Murder Mystery

is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

We often think of the media we consume as food for the mind. The right books, the uplifting films, the inspiring podcasts, we believe that these will make us wiser, kinder, better people.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu is supposed to have said, Watch your thoughts, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions.
Watch your actions, they become your habits.

Watch your habits, they become your character. Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.

By this logic, if we want to be good, kind, and ethical people, we should watch movies about good people, read books about kindness, and consume stories about high-minded individuals who always do the right thing.

Glance at any list of bestsellers or movies that crush at the box office, and you don't see many high-minded plots and altruistic characters.

Now, you find people who lie and cheat, family members who betray one another, friends who are not good friends. If we are what we consume, surely this does not bode well for us.

Nowhere is this tension more acute than in stories of violence, gore and killing, especially in horror movies.

The goal of all the spattered blood, severed limbs, and blood-curdling shrieks is to make you horrified, not edified.

If most of us want to be good people, What explains the enduring popularity of books and movies that show us not just the worst of human nature, but the worst that the human imagination can conjure?

This week on Hidden Brain and in a companion episode for Hidden Brain Plus, why we crane our necks to observe car crashes, endlessly gape at videos of natural disasters, and deliberately subject ourselves to tales of murder and mayhem.

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What do the kinds of shows and books we choose say about us? How do they shape us?

Colton Scrivener is a researcher at Arizona State University and Aarhus University in Denmark.

He's a psychologist who studies why we consume certain stories and the effects those tales can have on our minds. Colton Scrivener, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hello, Shankar. Thanks for having me on.

Colton, as a kid, I understand that your favorite movies were those featuring Indiana Jones, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Temple of Doom.

What scenes in particular were you drawn to in these movies?

Yeah, I loved those movies as a kid. I still love them as an adult.
I've probably lost count of how many times I've seen them.

I do remember watching them, you know, on repeat as a kid, and, you know, I could never remember the names of them. You know, there's Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's The Temple of Doom,

there's the Last Crusade. But I always remembered them kind of by specific scenes.

And so I would remember, you know, oh, well, this one was the one where there were a lot of rats, or this one was the one where there was a big snake, or this is the one where the guy's face melts like an ice cream cone.

And those scenes were always the ones, I guess that's why I remembered them by that. I remembered them by kind of the violent scenes or scary scenes that were in the films.

So, Temple of Doom, if someone asked, have you seen Temple of Doom? And I'm, you know, I'm a kid, I would say, well, I think so. Which one was that?

Is that the one where he pulls his heart out of his chest and it's still beating?

That's kind of how I would, you know, that's how they sat in my mind.

So, one theory might be that we seek out dramatic stories about violence and gore because our own lives are boring and humdrum.

But there's research that suggests that in the aftermath of scary things happening in real life, there's often a surge of interest in scary entertainment.

In the early 1970s, a young woman, a college student, was murdered on the campus of the University of Wisconsin.

A team of psychologists studied the subsequent entertainment choices of students on that campus. What did they find, Colton?

What the psychologists were studying was what kinds of films the participants would choose as a reward for taking part in a study, like a psychological study.

And in this case, in the town they were in, there were two films that were in theaters.

There was Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and then there was kind of a rom-com, and I can't recall the name of that one.

But what they found is that after this murder occurred, the students on the campus were much more likely to choose the scary film as a reward for taking part in a study.

I understand that the researchers even drilled down and found that students who were in the same dorm as the victim were more likely to watch the scary movie than students who were in different dorms.

Correct, yeah, if you think about this like a heat map, you know, where you have different colors and the closer you got to this dorm, you know, the redder it got, the more likely they were to choose to go see Truman Capote's film.

So a couple of decades later, in the early 1990s, a super violent video game called Mortal Kombat was released. Two different versions of the game were made available to the public.

Why were two versions made available and how do they fare, Colton? Well, Mortal Kombat kind of broke ground in video games.

It came about at a time when video game consoles were moving from purely being in arcades to now being in the home. You were having these new stories coming into households.

And what you had is you had a couple of sort of big players, I guess,

who were able to sell Mortal Kombat. And one of those was Nintendo Entertainment Systems, which of course is still around, still very popular.

And they had the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and they wanted to release Mortal Kombat. And then you had the Sega Genesis platform.

And the difference between these two is that Nintendo kind of had cultivated this family-friendly approach to video games.

And so when this super violent game came out, you know, where you could engage in these finishing moves, where you pull an opponent's spine out of their back and hold it up like a trophy, you know, and of course, this is all just sort of pixelated, you know, early 1990s graphics, but still quite violent.

What Nintendo decided was that that was simply too much for their family-friendly approach to video games, but they knew that Mortal Kombat would be successful.

So the compromise they struck was that for their systems, the blood in the game would actually be turned to kind of a grayish color.

And they called it sweat rather than blood. It's almost like the fighters were sweating instead of bleeding.

And many of the finishing moves had to be altered or removed entirely from the game.

Now, Sega, which was a much smaller

video game company at the time and, you know, Super Nintendo Entertainment Systems outnumbered Sega by probably five to one in American households and Sega kind of took a big bet on Mortal Kombat and said no, we're going to show it in all of its all of its gory glory

and so they left the blood red. They left it as blood rather than sweat.
They left all the finishing moves as they were. And surprising to Nintendo, I think,

the

Sega Genesis version of the game outsold the Nintendo version of the game by several factors.

Wow.

So in other words, even though it was much more violent, and even though many people might say, you know, we are not a fan of violence or we are appalled by violence, the video game that was the more violent version, the very same video game in its more violent version, outsold the Tamo version.

Correct. And that's, you know,

as a scientist, like, wow, that's the perfect study you could set up, right? And the video game industry kind of accidentally set that study up for us.

Let's skip forward in time to 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit.

People who were stuck at home without much to do but stream movies chose one movie in particular to watch, even though it was nine years old at that point.

Here's a clip from the movie in which a research scientist is talking to a public health administrator. I thought you said that once we could grow it, we could vaccinate against it.

We tried using dead virus combined with several adjuvants to boost immune response. And

no protective antibodies, a lot of dead monkeys. Can you get to the part where there's good news? Now we have to try a live attenuated virus.
Like with polio? Exactly.

The only danger with a live virus is the possibility that it will revert to wild type and kill the host. So this was the 2011 movie Contagion.
What was it about, Colton?

So Contagion was essentially a film about a global pandemic and what we thought a global pandemic would look like, not just in the form of the virus itself and how it would spread, but also how people would respond to this.

What would be the social response to this global pandemic?

So I understand that Google Trends data kept track of the popularity of this movie.

And in 2019, this is the year before the pandemic, the movie was averaging around six on a scale of 1 to 100 in the popularity index.

By January 2020, as the first reports of the pandemic were sweeping across the world, the popularity surged to 84.

And by March 2020, when mass closures hit the United States and other countries, it hit 100, the very peak of search interest.

Correct. So those Google Trends data do a great job of showing you what are people interested in in relation to a particular topic or movie.

So with contagion, the most popular that it had been was in March of 2020, despite having come out nine years earlier.

And despite at the time, I believe it was only available on one streaming platform.

Now, on what level, this is very puzzling, right? People are terrified about the pandemic. There's a lot of uncertainty.
There's a lot of worry. And what do they choose to do in their spare time?

They go and watch a movie about another pandemic?

That seems to be what they did. Yeah, at least many people did.
You know, it shot up from on the Warner Brothers catalog. I think it was ranked like 270 or 271 or something like that.

And it had shot up to being the second most popular movie on the catalog overnight.

During the pandemic, Colton, you say that another type of movie also surged in popularity. What was this type of movie?

Well, this, you know, may come as a surprise to some, but horror movies kind of had their time to shine in 2020 and 2021.

And so, what you saw was that kind of in the early year or so of this pandemic, this new novel threat that the world was facing, people were seeking out scary movies more in relation to other kinds of movies than they ever had before.

So, on the surface, Colton, this is puzzling. Many of us say we want to be good, kind, and thoughtful people, and yet many of us seem to be drawn to stories of gore and violence.

One of the things that I've noticed in my years as a podcaster is the sheer size and enduring power of the true crime podcast industry.

Millions of people just can't seem to get enough of stories of kidnappings and murders and violent crime.

Yeah, I mean, you know, ever since podcasting has kind of taken off, true crime has always been in the top five or top ten of most popular podcast genres.

Parents, pastors, and pundits denounce violence and other forms of antisocial conduct. But as consumers of entertainment, we seem to eagerly soak them up.

When we come back, why we find ourselves rubbernecking on the highway as we pass a car car crash, and what our fascination with tales of murder and mayhem reveal about our minds.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

In countries around the world, people tell each other stories about the worst of human nature. Children whisper tales to each other about ghosts and goblins.

Adults eagerly read news accounts of crime and violence. The gorier, the better.

And in the aftermath of disasters, researchers find many people are more strongly drawn to fictional tales of violence and vengeance.

Colton Scrivener is a researcher at Arizona State University and Aarhus University in Denmark.

Colton, in his 1871 book, The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin tells a story about a group of monkeys at the zoo. What was the story he read about?

So Darwin had heard this story that a group of monkeys would

seem to be fascinated by the thing that they should fear the most, which for a group of monkeys is a bag with a snake.

And Darwin was so fascinated by this that he actually ran an experiment himself trying to replicate this. Hmm.

What did he do?

He took a bag and he put a snake in it and he went to the London Zoological Gardens and he put it, I don't know if he specifies what kinds of monkeys they were, presumably rhesus macaques or something like that.

He put this bag in the

exhibit and he noticed that the monkeys would slowly walk up to it, like one monkey, the bravest monkey, would slowly walk up to the bag, peek inside and shriek.

They would yell and they would run away.

And you would think, like, okay, that should signal to the other monkeys that they shouldn't look inside this bag because there's something bad in there.

And it did signal that there was something bad in there. But what Darwin found was that the other monkeys then decided they needed to take a peek.

So they would one by one slowly creep up to the bag, peek inside, see the snake, shriek, and run away.

And, you know, this absolutely fascinated Darwin, and he saw this as as a form of almost human-like curiosity.

He writes, monkey after monkey, with head raised high and turned on one side, could not resist taking a momentary peep into the upright bag at the dreadful object lying quietly at the bottom.

So the monkeys represent an example of what is sometimes known as predator inspection. What is this, Colton?

Predator inspection is really interesting because, you know,

in the same token as with the monkeys and the snake, you might expect that, you know, if a zebra sees a lion on the savanna or a gazelle sees a cheetah, that they should just run away, right?

I mean, why would the zebra do anything else other than run away when their natural predator is within eyeshot? But oftentimes,

what they will actually do is stand very still and look at the predator.

And what's really interesting about this is that, you know, there's some differences in which animals are looking at the predator and when they choose to do so.

You know, the gazelles will choose to look at the cheetah more often when they're in a larger group, when they're a bit further away from the cheetah, and it's not evenly spread among the groups.

So the gazelles that are adolescents or sub-adults are much more likely to engage in predator inspection.

And what is the logic, the evolutionary logic to these actions?

Yeah, so of course you have to ask why

would a prey animal stop and take a look at its natural predator instead of running away.

And the logic here is that in many cases in nature, prey animals live in very close proximity with their predators.

And so every time you see a lion, if you're a zebra and you run away, you're going to be running for most of your life, right? And that's actually worse for you.

You're going to be expending calories that you would otherwise be saving. You are going to be spending time running instead of grazing.

It's actually going to put you at higher risk of being caught later on.

So that's one sort of side of the coin of the logic. The other side is that if you don't know much about your natural predators, you're kind of in a bad spot, right?

It's good for you to be curious about them because

if you can learn a bit about them, sort of their moods, what they look like when they're hungry or they're hunting,

you can be much more efficient in

your ability to get away.

So we've talked about the many ways that humans are drawn to stories of violence and danger, things that ought to be aversive and unpleasant.

You believe that our proclivity to seek out information about dangerous and disturbing things is similar to the interest that the monkey showed in the live snake, and you call this morbid curiosity.

What do you mean by the term?

Well, it's a commonly misunderstood term, I think. You know, if you hear the term morbid with another word, you often think of that thing as being bad.

And in the case of morbid curiosity, I don't mean that the curiosity is bad. I mean that people are curious about things that are bad.
So the curiosity itself is not pathological, it's not bad.

But because the object of the curiosity is about a potential threat, I've called it morbid curiosity.

And so, you know, the definition that I've used for morbid curiosity is simply an interest in or a curiosity about threats. And this could be visual information, it could be

auditory information, you know, any kind of information about something that is dangerous or could be dangerous.

You say that the concept of morbid curiosity in some way speaks to the puzzle that we have been discussing.

On the one hand, we denounce violence and antisocial behavior, but on the other hand, we are drawn to seeing it and hearing about it?

Correct. Throughout time and across cultures, violence

usually is seen as bad. It's usually punished.

But the interesting thing is that even in cultures that are the most anti-violence in most circumstances, they often have certain rituals or certain events where violence is not only seen as okay, but it's maybe celebrated.

And it was really intriguing to me that people could have these completely opposing views on how how moral something is, depending on what kind of situation it occurs.

What do you think watching a film like Contagion did to people as they struggled with the uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, Colton?

You know,

if you're introduced to something that's that's new, what do you want to do? Well, you want to you want to learn about it, right? And if you're introduced to something that

scientists in particular are just now kind of trying to figure out, you know, in February and March of 2020,

a lot of mistakes were made. People were kind of seeing the scientific method in action.

They were seeing how science works in action, which is, you know, you think something might be true and you test it and maybe it is and maybe it isn't. And I think people aren't used to that.

And so the next best thing that they had, the best cohesive story that people had was, in this case, contagion. It was a film

about a pandemic and about the social response to that pandemic, about how the virus spread and what it did to you.

And it was a neatly packaged, well-told story in about 90 minutes that people could consume.

So in some ways, Colton, this puts a different spin on students who go to see a violent movie after something bad has happened on their college campus.

Correct. Yeah.
You know, that study came out in the 1970s, and these scientists didn't call what they were observing morbid curiosity, but that's exactly what they were measuring.

That's what they were finding was morbidly curious behavior in these college students who presumably felt an urge to learn about interpersonal violence. And again, you know, an

easy way for them to do that is to go see a movie.

I can think of all kinds of other examples examples from the news. You know, something bad happens, there's a serial killer on the lose, and suddenly we're all very fascinated with psychopathy.

And it's not necessarily because we're interested in psychopaths, but we're saying something dangerous is out there. Let me learn about it.
In some ways, it's a form of predator inspection.

Exactly right. Yeah, I think, you know, a lot of the

neural mechanisms are probably conserved across mammals for

predator evasion, predator inspection, just general threat management when it comes to predators.

If a zebra had the ability to write a book or create a documentary or a fiction film, it would almost certainly create many of those about lions.

And I think the same is true of gazelles. They would be creating media entertainment about cheetahs, right? And I think humans do the same thing.

The only difference between

other animals and their form of morbid curiosity and humans and their form of morbid curiosity, is that humans can actually create stories where they're not exposed to the danger, right? So

if a gazelle wants to learn something about a cheetah, it has to be there in person. And there's a much higher risk associated with that.

Humans, on the other hand, can consume a story that someone else has created either because they've had a personal experience with this danger or because they understand how this danger works and they can put it actually in a new context in which nobody has ever experienced this danger, but they might.

So humans have this incredible ability to forecast into possible futures and imagine what kinds of behaviors are adaptive, what kinds of behaviors are maladaptive,

and what these things might look like, how we can prepare for them, how we might see them coming before they actually arrive.

So it's much safer, in other words, to sit in a movie theater with a bag of popcorn in your hand and hear a story about a terrifying killer shark that's on the lose than to actually be in the waters of the ocean and potentially have to encounter the shark.

Correct, yeah. And one of the questions I get a lot is, well, if that's true, why don't we just read science textbooks about sharks in that case?

Or why don't we read science textbooks about pandemics instead of watching contagion? And I think the answer is that, you know, humans are storytelling creatures.

We learn really well, despite the fact that we can experience a situation cognitively without actually being in the presence of it.

You know, we come from a 500 million year line of organisms that

have developed brains that can only understand experience in a first-person perspective.

And that's exactly what stories do, is they give you a first-person perspective of what it's like to be somewhere and experience a thing.

And so stories kind of, you know, are crafted in a way that tap into these evolutionarily old parts of our mind that are just used to dealing with everyday experience.

And so we consume them more easily, we remember things from them more easily.

And, you know, in small-scale societies, most things are told as stories. They're not told as a list of facts.

Your research has found that watching content like horror movies can help make people more psychologically resilient. How so, Colton?

This was one of the more interesting things out of my career so far, I think, was finding that being a horror fan, you know, watching

scary movies or reading scary books seems to actually have an effect on how resilient you are to real dangers in the world. And so I first found this

in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

You know, we recruited a couple hundred people uh using online platforms because of course we couldn't bring people into the lab and what we found was that uh

people who were horror fans uniquely were more resilient to the stresses of the pandemic so even when we controlled for big five personality we controlled for age we controlled for income we controlled for sex we controlled for all these things we could think of that might influence resilience.

And we still found that if you watched horror movies, you were more resilient during those early months of the pandemic.

People who were horror fans were experiencing less psychological distress.

So they were experiencing, to a lesser degree, anxiety, insomnia,

sleeplessness, depression. They were experiencing those physiological symptoms of stress much less than people who were not horror fans.

And when we looked at morbidly curious people and we isolated that variable by itself, we found that people who scored high in morbid curiosity were experiencing much more positive resilience.

So they were much more optimistic about their ability to kind of get through these difficult times.

They were feeling, you know, despite how difficult the world was, they kind of maintained their optimism

about humanity and about their ability to persevere.

I'm wondering if it's also possible that as we watch the movie about the scary shark or the movie about the serial killer, in some ways it takes our minds off of the things that are worrying us in our real lives.

In other words,

the fear of the artificial threat in some ways replaces the fear of the real threat and in some ways mitigates how frightened we are in real life.

Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, you would think that if you're feeling stressed, you might go watch a feel-good movie, watch a comedy or

a rom-com or something that

would make you feel good, right?

But what's really interesting is people don't seem to do that as often as they seem to seek out scary things or things that are difficult to engage with when they're feeling bad.

And this really intrigued me. And I kind of, you know, there was no research on this when I first started thinking about this conundrum, this paradox.

And what I was finding were a lot of horror fans who would write about this experience. They would write about their their personal experience

overcoming their anxiety with horror. And they'll write about this on online, you know, message boards like Reddit, for example, or they would write op-eds in magazines.

And many times, you know, they would, they would accidentally discover this and they don't understand quite why it works, but they were noticing that when they would watch the scary movie, it seemed to kind of calm them down.

And so I started, you know, I started thinking about this, like, how could this possibly work? What are the mechanisms here? You know, if this really does work in some people, what could be going on?

So I think what's happening here is when you are feeling anxious about something, in particular, if you're feeling kind of a generalized anxiety, you know, you're not really sure what you're anxious about, but you're getting the sweaty palms, the racing heart, you're feeling vigilant.

That just kind of sits in this cycle, this vigilance cycle where your vigilance is looking for a potential threat and it can't find it.

So it turns up the vigilance even more to try to find it and it still can't find it. And those are the cycles of rumination that are pretty familiar to people with anxiety.

And what's interesting is, you know, our minds are exceptionally attuned to threats. So threats pretty much overpower any other stimulus in our field of view and our mind.

And that makes sense because if there's something threatening in your environment, you should kind of pay attention to that over other things.

The problem, of course, is in humans, we don't often have threatening things in our environment, but we have them in our heads.

And so I thought, well, maybe horror kind of is like fighting fire with fire because you're giving your mind something threatening to latch onto.

You know, you're giving it a killer on the screen or a, you know, a serial, in the case of true crime, like a serial story about a serial killer or in horror or the story of this terrible monster.

And what that does is it does a much better job of kind of dislodging this cycle of rumination.

You can imagine it kind of like a highway off ramp, you know, for your mind so that you can get out of that. And then now you're sucked into the movie or a book works just as well for many people.

You're sucked into this story, let's say, this scary story, and you're still feeling anxious. You haven't solved that problem yet.

But the difference now is that you have control over the source of the anxiety. It's identifiable.
You know what you're anxious about. You have some control over it.
You can put the book down.

You can pause the movie. You can sit with a friend and watch it.
You can do things that make you feel safer. You can collect yourself, right?

Or you can kind of, as the movie's playing through some of the

less scary scenes, you can kind of collect yourself a bit.

And then after 90 minutes, the movie ends, the threat goes away. And that triggers to your mind, like, hey, the threat is, we found the threat.
Now it's gone.

Now, what's called the parasympathetic nervous system, this is the part of your mind that controls the, you can think of it like the, as the rest and digest part of your nervous system.

It helps you kind of relax.

That part of your nervous system kicks in and it helps physiologically calm you down.

You've been exploring the idea that people might sometimes use scary entertainment as a way to connect with other people. What do you mean by this?

You know, we talked about earlier how humans are storytelling creatures.

A lot of our time is spent talking with others, telling others about things, experiencing these fictional worlds or past experiences or future possibilities with others.

And sometimes those are scary stories, scary events that might happen or scary events that did happen or scary fictions that could happen.

And so again, we kind of just took the next natural extension of this. You have, okay, well,

Maybe some people who are anxious seem drawn to horror and it helps them because it gets them out of a cycle of rumination.

And then the kind of next step of that is, okay, if they do this a lot, they might actually be building some skills and learning something about themselves.

But then if you, you know, if you go to a haunted attraction in October or you go to a new screening of a new horror movie at a theater, what you notice is that most people are there with someone else.

And this is especially true at haunted attractions.

And what's especially interesting at haunted attractions, there's two things here. One of them is that, you know, they open usually in late September and they're open through Halloween.

That's kind of their prime season.

But if they are open another time of year, it's almost always during Valentine's Day.

It's during a holiday where we spend time with those we love the most.

And it's kind of, it was kind of intriguing to me that that's when they were open, right?

And if you go to a haunted house in October, what you notice is that a lot of people are there with their significant other.

If you go to a horror movie, what you notice is a lot of people are there with their significant other, their spouse or their boyfriend or fiancé or girlfriend.

And so we think kind of this next natural extension of our thinking here was that, well, maybe you're not only learning something about yourself, but maybe you're also learning something about the people around you because you're seeing how they respond in these sort of playful

simulations of fear. So for example, you know, if I go through a haunted attraction with a friend and my friend

acts protective towards me and kind of we stick together, right?

That's kind of a good clue that maybe they're a good cooperative partner.

But if I go to this simulation and I see them kind of lose their cool a little bit and they leave me behind, or you know, they don't cooperate with me in these

simulation of a fearful experience, it might be an indication that they're not going to cooperate with me in a real situation that's threatening.

And so, we could be learning not only about ourselves, but about you know, potential partners or friends in these situations.

I mean, I'm thinking even of little kids during Halloween. I mean, who goes trick-or-treating just by themselves? The whole fun is to go with other little kids and to scream in terror together.

And in some ways, it is a very social activity. And of course, I think the idea that horror movies might make for good date-night movies or date movies, I think that's well established.
Yeah,

some of the earliest work on horror movies uh

was research on couples and and uh what couples do when they uh when they go to a scary movie and this was kind of dubbed the the snuggle theory of horror and this early idea was that

that the reason people enjoyed horror movies was because they could kind of live out these cultural expectations of how they were supposed to react.

So for example, if a man and a woman go on a date to a horror movie, there's an expectation that the man will act act kind of brave and you know, will it'll give him a good excuse to kind of bring his female counterpart closer to him.

And the woman will have this expectation of the man that he will act brave as well, but also that she might be a little fearful and give him the opportunity to act brave, right?

Give him see if he will act brave when she's afraid.

It's commonly feared that people who are drawn to dark and disturbing content must themselves harbor unsavory qualities.

When we come back, are horror aficionados people to be feared or some of the nicest people around?

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.

Are you a fan of dark and sinister tales? Do you find yourself gravitating to stories of crime and vengeance?

Do you sometimes feel guilty about the books you read and the TV you consume?

If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with a Hidden Brain audience about your interests in the Erie or the Macabre, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org with the subject line scary.

Again, that's ideas at hiddenbrain.org.

Across the animal kingdom, creatures large and small seem to be fascinated by their predators. Humans are no exception.

We devour books and movies about pathogens and pandemics, terrorists and traitors, serial killers and psychopaths.

Colton Scrivener is a researcher at Arizona State University and Aarhus Aarhus University in Denmark. He's the author of Morbidly Curious, A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

In the early 1980s, Colton, a new generation of super gory horror films hit the theaters. Audiences loved them, but many observers were appalled.

Here's film critic Roger Ebert sharing his view about one such film.

Our next movie is Friday the 13th, the final chapter, an immoral and reprehensible piece of trash that sold more tickets on its opening weekend than any other movie so far in 1984.

And that is a very, very depressing commentary. It really makes me sad to think of all those moviegoers, most of them teenage kids, sitting there watching this sad, cynical, depressing movie.

Coulton, what do you hear in that expression of outrage about the content of horror movies and the people who go to see them?

So Roger Ebert hosted this show with Gene Siskel, and they were two of the most well-respected, popular movie critics of their time. So Roger Ebert, they're obviously saying that

it was a real shame that people were watching this morally depraved movie. And Gene Siskel chimes in a bit later by saying that people who enjoy it are obviously depraved and they hate women.

And what struck me about this clip when I watched it for the first time was that the film critics weren't criticizing the film.

I mean, they were, but they were even more so, they were criticizing people who watched the film, which is unusual, I think, for a film critic to do.

And, you know, you might think, well, maybe that only happened in the 1980s because that's when slashers kind of cropped up, right? Halloween success drove

filmmakers to make hundreds of these slasher movies, the most successful of which right afterwards was Friday the 13th. And these were gorier.
They were more violent, sure.

And Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel and many other critics hated these films, thought they were just, as you said, they're they're a poor indication of the health of society, if you will, especially of young people, of teenagers.

So, yeah, I mean, what I hear there is not a film critic criticizing a film, but a film critic criticizing the sort of moral standing of the film's fans.

There was a movie critic from the New York Post who wrote a blistering review about the movie series Saw, where he says that people who watch these movies are, quote, depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most other living things.

So it's not just that there's something wrong with these people for watching these movies, but that we should be afraid of these people who go and watch these movies.

Well, it's worth seeing two things. I mean, one, are they right? Are people who are horror fans, you know, low in empathy? Are they

not not compassionate, not kind, you know, terrible people?

As much as I didn't want that to be true, I was open to the possibility, right?

Because I'm sympathetic to the intuition that if you can watch really violent things and be okay with it and even enjoy it, that maybe it says something about your psyche or your

whether or not you approve of violence. I'm sympathetic to that intuition.
But as far as I knew, there were really, you know, there was no empirical work that had really shown this.

And so the very first thing I did was I actually actually ran a study where I created these fake user profiles, you know, like you might see on a, an early version of a social media website, where it's just a person's name, their age, whether they were a man or woman, and their favorite movie genre.

And I created hundreds of these profiles that were just randomized, you know. And

I presented them to participants and I asked the participants to

kind of guess like what they think this person is like you know with minimal information what can you discern about this individual and i had asked them to guess this individual's personality you know their big five traits but also you know do you how empathetic do you think they are how compassionate do you think they are how kind

and what i found was that People were much more likely to say that, you know, if one of the profiles said that the favorite movie genre of that individual was horror, they were much more likely to say that that individual is likely to be unkind, not compassionate, and lacking in empathy.

That really said to me, like, okay, it's not just movie critics, you know, it's regular people kind of have this intuition. So then I was like, okay, I really have to study this and see if it's true.

So I ran a series of studies. But what I found was that all of my horror fans looked just like regular people.
It looked like I had a group of non-horror fans kind of as my control. And

they looked just like them. There was no relationship between how much of a horror fan you were and how empathetic you were.

Except that now there was a couple of instances where I did find something significant, but interestingly, it was in the opposite direction as many people would expect. So

some horror fans, and in particular, those who liked paranormal horror movies, scored a bit higher in cognitive empathy. So they were a bit better at taking the perspective of other people.

What you're doing when you're engaging in a fictional story about someone's experience is you are imagining yourself in their shoes. I mean, you are literally engaging cognitive empathy, right?

And when you see shots of their face on the film where it kind of zooms in on the on the victim, in this case of a horror film, the victim's face, you know, their screams of agony and their fear on their face,

I mean, you're then, ideally, you're feeling that, right? You're feeling afraid and you're putting yourself in their situation.

And if you're not doing that, you're probably not enjoying the horror movie, right? When I buy a ticket to a horror film, I expect to feel afraid. I expect to be scared.

And if I don't empathize with the protagonist, then I'm probably not going to feel afraid, right? We're not afraid of monsters because they kill people or they kill people on screen.

We're afraid of monsters because they kill people who are like us, right? People we're imagining ourselves to be. That's what generates the fear.

And so if you're not empathizing with the protagonist in a horror film, you're probably not enjoying the horror film that much.

Now, of course, could someone who is really violent, could they be empathizing with the killer? Sure, I suppose so. I mean, that's true of action movies as well.

It's true of rom-coms where there's an evil partner, you know, a really bad, toxic partner. You could be empathizing with them.
I think that's not something that's unique with horror.

I think in many cases, in many genres of film, people are empathizing with the protagonist. That's what stories are crafted to be understood.

But I'm thinking back to movies like Jaws. You know, the movie is called Jaws.
It's about a shark, but really, it's not about the shark at all.

It's actually about how people are terrified about the shark, how they're frightened about the shark, how they're trying to defend themselves against the shark.

It's really about the people, not the monster.

I think that's exactly right. And that's a good example of where it would be kind of silly to say that people are empathizing with the antagonist.
Like, are they imagining themselves as a shark?

That's

a strange argument to make, right? I think it's clear in a film like Jaws that people, like you said, are

empathizing with and taking sort of the cognitive perspective of the protagonists and the danger they're in.

There's another line of evidence that people who enjoy horror are, in fact, people who are empathetic, and that comes from the genre of the haunted house that involves a character known as a pleader.

Can you describe one of these houses and who these characters are, Colton?

Yeah, I was talking to to Ben Armstrong who owns Netherworld haunted house in in Georgia it's one of the most well-known haunted attractions around Halloween and uh I was telling him about this empathy study that I had just conducted uh because I was you know like I was surprised by it uh and I was asking him what he thought about it as someone who is in the horror industry and he said you know it it kind of makes sense he said in in our industry we have what are called pleaders and these are usually like younger kids young women who are in the haunt, who are actors.

They're actors in the experience.

But in the story, as you go through the haunt, in the story, they are seen as victims. So they're like a visitor who's been captured and is being held captive.

And as you go through the haunted house, you kind of have the option to stop and try to help them escape. Or you can continue on, right?

And maybe you think it's a trap, or maybe you're too afraid to go try to help this person.

And you would think that most people who visit the haunted house would ignore the pleader because they know that they're an actor. It's no secret that this individual is probably an actor.

And there's no requirement to actually help this person, right? You can continue on as you please.

But he said, you know, what you find is that the pleaders are one of the more successful parts of the haunt. I mean, they almost always draw in with their cries of help.

They almost always draw in these people who are at the haunted house to come help them. And a lot of that is, you know,

they're activating the empathy response. They're activating, they look like vulnerable protagonists in this story or vulnerable, in this case, vulnerable side characters.

And they're, you know, activating the empathy response in the haunt goers really well.

Another real-life demonstration of this research finding that empathetic people might be the ones who are drawn to horror are so-called so-called horror-themed restaurants.

Tell me what a horror-themed restaurant is and why some of them seem to attract a clientele that is especially tenderhearted.

Yeah, there's

been kind of a recent crop of horror-themed restaurants. They're restaurants that

have themes that you would find in a horror movie or are themed like particular horror movies.

And you see this with bars and restaurants and sort of all kinds of almost experience-based establishments.

And what's really interesting is that a lot of these horror-themed restaurants or coffee shops, they'll have a really high portion of vegan or vegetarian options.

And you might think that someone who's a horror fan, you know, doesn't, again, as

the New York Post critic said, shouldn't be allowed around animals.

But what's a little ironic is that many of these horror-themed restaurants are either vegetarian or vegan restaurants, or they have a huge aspect of their menu that caters to vegetarians and vegans, presumably horror fan vegans or horror fan vegetarians.

I mean, in some ways, that runs against the idea that these people who watch these movies are sort of bloodthirsty people, almost by definition.

Yeah, and, you know, I'm myself, I'm not a vegetarian or vegan, and I don't, you know, think that it necessarily says anything about the individual if they are or are not, but it certainly would be strange to have

an individual who you think shouldn't be allowed around animals, and yet they are a vegetarian or a vegan, perhaps for moral reasons, right? For their own moral reasons.

Not everyone feels a natural inclination to feed their morbid curiosity.

Maybe you're someone who scurries away when your spouse puts on a gory movie or cringes when your child plays a violent video game.

And yet, maybe you're also curious about the psychological benefits of engaging with the dark side of life.

If so, our companion episode on Hidden Brain Plus may be for you. It's called How to Enjoy the Chills.

You can try Hidden Brain Plus with a free seven-day trial by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.co/slash hiddenbrain.

Again, those sites are support.hiddenbrain.org and apple.co/slash slash hiddenbrain.

Colton Scrivener is a researcher at Arizona State University and Aarhus University in Denmark. He's the author of Morbidly Curious, A Scientist Explains Why We Can't Look Away.

Colton, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you very much for having me on.

Are you a fan of thrillers and murder mysteries? Do you love true crime podcasts? Does the idea of going to a haunted house or an escape room seem like great fun?

If you have a personal story you'd be willing to share with the hidden brain audience or a question or comment about morbid curiosity, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email it to us at feedback at hiddenbrain.org with the subject line scary.

Again, that's feedback at hiddenbrain.org.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Quirrell, Ryan Katz, Audem Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury.

Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor.

This December, Hidden Brain is proud to join Pods Fight Poverty. We're teaming up with other podcasts to raise funds to lift three villages in Rwanda out of extreme poverty.

Your donation goes directly, no strings, no middlemen, to the families who know best what they need. Visit give directly.org/slash hidden brain to make a difference for someone who needs it most.

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I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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