Scared and Loving It: The Psychology of a Good Fright

Every October, the world divides into two camps. One camp is counting down to the American Horror Story finale, planning a haunted house trip, and queuing up every scary movie they can find. The other camp would rather do their taxes. I have friends in both camps, and neither one understands the other.

As a psychologist who treats phobias, I find this split fascinating. Fear is supposed to be something we avoid. Yet millions of people pay good money to have a stranger in a mask chase them down a dark hallway, and they walk out laughing. Researchers have spent the last several years trying to figure out why, and the answers say a lot about how fear works for all of us.

There is a sweet spot

In Denmark, a team of researchers set up shop inside a haunted house with almost fifty rooms. They fitted 110 visitors with heart rate monitors, filmed them at the scariest moments, and asked them afterward how frightened they were and how much they enjoyed it (Andersen et al., 2020).

People who weren't scared at all didn't have much fun. People who were terrified didn't have much fun either. Enjoyment peaked somewhere in the middle, in a range the researchers called the sweet spot of fear. Visitors treated the whole thing almost like a game, and later work from the same group found that people actively manage their fear to stay in that range. They grab a friend's arm, close their eyes for a second, crack a joke. With practice, they get better at it.

Your sweet spot and your best friend's may be miles apart. Hers might be a full season of American Horror Story. Yours might be the trailer.

You may feel better afterward

Sociologist Margee Kerr and neuroscientist Greg Siegle took a mobile lab into the basement of an adults-only haunted attraction outside Pittsburgh and studied 262 guests before and after they went through it (Kerr et al., 2019). On the way out, people were in better spirits than on the way in, with lower anxiety and more energy. Brainwave recordings showed that the guests whose mood lifted also had quieter brain activity afterward. The more intense the scare, the more their mood improved.

Kerr likens the experience to other hard things people choose to do, like running a race or tackling a tough climb. You get through something difficult, and the ordinary stresses waiting for you at home look a little smaller by comparison.

Horror fans may be tougher than they look

In 2020, a group of researchers asked 310 people about their movie habits and how they were coping with the pandemic (Scrivner et al., 2021). Horror fans reported less psychological distress than everyone else, even after the researchers accounted for age, income, personality, and how much people liked movies in general. Fans of zombie and apocalypse films did even better, showing more resilience and feeling more prepared.

The researchers' explanation is that scary stories give us a safe place to rehearse. Someone who has spent years watching characters handle disaster has, in a small way, practiced staying calm when things fall apart.

What this has to do with phobias

Here is where my work comes in. The most effective treatment for phobias is exposure therapy, which means facing the feared thing gradually, in a controlled way, until the fear loses its grip. A person afraid of flying might start by looking at pictures of planes, then sit in a parked plane, then take a short flight.

Horror fans have essentially been doing their own version of this for years. The fear is real, but they chose it, they know it will end, and they can always look away. That combination of choice, safety, and a clear exit is what lets fear shrink instead of grow.

Someone with a phobia experiences fear very differently. It shows up uninvited, it feels like it will never end, and there is no exit. The goal of treatment is to give that person back the same sense of control a horror fan takes for granted.

None of this means you need to start watching horror movies. If scary movies aren't your thing, you're in perfectly good company. It does suggest that fear itself is less of an enemy than we tend to think, as long as we get some say in how much of it we take on.

So here is something to consider. Which fears in your own life did you choose to face, and which ones are still making the choices for you?