How Horror Stories Help Us Cope With Real Life (Published 2022) (2024)

One weekend when I was in the fourth grade and my friend Whitney was coming to sleep over, my mother took me to the video store to rent a movie. I picked “A Nightmare on Elm Street” — Mom must not have checked the title or she would have balked — and I loved every second of it. Whitney, on the other hand, didn’t sleep well for weeks.

That evening sparked my lifetime love of horror stories. I became the girl who made all her friends watch scary movies at slumber parties. (If you were one of them: I’m sorry.) Stephen King’s “It” remains one of my favorite books. I listen to disturbing true crime podcasts on my daily walks. And I can’t make it through October without watching the original “Halloween.”

Apparently, there’s a growing legion of gore fans like me out there, as interest in scary films has been on the rise. In 2014, horror movies made up a 2.69 percent share of the annual box office, but the percentage jumped to 12.75 percent in 2021, according to the online movie database The Numbers.

What can we say about people who like watching others be chased, attacked and sometimes eaten? Why do so many people enjoy being scared out of their wits? I reached out to three researchers who study the psychology of horror fandom and learned there are many reasons people seek out these experiences — and that consuming horror in controlled doses may actually be helpful for our mental health.

Some people enjoy scary things more than others do.

The first thing to understand about horror is that people only like it when they actually feel safe, said Cynthia Hoffner, a researcher at Georgia State University who studies the psychological effects of media. The only time I did not enjoy a horror movie was when I was home alone at night as a tween watching “Child’s Play” and thought I heard noises coming from the living room (maybe Chucky was after me?). Research suggests horror fans have a fear “sweet spot,” too — they enjoy frightening experiences less when they don’t feel scared enough or feel too scared.

My love for horror also challenges gender norms, because men tend to enjoy the genre more than women do, Dr. Hoffner said, especially when gore is involved. This could be because of the cultural expectation that men should be able to handle fear. “Watching these kinds of films can be a way of mastering horrifying situations and demonstrating that you’re not afraid,” Dr. Hoffner said. (Interestingly, though, women are more drawn to true crime, as I’ll discuss in a minute.)

We don’t know much about the personalities of people who love horror, but there are some theories. In an analysis of published research, Dr. Hoffner and her colleague Kenneth J. Levine reported that people who have lower levels of empathy — measured in part by whether study participants agreed with statements like “I am often quite touched by things I see happen” — are more likely than others to enjoy scary media, because they do not worry as much for the victims. But “that doesn’t mean that everybody who enjoys horror films is low in empathy,” she clarified, and a recent study that has not yet been peer-reviewed came to a different conclusion, reporting that horror fans have just as much empathy and compassion as non-fans — so the jury on this is still out.

Research suggests that horror fans also tend to be people who enjoy intellectual stimulation and imaginative activities, and that many are sensation seekers — people who love thrills and new experiences — because they enjoy the rush of adrenaline they experience when they’re scared, Dr. Hoffner said.

Some studies have found that people who are feeling nervous or are prone to anxiety are drawn to horror films, too. Perhaps scary movies provide a new focal point for their worries: Instead of ruminating over, say, finances, they can worry about the zombies they’re watching. When you watch a horror movie, you can “switch the source of your anxiety,” explained Coltan Scrivner, a researcher in the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, which studies the situations in which fear can be fun and meaningful. When the movie ends, your anxiety may subside, too.

Horror can make us more resilient.

When Dr. Scrivner and his colleagues interviewed people for a study in the spring of 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, they found that horror fans reported experiencing less pandemic-related psychological distress than non-fans. Why? Nobody knows for sure, but one possibility is that if you’re used to feeling unease and uncertainty in movies, maybe you ‌handle them better in other situations, too, said Marc Andersen, a psychologist who works with Dr. Scrivner at Aarhus University but was not involved in the study.

Watching horror movies can also help people think through how they would respond to threats. In Dr. Scrivner’s 2020 study, people who watched scary films involving depictions of mass chaos, such as alien invasions and apocalypses, said they felt more mentally prepared for the pandemic than people who didn’t watch those films. In March 2020, the movie “Contagion” — a 2011 thriller about a pandemic — became one of the most downloaded movies on iTunes, possibly because viewers could watch it and “in a sense begin to draft their own worst-case scenario manual,” Dr. Andersen said.

The desire to self-educate could also explain a love for true crime. After listening to a podcast about, say, a serial killer, I gain insight into what makes people commit such atrocities, and I’d like to believe I’d be more likely to spot a serial killer if I saw one. Research suggests that a majority of true crime fans are women, perhaps because they fear becoming crime victims more than men do and consider what they learn from the genre a means of protecting themselves. It provides a “behind-the-curtain view that presumably could help you avoid getting kidnapped,” Dr. Scrivner said.

Horror can help us understand ourselves, too.

People also engage with scary media to gain insight into themselves, the experts said. In a 2022 study, Dr. Scrivner, Dr. Andersen and their colleagues interviewed horror fans, including people attending a haunted house, about why they enjoyed scary experiences. Some participants said they appreciated learning about their reactions to fear. “You can kind of reflect on ‘Wow, I was really more scared than I thought I would be,’ or ‘Wow, I really reacted in a way that I didn’t think I would react,’” Dr. Scrivner explained.

After learning about all the reasons people engage with horror, I couldn’t help but wonder about my own rationale. I’m not much of a sensation seeker — I loathe roller coasters and will never, ever skydive — but I do deal with potential threats by learning as much as I can about them (one reason I love reporting this newsletter). Perhaps horror movies help me feel more in control of my emotions and better able to manage the terrifying situations I could one day encounter.

There’s one other reason I love horror movies, too: They remind me how fortunate I am. After watching “Halloween” every year, I feel grateful that I have never been chased by a psychopath with a knife.

Happy Halloween!

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