is a psychiatric disorder that may occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic experience.

How Horror Impacts Your Behavior

Just like playing violent video games 🕹, watching a scary movie can prime aggressive behavior. Any activity that heightens emotional response, especially in someone who has difficulty controlling their emotions, can trigger an effect 💪.

But of course, everyone is different. Therefore, it is difficult for doctors and researchers to pinpoint one or two exact ways that horror impacts each person’s behavior. So, experts look for associations between us hom*o-sapiens. Such as the fight-or-flight response.

The Fight-or-Flight Response

The fight-or-flight response is a physiological reaction 🧠 that occurs in response to a perceived harmful event, attack, or threat to survival.

During this reaction, certain hormones like adrenalin and cortisol are released, speeding the heart rate, slowing digestion, shunting blood flow to major muscle groups 🫁, and changing various other autonomic nervous functions, giving the body a burst of energy and strength💪.

The fight-or-flight response is also often called the “amygdala hijack”. The amygdala hijack is recognized as a component of the limbic system and is thought to play important roles in emotion and behavior. The amygdala has become best known for its role in fear processing.

The fight or flight response goes as described:1

1. Scary movies 😱 bypass the conscious parts of the brain to tap directly into the fight or flight response.
2. It begins in the amygdala 🧠, which evolved to respond immediately to anything that looks like a threat, regardless of how real it actually is.
3. The amygdala sounds the alarm to your body, first activating the hypothalamus (vital role in controlling many bodily functions), which tells your adrenal glands to inject you with a big boost of adrenaline.
4. This causes the heart to pump faster and faster, delivering more oxygen to the muscles in case you need to fight something or run away.

The Exorcist may not be real, but your brain isn’t going to take any chances.

The most effective element of a horror movie, though, isn’t even the on-screen monsters, but rather the background music. The screechy, discordant, non-linear noises that build and crescendo sound enough like a baby’s scream that they activate the same genetically hardwired response pathway that a wailing child does.

Don’t believe me?

Check out this super surreal video on how music can determinately alter your emotions towards a clip in a movie:

To delve deeper into this dismal disparity (hope you like that alliteration after my sin of using Wikipedia) between our brain and our emotions, researchers have curated case studies for brain nerds (which totally isn’t me…) to learn more from!

First, researchers delved into the world of horror cinema and created a comprehensive movie study to determine the top 100 horror movies from the past 100 years, using IMDB ratings and the opinions of 216 film enthusiasts.

Study participants watched the two films using special goggles 🥽 while inside an MRI machine and were asked to rate their fear and catalog the jump scares in the films.

“People found horror that was psychological in nature 🍀 and based on real events the scariest and were far more scared by things that were unseen or implied than what they could actually see,” according to a University of Turku press release.

If I go too in-depth about the brain and neuron pathways as a result of these participants, I’m afraid I’ll lose you. (But keep an eye for that in an upcoming article!)

Based on their findings, researchers separated the fear experienced while watching a horror movie into two main categories:

1. Preparatory sustained awareness😳 — which is the impending feeling of dread.
2. Acute fight-or-flight responses ✈️— which is more commonly known in this context as jump scares.

Preparatory Sustained Awareness

Data collected by the MRI scans found that, while the subjects were watching horror movies and experiencing the “preparatory sustained awareness” type of fear, the regions of the brain involved in visual 👁 and auditory 👂perception became more active. This is because the brain felt the need to pay attention for “cues of threat in the environment.”

Fight-or-Flight Responses

Subjects watching horror movies and experiencing jump scares had brain activity in regions involved in emotion processing, threat evaluation, and decision making which researchers said enables rapid response.

Researchers have mentioned that this could also intoxicate excitement — brain regions experiencing enhanced activity during horror movies were also continuously interacting with sensory regions. Our brains are continuously anticipating and preparing us for action in response to threats and horror movies.

Fascinating Findings

They found that acute fear elicited consistent activity in a distributed set of cortical, limbic, and cerebellar regions, most notably the prefrontal cortex, paracentral lobule, amygdala, cingulate cortex, insula, PAG, parahippocampus, and thalamus.

In layman's terms, these parts of the brain play a key role in attention, perception, awareness, thought 💭, memory, language, and consciousness. For instance, the limbic region is a set of structures in the brain that deal with emotions and memory.

These regions (listed above) have been previously identified as being active in response to threat

Functional Connectivity

(P.S., that just means how the neuron’s in our brain are communicating and the pathways they’re forming, I just saved you from a Google Search 😄)

Functional connectivity analysis revealed that fear was associated with profound functional connectivity changes. This functional connectivity increased as fear increase.

It’s almost as though the sustained anticipatory fear mechanism prepared the reactionary acute fear mechanism as the threat became closer in proximity.

In layman’s terms 🪵(yet again), as your brain becomes more “experienced” (by watching horror movies), it does a better job at detecting/anticipating scenes that retract fear, such as jump scares, screaming, etc…

We have established that horror scares the crap out of us and continuously keeps up on our toes 🦶. On paper, it seems like a neverending list of cons. Then why are many of us obsessed with horror?

It’s no miracle that scary movies alone have made billions of dollars in ticket sales since Frankenstein 🧟‍♀️ in 1931.

Addiction Pathways

One possible reason for this is linked to addiction pathways🛣. The adrenaline released from a fear response can cause a viewer to seek out that sensation again and again. Our love of all things horror may also stem from the Arousal Transfer Theory, suggesting that negative 👎 emotions created by scary situations can intensify the positive feelings 👍 we experience when the characters make it out alive.

Either way, the pure rush of adrenaline that horror movies evoke hasn’t stopped people from coming back for more.

A Sense Of Comfort & Solidarity, Perhaps?

This might be a little far-reaching but, horror movies can even give us a sense of comfort and solidarity.

It could be therapeutic 🤑 because it could suggest to a viewer, that some of our fears are not as real as we imagine them to be, or that threats in real life are not always as hard to deal with as we first thought. It makes us desensitized to scary things in our reality, teaches people to be less scared. As people learn to be scared, fake horror films can teach them to become less scared of certain objects.

But don’t take my word for it.

Scientific Findings

A study published in the Journal of Media Psychology found that people watch scary movies for three main reasons: tension, relevance, and unrealism. For some, watching scary movies can be an entire experience due to the mystery and the shock. Others who are drawn to it due to “relevance,” find elements in the movie that they can relate to.

Those who like horror due to its “unrealism” enjoy it because they know for a fact that it’s all fake anyway. For them, it’s just pure entertainment and fun 🥳.

“When we watch a horror movie 👺, it stimulates the brain and the brain responds with the physical and emotional sensations we call fear,” Brownlowe says. “Believe it or not, for some people, this is a lot of fun.”

Horror movies are meant to scare you👹. But for some people with anxiety, they may find horror movies comforting (the irony).

According to Brownlowe, there’s a good reason why. “The experience of your brain calming itself down after watching a scary movie is actually neuro-chemically very pleasurable,” she says.

Ah, my personal anecdote might be scientifically proven true after all, or so it seems…okay I have no idea where I am going with this 😌.

Why (if you do) do YOU watch horror movies? Do you enjoy the gore, being startled, or just love the sheer escapism it offers 😱..?

How scary movies make you feel is a big reason why people keep going back for more.

Time to watch YOU.

Sources

Thanks for sticking ‘til the end! All sources are cited in this Google Document.

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