Most horror movie fans recall unforgettable scenes of spine-chilling thrill with glee. Whether it’s the creepy twins beckoning Danny in The Shining or the dark shadow approaching the shower curtain in Psycho, everyone has a favorite, most terrifying cinematic moment. Which if you think about it, is kind of odd. Favorite and terrifying should not go together. Yet from children possessed by the devil to deranged writers to chainsaw-wielding killers, our appetite for horror seems endless. Clearly, many people love being scared.
Scientists have spent a lot of time figuring out why. Some propose that horror films allow enjoyment of the illicit and taboo, dark feelings that society shuns. Researchers who focus on the body’s circuitry submit that it’s the thrill of a visceral rush. Now experiments from various fields offer a more complete picture of why some delight in being scared silly.
Our brains actually have to decide to be what we call “scared.” Experiencing fear — the heart-clenching, hair-raising goose bumps — is a raw and evolutionarily ancient response to a perceived threat. There’s nothing uniquely human about it; birds do it, bacteria do it, as do nerve cells growing in a Petri dish. We register something as threatening — the sound of a twig snapping behind us in a dark wood, a late night knock on the door — and the body experiences a rush of arousal. This intense physical experience is fed back to the brain. And that’s when we truly are afraid.
“This relatively meaningless feedback from the body, when contextualized in a certain way, is interpreted and that’s what you end up feeling and believing,” says Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University. In fact, that heart-thumping arousal experienced in negative situations is nearly indistinguishable from that experienced in positive situations. In a classic experiment done at Columbia University in the 1960s, scientists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer gave students a shot of adrenaline and then sent them into rooms where an actor expressed either really positive or really negative words and emotions. The researchers found that the students adopted the mood of the room.