Why do we enjoy horror movies? The science of recreational fear

The Lingering Alarm

Mara: In 2017, Coltan Scrivner was a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, hunting for cognitive paradoxes. That year, the university's news office reported, he started working with Mathias Clasen, a researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark with the same interests. Two colleagues came along. And the four of them went somewhere unusual for a lab: a local haunted attraction, to watch how visitors responded to being scared.

Eli: That's the puzzle a listener sent in, word for word: why do we actually enjoy getting scared by horror movies? Today's angle is the paradox of recreational fear as an evolutionary training ground.

Mara: Clasen's lab at Aarhus has a name for it: recreational fear. They start from the usual view, that fear is unpleasant, something people would rather avoid because it drags down well-being. Then they point to the exceptions. A toddler being play-chased by a caretaker. A cinema full of people screaming in delight. Somewhere in that shriek, a brain has decided the fright is safe enough to enjoy. How it decides is the part nobody in that haunted house could see.

Eli: So recreational fear is fear on purpose, in a setting someone picked themselves.

Mara: Picked, and pretend. Which leaves the question Scrivner's team was circling: whether horror just rides an adrenaline reflex, or does something useful for the mind.

Eli: The reflex half is easy to see. A scary scene reads as a threat, and the body fires the fight-or-flight response, the ancient alarm that speeds up the heart and breathing and readies the muscles to fight or bolt. An expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham calls that reaction essential to human survival. And it doesn't wait for permission. Ajay Satpute at Northeastern says knowing a jump scare is a simulation doesn't stop the sensory systems from responding. The stress is genuine, even when the monster isn't.

Mara: That's what Scrivner's team watched.

Eli: And that alarm is slow to switch off. Dolf Zillmann built a theory on the lag, called excitation transfer: the body's arousal outlasts whatever caused it, like an engine still revving after the car stops, and that leftover charge gets credited to whatever comes next. In the mid-1970s he and a team showed 60 seven- and eight-year-olds different versions of an adventure film. By their account, the kids liked it best when a frightening lion came with a satisfying ending. In Zillmann's reading, the fright charged up the happy finish.

Mara: Eli, that's the body's half of the story. But an alarm, even a lingering one, still doesn't explain why anyone would pay for it.

The Safety Curve

Eli: The other half sits in the head. Mark Vahrmeyer puts it like this: "Part of us responds to what we are seeing as though the threat were real, whilst another part knows that it is not. We know where we are, we have chosen to be there, and, importantly, we can stop the experience." That's the protective frame, an invisible fence made of fiction, choice and an off switch, keeping a fright from turning into a real emergency.

Mara: So the sofa and the ticket aren't just the setting. They're the experience.

Eli: And there's machinery behind it. Prefrontal appraisal is the front of the brain checking the context, weighing memory and reasoning against the amygdala, the brain's smoke detector, and sometimes calming it, so a false alarm gets sorted from a true one. When that check reads the moment as safe or fun, the same racing heart can feel like excitement instead of fear. That flip is still argued over. The evidence suggests enjoyment needs the thinking brain to know it's safe while the body is still running fight-or-flight.

Mara: Which brings it back to Scrivner and Clasen. Their haunted house was Dystopia, in Vejle, Denmark, and they tracked visitors' heart rates on the way through. In a place like that, a heart can easily hit 180 beats a minute. The big swings in heart rate tracked fear in a straight line: more swing, more fright. Enjoyment did something else. It rose, peaked at a middle level of fear, then fell away. They call it an inverted-U, a hill-shaped curve where too little fear is dull, too much is just terror, and the sweet spot sits at the top.

Eli: A psychologist predicted that shape in 1967: moderate arousal rewards, high arousal repels.

Mara: And the fun shows up in the pulse itself. Enjoyment followed the small flickers riding on top of those big swings. Tara Perreault says that's where the fun lives, and that heart rate alone can tell pure terror from fear and fun mixed together. Others had seen the mix on screen. In 2010, Eduardo Andrade said that for horror fans, "the most scary scenes were also the most pleasant ones." Not everyone reads the curve the same way, but fright and pleasure were peaking together.

Eli: Awkward for Zillmann. To Andrade, bleak endings still please, and small studies caught pleasure peaking mid-scare.

Mara: Joel Cohen said, "In the real world, people simultaneously can experience both happiness and sadness, exhilaration and anxiety." So the sweet spot holds up. What nobody had shown yet was whether it's a cheap thrill or training for something that lasts.

The Threat Simulator

Eli: Then, in 2020, the real thing arrived, for everyone at once.

Mara: As the pandemic took hold, Clasen and Scrivner's group surveyed 310 people. Fans of horror films showed greater resilience. Fans of what the team calls prepper genres, alien invasions, apocalypses, zombies, showed resilience and preparedness both. Their reading is threat simulation: horror as a flight simulator for dread, where the brain runs a danger it knows is fake and practices getting through it. So the old question, reflex or something useful, got an answer from them that leans hard toward useful.

Eli: Clasen and Scrivner argue horror taps evolved defenses so audiences can practice regulating emotion. An Emory researcher calls it a kind of rehearsal: the same physiological response, plus the chance to calm down.

Mara: For them, horror stops looking frivolous. In 2020 it looked like a buffer.

Eli: Mara, Zillmann's side reads the thrill differently: the arousal of fear turning into relief and euphoria once the scare passes. Mark Vahrmeyer, Dr. Gregg Roberts and Margee Kerr sit there. Andrade, Cohen and Marvin Zuckerman see benign masochism, pleasure drawn straight from the feeling of fear itself, within safe limits.

Mara: Each reading can live with the 2020 survey. What none of them settles yet is why the same rehearsal thrills some people and is unbearable to others.

Relief and Mastery

Eli: Part of that split is wiring. Not everyone was in that resilient crowd. Marvin Zuckerman studied sensation seeking, a standing appetite for intense, new experiences, and he said, "High sensation-seekers enjoy morbid curiosity in general and horror movies in particular." People who enjoy horror and chase sensation show different brain chemistry too, including a stronger dopamine response, the brain releasing its reward chemical, when things get intense. So the jolt that drives one person out of the room lands differently in theirs, even with the same safety check running up front.

Mara: At the other end sits empathy. An expert at the mental health organization WellPower says people prone to empathetic distress, taking in a character's suffering as if it were their own, may feel much of the same fear the characters feel, and the film stops being fun. Lower anxiety and empathy tend to go with enjoying it more. And company changes things. In a haunted-house study from Clasen's lab, visitors' heart rates fell into step with each other, most of all between pairs who were close.

Eli: So the more someone feels for the victim, the steeper the price of admission.

Mara: Then the scare ends. Vahrmeyer warns against reading that as some emotional cleanse. "Human emotions are rarely that tidy," he says. What people get is the contrast: the heightened arousal, then the relief. And with the body still charged, that relief can tip into euphoria.

Eli: And the person walks out having made it. A Cleveland Clinic expert describes the feeling of getting through the haunted house, or the whole scary movie, and being OK. Call it fear mastery, the confidence that comes from facing something frightening and coming through. One account has adrenaline readying the body and dopamine reinforcing the sense of having handled it.

Mara: Which brings it back to Scrivner, who by his own account usually catches a haunted house or two every October. The visitors his team wired up in Denmark weren't only chasing a jolt. On the threat-simulation reading, they were rehearsing.

Eli: People enjoy horror because a fake threat sets off a real alarm, the thinking brain knows the exit is right there, and that turns the surge into a thrill, then relief, then the feeling of having handled danger without paying for it.

Mara: What nobody has shown yet is whether controlled scares can directly build stress resilience for people who need it clinically. The signal to watch is long-term trials testing exactly that.

Eli: Listeners can look up recreational fear.

Mara: Follow science with us as researchers study why minds pursue fright.

Eli: Thanks for listening. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time.