It’s spooky season, that time of year when people deliberately spend a lot of time and money panicking. It’s time to watch horror movies, visit haunted houses, or relax with a spine-chilling Stephen King novel. It is, for many people, a lot of fun.

Why are some people (me not included, if I’m honest) so turned on by fear? What’s so fun about fear? You could make an evolutionary argument for running away from the things that scare us – that is, in general, a good way to stay alive – but why do some people turn and run towards fear? What do they get out of it?

This is a question that Mathias Clasen and Marc Andersen have been asking for several years. They are the co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and with several colleagues, they studied why we seek out fear and what our penchant for the horrific might teach us about ourselves.

“We see it (fear for its own sake) everywhere,” Clasen says, citing everything from kids enjoying hide-and-seek to teenagers watching horror movies and adults riding roller coasters. “But at the same time, it’s sort of understudied scientifically, even ignored. So there was something there that required serious scientific study. Plus, we had a lot of fun doing it.

Clasen and Andersen are quick to point out that they are not the first to explore this topic. But they see that there are still many questions to answer and explore. In a recent episode of InexplicableVox’s science podcast, they laid out some of the things they learned while investigating the funny fear paradox and what else they’d like to learn.

Haunted house studies

When you imagine the perfect scientific setting, you probably don’t picture an abandoned fish factory in the middle of the woods. You probably don’t imagine killer clowns, zombies, or people wielding chainsaws, either.

But Clasen, Andersen and their colleagues conducted several experiments in exactly this type of environment – ​​setting up in an elaborate haunted house in Denmark called Dystopia.

“It’s a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to conduct any sort of controlled, systematic scientific investigation,” admits Clasen. Someone will try to set up a camera for an experiment, he says, “and then a clown – a real clown actor – will come and throw fake blood at us.” »

“But in a way, this type of horror house is much better calibrated to investigate the type of phenomena that really interest us,” says Andersen.

After all, in a normal lab, there’s only so much you can do to scare people before you start crossing some ethical lines, but if someone shows up in an abandoned fish factory, literally looking to be scared, it It’s their choice. So this haunted house helped them glean some pretty important information about how fear and pleasure might be related.

In one study, for examplethey asked a group of participants to fill out a questionnaire before walking 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 examined them again right after they left the house, all to get a sense of their fear, but also how much fun they had.

And they found that the relationship between self-reported fear and self-reported enjoyment in surveys had a sort of inverted U shape. Essentially, if a haunted house doesn’t scare you that much, it might not be that fun. But if you’re very, very scared, it’s probably not very pleasant either. You’re looking for some sort of happy medium between the two extremes.

“You can think of it as a sort of Goldilocks principle of horror,” Andersen says. “There seems to be something of a middle path where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.”

This trend also showed up in their heart rate data. Then again, the people who had the most fun were usually those whose hearts behaved a little differently than usual, but not hugely.

“It’s as if humans don’t like being very far from their normal physical state,” says Andersen. “But we seem to like being a little out of our comfort zone or a little out of our normal state.”

Andersen and Clasen also observed a similar U-shaped trend in other research. Some studies on curiosity, for example, also showed that people were particularly curious about things if they expected to be moderately surprised.

“They’re not really curious about things that they know they’re going to get lost in,” says Andersen. “They are generally interested in things that are a little outside their usual knowledge.”

Eventually, Clasen and Andersen began to hypothesize that when people were looking for a little fun scare, perhaps they were trying to learn through play – or in other words, trying to teach their bodies how to deal with fear.

“It’s about learning how your body reacts, for example, when you’re afraid,” says Andersen. “We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain tends to delete entry that he can predict. If you’ve tried something several times, that experience often seems less intense. One of our main hypotheses is that recreational exposure to fear allows you to learn more about fear and manage it more optimally.

When the whole world got scary

Unfortunately, the Recreational Fear Lab had a great opportunity to explore its hypothesis: the Covid-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, horror films have done very well at the box office. In April 2020, Penny Sarchet, now editor-in-chief of New Scientist, tweeted to Clasen: “I was wondering if people who like apocalyptic/horror movies (which I’ve always hated!) would be more resilient to the trauma of this pandemic. Are you going to look into this?

“What an intriguing idea, Penny!” Clasen replied.

In fact, it was so intriguing that Clasen and a few colleagues ended up conduct a study to investigate whether people who watched a lot of horror films had fewer symptoms of psychological distress during those first scary days of confinement.

They couldn’t go into the field (it was, after all, a global pandemic), but they handed out questionnaires to get a sense of people’s personalities, their symptoms of mental distress, and their movie preferences and tastes. . They found that “fans of horror films showed greater resilience during the pandemic and fans of “prepper” genres like alien invasion, apocalyptic, and zombie films showed greater resilience during the pandemic. both greater resilience and greater preparedness. »

These are, of course, self-reported results. And as Clasen told me, this finding is correlational, meaning they can’t say one thing caused another.

“We can’t say, based on this study, that watching a horror movie makes you better control your stress levels during a pandemic,” he says.

Maybe the kind of person who likes horror movies is just less likely to be stressed in the first place.

How can we control our fear?

Clasen and Andersen are excited to continue exploring this question. Andersen says he wants to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear reduces their stress levels over time. They also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help children who have undergone treatment for anxiety disorders.

“We would like to enroll them – if they want – in some sort of bravery module,” he says, while pointing out that the terminology could change. Essentially, it would be “invite them to the roller coaster theme park, have them sign up for a rock climbing class, maybe see some horror movies.”

The goal is not to scare some anxious children, but to create an environment where they can have a little fun with their fear. He wants to know if it would really help these children better manage their anxiety. Essentially: could we fight fear with fear?

Whatever they learn, they’ve demonstrated that our obsession with horror isn’t just about a few cheap thrills. There is something fascinating and mysterious at its heart.

“It seems that stories and fiction are essential instruments for navigating the world for humans,” Clasen says. “Imagination might be our most interesting asset. We can use our highly developed imagination to walk through scenarios, imagine different states of affairs, and prepare ourselves.