Why is horror so fun?

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Matthias Cleeson spends a lot of his time thinking about terrifying things.

I have a fondness for scary books.

I really like that experience of being really messed up by letters on a page.

And I remember being really interested in scary stuff as a teenager, but also being puzzled at why.

Because I would read a Stephen King novel or watch a slasher movie and then feel compelled to sleep with the lights on for several nights and found myself asking, what the hell?

What's going on here?

What's going on when people voluntarily seek out things that frighten them?

It's kind of weird if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, right?

Like, running away from scary stuff makes sense.

We're probably more likely to survive if we skedaddle when we're spooked by something.

But why do we also then run towards scary things sometimes?

Like, why do we pay good money to go to a movie theater and freak out?

It is this paradox of horror that fascinated Matthias.

He wound up studying horror for a living.

He joined the English department at Aarhus University in Denmark, but also looked at other disciplines to try and understand his subject matter better.

And that that is where Mark Anderson winds up coming in.

About a decade ago, Mark was doing his PhD at Aarhus University as well, studying cognitive science and religion.

And Matthias was this weird dude who came to our department and presented on, you know, all this weird horror stuff that he was very interested in.

Talking about his questions, like, why is it that humans are attracted to experiences that at their core are negative?

Why is it that we like stuff that we don't like?

Now, Mark does not really experience this contradiction firsthand.

I'm not really that much into horror.

I don't like it very much.

It's mostly Matthias that likes it, and he's the sort of stone cold person in the room.

I'm a much more timid

kind of guy.

But he was still really intrigued by the weird paradox of horror that Matthias was talking about.

And so this scientist who does not really love horror and this literature professor who loves it quite a lot ended up starting a cross-disciplinary quest to explore horror together.

I think that's one key to our success is we have these nicely overlapping domains of expertise.

Mark is really good at designing experiments and doing statistical analysis, and I like Stephen King novels.

Matthias and Mark are now co-directors of an entire lab devoted to studying this thing that they call recreational fear.

We see it everywhere.

It's little kids enjoying peekaboo, it's teenagers liking scary movies, it's middle-aged people going on dog tourism or getting on roller coasters.

But at the same time, it's sort of scientifically understudied or even ignored.

So there was something there that mandated serious scientific study.

Plus, we were having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

So, this is Unexplainable.

I'm Bert Pinkerton.

And today on the show, a hell of a lot of fun with a paradox of horror.

Mark and Matthias, and some of their colleagues, they decided to explore some basic aspects of the relationship between fear and fun.

They wanted to understand what was going on in people's heads and bodies when they were spooking themselves.

And to do that, they went to a haunted house.

Dystopia Haunted House is an old abandoned fish factory lying in the midst of the woods.

The factory consists of about 50 rooms, and so guests buy a ticket.

They walk through the 50 rooms where they're chased by, you know, pig men with chainsaws and killer clowns and zombies and so on.

Mark, do you enjoy this house?

From the outside, very much.

Yes,

I have been forced into the haunted house, I think, three times by now.

And

I mean, it is getting easier each time.

Yeah, I remember once we were in the haunt with a collaborator and we kept yelling at each other, you you know, you go first, you're the postdoc.

No, you go first, you're the PI.

All in

relatively good spirit.

We made it through.

It was a fun bonding experience.

But it could have gone the other way.

You know, one of us could have pushed the other in front of the guy with the chainsaw, which might have ended the collaboration right there and then.

I'll just add that that is exactly what Matthias did to me, who was the postdoc, by the way.

This may not seem like a great place to do serious science, but Matthias and Mark thought it actually might be kind of ideal.

Because in this setting, they could study people who were really freaked out.

After all, in a lab setting, there's only so much you can do to scare the bejesus out of people before you start crossing some ethical lines, right?

But if someone shows up at an abandoned fish factory, literally looking to be scared, that is their choice.

So it's a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to do any kind of controlled, systematic, scientific investigation.

They're trying to mount a surveillance camera and then some clown, a literal clown actor will come and throw fake blood on us.

But in a way, this kind of horror house is much more well-calibrated to investigate the kind of phenomena that we are really interested in deep down.

The kind of insight we can get into recreational fear.

It's just, it's out of this world.

Take this one study, for example, that gave Matthias and Mark and their colleagues a really key set of insights into how fear and fun might be connected.

In the study, they asked a bunch of participants to fill out a questionnaire before they went through the haunted house.

They hooked them up to a heart rate monitor, filmed them during some of the house's biggest jump scares, and then surveyed them again right after they left the house.

All of this to kind of get a sense of both how scared they'd been, but also how much they had enjoyed themselves.

And they found that the relationship between self-reported fear and self-reported fun in the surveys had this kind of upside-down U-shaped.

You can think of it as sort of the Goldilocks principle of horror, right?

That too, little fear is not that enjoyable when you are in a haunted attraction, but a lot of fear is actually not that enjoyable as well.

There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.

And this pattern showed up in their other measurements too.

Like some of the data from the heart rate monitors, again, showed that the people who enjoyed themselves the most tended to be the people whose hearts were behaving a little differently from their usual, but not like enormously so.

So it is as if humans dislike being very far from their normal physical state, but we seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.

Studies like this have fed into a hypothesis that Mark Matthias have developed about the potential purpose for recreational fear, like why we might seek it out.

And the deeper that they have gone into their research, the more they started to feel this nagging sense that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Like now that they've unlocked this awful secret, they will never be able to lock it away ever again.

I'm just kidding.

Their research has not led to anything deeply horrifying, but it has given them a window into how we might be facing our fears.

So, more on that after the break.

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In a horror story, there are only victims and monsters.

And the trick is not to end up as either.

So, in their haunted house study, Mark and Matthias saw this kind of U-shaped relationship between fear and fun.

Basically, too much or too little fear, not that fun.

Somewhere in the middle, this kind of like sweet spot of fear, very fun.

And they were seeing this same pattern in other research, too.

We know from studies on curiosity that humans get curious about things where they expect a moderate surprise.

They are not really curious about things where they know that their predictions are going to be way off.

They are typically interested in things that lie a little bit outside of their normal knowledge.

So, that same kind of Goldilocks effect, where something that's just the right amount out of your comfort zone is the most interesting or the most fun.

And seeing these similarities between curiosity on the one hand and fear for fun on the other, it led Marcomatius Marcomatius to their hypothesis, which is

maybe

when people seek out a little fun fear,

they're actually trying to learn through play, like trying to teach their bodies how to handle fear.

It's about learning how your, you know, your body reacts, for instance, when you become scared.

We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain has a tendency of suppressing input that it can predict.

So, if you have tried something several times, then oftentimes that experience feels less intensive.

So, one of the main hypotheses that we have is that recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way, you could say.

Unfortunately, Matthias and Mark's lab got a great opportunity to explore this idea further.

During the COVID pandemic, where the whole world closed down and we were all deadly scared of what this virus was,

no one knew at the time.

I remember this vaguely.

Yeah.

And so one really surprising thing that happened was that the horror box office exploded.

So people became really, really interested in watching horror movies all of a sudden.

A British science journalist who had written about some of my work years ago, in which, you know, I told her that I thought horror might help us prepare for a dangerous world, she tweeted me and asked me if I thought that horror movie fans were doing a better job of keeping their stress levels down during the pandemic.

Matias and some of his colleagues wound up running a study to investigate this question, to see if people who watched a lot of scary movies exhibited fewer symptoms of psychological distress in those early scary days of lockdown.

Now, because it was the middle of the pandemic, they couldn't go out into the field for this.

So we've distributed questionnaires looking at people's symptoms of mental distress, getting a personality profile, and also getting a measure of how often they watch disaster movies, prepper movies, that sort of thing.

And when they went through the results, they found that People who watched a lot of scary movies reported, at least, feeling less psychological distress.

And people who watched a lot of prepper movies, they said that they felt better prepared.

They had lived through similar scenarios in their imagination hundreds of times.

So for them, you know, it wasn't just science fiction in an abstract sense.

They felt like they'd sort of been there before.

Anecdotally, these results fit in with their own experiences.

Because Matias, the horror fan, he was not super phased by the pandemic.

I was sort of cool with it, you know.

Mark, by contrast.

I was not cool with it at all.

I remember, you know, the first days where I would, like, disinfect Amazon packages and, like, have them rest three days in our shit before I dare to touch them.

Now, to be clear, their study results were all self-reported stuff, right?

And also, as Matthias told me.

This is all correlational.

We can't say, based on this study, that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic.

So maybe the kind of person who likes scary movies is just less likely to get stressed out in the first place.

But they're excited to continue exploring this question.

Mark says they want to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear does actually bring their stress level down over time.

And they also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help kids who've gotten treatment for anxiety disorders.

We would like to sort of enroll them, if they would like, in sort of a bravery module or whatever, inviting them to the roller coaster theme park, having them enroll in a climbing course, maybe seeing some scary movies.

Not like seriously freak some anxious kids out, but let them have a little bit of fun with their fear.

Matthias and Mark want to know if that would actually help these kids learn how to deal with anxiety better.

Like, could you do roller coaster therapy, essentially?

Could we fight fear with fear?

So basically, right now, Matthias and Mark have a lot of cool, exciting questions about why we seek out fear for fun, and not that many perfect, complete answers.

Like, they're still a long way from solving the paradox of horror.

One thing they do feel pretty confident about though is that these questions are worth exploring.

Like there is something both really fascinating and kind of important at the heart of our obsession with horror.

I mean it seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world for humans.

You know, we rely on the imagination.

The imagination might be our coolest asset.

We can use our uniquely evolved imaginations to run through scenarios, scenarios, to imagine different states of affairs, and to prepare.

If you want to read more about the research that Mark and Matthias and their various colleagues have done, please look up the Recreational Fear Lab from Aarhus University in Denmark.

They have got papers about Stephen King and the Exorcist and peekaboo in daycares.

It's like great Halloween reading all around.

In the meantime, this episode was produced by me, Bert Pinkerton, and edited by Meredith Hodnott, who also runs the show.

Noam Hasenfeld is our host and does the music.

Christian Ayala did the mixing and the sound design.

Anouk Dusseau did our fact-checking.

Manding Nguyen is the fact that ostriches can run as fast as horses.

Jorge Just is a gem of a human.

And we are always, always, always grateful to Brian Resnick for co-founding this show.

Thanks also to John Clint Hill and Coleman Lowndes for their help with this episode.

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