Psychology Today: Why Do We Enjoy Horror Movies?

"Given that humans like pleasure and dislike pain, we should, in theory, seek to consume stories about nice people who have lovely lives and are kind to each other and avoid anything to do with dark dangers, murderers, torture, and any other horrible stuff. Zombies, vampires, and vengeful spirits should, according to logic, be completely out of the question as vehicles for entertainment.

It is clear that fictional stories contain, and have always contained, large amounts of pathos, without which a story would feel anodyne and boring.

We navigate different emotions every day, both negative and positive, and we never achieve a state of serene and stable inner bliss. So fiction replicates life to some extent, even in its most fantastic modalities, albeit in an amplified and compressed manner.

Therefore, it can be argued that for a narrative to be interesting and engaging, the story needs to include a certain amount of adversity and threats, not unlike those we may encounter in real life.

It has been postulated that what we enjoy in these stories is the psychological arousal they induce, which is exciting, even if associated with fear, normally a very unpleasant emotion.

Others say that it is the final release of this tension at the end of each gruesome scene that triggers the psychological reward.

What we fear in the ghost and the corpse is the embodiment of death–our own eventual death–and what we fear in the dark, desolate place–where an assailant can hide, and others aren't present to help–is the risk of encountering that death. The unlimited evil of a sadistic demon unmotivated by normal human appetites is even scarier, however selfish these may be. That's the trick: watching the scary proxies of death from the safety of a sofa while holding a bag of popcorn—the thrill of the fear, without the risk."

Read the full article here!

Reflection:

What are some of your favorite horror movies?

#HorrorMovies #Emotions #Thrill