Why do we love to scare ourselves?
It’s spooky season, that time of year when people spend lots of time and money deliberately freaking themselves out. It’s a time for watching scary movies or touring through haunted houses or curling up with a bloodcurdling Stephen King novel. This is, for many people, very fun.
But why?
Why do some people (myself not included, if I’m being honest) get such a kick from being scared? What is so fun about fear? You could make an evolutionary case for running away from things that scare us — that is, generally, a good way to stay alive — but why do some people then turn around and run toward fear? What are they getting out of it?
It’s a question that Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen have been puzzling over for several years. They’re the co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, and along with several colleagues, they’ve been investigating why we seek out fear, and what our penchant for the horrible might teach us about ourselves.
“We see it [fear for fun] everywhere,” Clasen says, citing everything from kids enjoying peek-a-boo to teens watching horror movies and adults going on roller coasters. “But at the same time, it’s sort of scientifically understudied or even ignored. So there was something there that mandated serious scientific study. Plus we were having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.”
Clasen and Andersen are quick to stress that they’re not the first people to explore this subject. But they see a lot of questions left to answer and explore. On a recent episode of Unexplainable, Vox’s science podcast, they laid out some of the things they’ve learned as they’ve investigated the paradox of fun fear, and what they’d still like to learn.
The haunted house studies
When you imagine the perfect scientific setting, you’re probably not picturing an abandoned fish factory in the middle of the woods. You’re also probably not imagining killer clowns or zombies or people waving chainsaws.
But Clasen and Andersen and their colleagues have run several experiments in exactly this kind of environment — setting up shop at an elaborate haunted house in Denmark called Dystopia.
“It’s a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to do any kind of controlled, systematic, scientific investigation,” Clasen admits. Someone will be trying to mount a camera for an experiment, he says, “and then some clown — a literal clown actor — will come and throw fake blood on us.”
“But in a way, this kind of horror house is much more well calibrated to investigate the kind of phenomena that we are really interested in,” Andersen says.
After all, in a normal lab setting, there’s only so much you can do to scare the bejesus out of people before you start crossing some ethical lines, but if someone shows up at an abandoned fish factory, literally looking to be scared, that is their choice. So this haunted house has helped them glean some pretty key insights into how fear and fun might be connected.
In one study, for example, they asked a bunch of participants to fill out a questionnaire before they went through the house. They hooked them up to a heart rate monitor, filmed them during some of the house’s biggest jump scares, and then surveyed them again right after they’d left the house, all to get a sense of both how scared they’d been, but also how much they had enjoyed themselves.
And they found that the relationship between self-reported fear and self-reported fun in the surveys had a kind of an upside-down U-shape. Essentially, if you’re not very scared at all by a haunted house, it might not be that fun. But if you’re very, very scared, it’s also probably not super enjoyable. You’re looking for a kind of sweet spot between the two extremes.
“You can think of it as sort of the Goldilocks principle of horror,” Andersen says. “There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.”
This pattern showed up in their heart rate data as well. There, again, the people who enjoyed themselves the most tended to be the people whose hearts were behaving a little differently from their usual, but not enormously so.
“It is as if humans dislike being very far from their normal physical state,” Andersen says. “But we seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.”
Andersen and Clasen saw a similar U-shaped pattern in other research, too. Some studies on curiosity, for example, also showed that people were especially curious about things if they expected to be moderately surprised.
“They are not really curious about things where they know that they are going to be way off,” Andersen says. “They are typically interested in things that lie a little bit outside of their normal knowledge.”
Eventually, Clasen and Andersen started to hypothesize that maybe, when people sought out a little fun fear, they might be trying to learn through play — or in other words, trying to teach their bodies how to handle fear.
“It’s about learning how your, you know, your body reacts, for instance, when, when you become scared,” Andersen says. “We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain has a tendency of suppressing input that it can predict. If you have tried something several times, then oftentimes that experience feels less intensive. So one of the main hypotheses that we have is that recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way.”
When the whole world became scary
Unfortunately, the Recreational Fear Lab got a great opportunity to explore their hypothesis: the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, horror movies did really well at the box office. In April 2020, Penny Sarchet, now the managing editor at New Scientist, tweeted at Clasen: “I’ve been wondering if people who like apocalyptic/horror movies (which I’ve always hated!) will be more resilient to the trauma of this pandemic. Will you be looking into this?”
“What an intriguing idea, Penny!” Clasen replied.
It was so intriguing, in fact, that Clasen and some colleagues wound up running a study to investigate whether people who watched a lot of scary movies exhibited fewer symptoms of psychological distress in those early, scary days of lockdown.
They couldn’t go into the field (it was, after all, a global pandemic), but they distributed questionnaires to get a sense of peoples’ personalities, their mental distress symptoms, and their movie preferences and tastes. They found that “fans of horror films exhibited greater resilience during the pandemic and that fans of ‘prepper”’ genres like alien-invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films exhibited both greater resilience and preparedness.”
These are, of course, self-reported results. And as Clasen told me, this finding is correlational, meaning that they can’t say one thing caused another.
“We can’t say, based on this study, that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic,” he says.
Maybe the kind of person who likes scary movies is just less likely to get stressed out in the first place.
How can we harness our fear?
Clasen and Andersen are excited to continue exploring this question. Andersen says they want to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear brings their stress levels down over time. They also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help kids who’ve gotten treatment for anxiety disorders.
“We would like to sort of enroll them — if they would like — in sort of a bravery module,” he says, though he stresses that the terminology there might change. Essentially, it would involve “inviting them to the roller coaster theme park, having them enroll in a climbing course, maybe seeing some scary movies.”
The goal is not to freak some anxious kids out, but to create an environment in which they may have a little bit of fun with their fear. He wants to know if that would actually help these kids learn how to deal with anxiety better. Essentially: Could we fight fear with fear?
Whatever they learn, they’ve demonstrated that our obsession with horror is about more than some cheap thrills. There’s something fascinating and mysterious at its heart.
“It seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world for humans,” Clasen says. “Imagination might be our coolest asset. We can use our uniquely evolved imaginations to run through scenarios, to imagine different states of affairs, and to prepare.”