As Halloween approaches, haunted houses, creepy theme parks and scary movies start to emerge, like zombies out of graves.
October is the month of horror, a strange time of year when many people temporarily let themselves feel afraid and uncomfortable, all in the name of fun. It’s a common Halloween ritual to watch a scary movie, either alone with a bucket full of candy corn, or with a group of giddy friends who need company to make it through two hours of terror.
Many thrill-seekers don’t think twice about the highly unusual nature of horror movies, but the marriage of the concepts of fun and scary seems to be a fascinating human invention that will always spark conversation among psychologists.
Common horrifying sound bites, like screaming, heavy breathing and rapid footsteps, stimulate the brain in a way that induces arousal, either sexual, physical or emotional.
Weylin Sternglanz, associate professor of social psychology in the Farquhar College of Arts and Sciences, believes that the range of emotions involved in the horror movie experience can be explained by the social theory of “misattribution of arousal”.
Sternglanz said, “We generally think of emotions as preceding a physiological response. For example, you feel scared, and this causes your heart to beat faster and your palms to sweat.”
However, the misattribution theory explains that when people experience arousal, possibly in the form of a scary movie, the physiological symptoms arise first, like tense muscles and sweaty palms.
Sternglanz said, “When people watch scary movies, they enjoy the physiological state of arousal, which can be reinterpreted as an intense positive emotion, like excitement, depending on the social context.”
The context is defined as the viewer’s surroundings; they might be watching a horror film with a group of friends in a theater or with their significant other in a bedroom. Depending on where they are, and who they are with, people will react differently when a figure jumps out from the shadows and stabs the movie’s protagonist.
Those who are not interested in watching movies full of terror wonder why others are willing to pay to make themselves feel uncomfortable for hours in a dark theater.
“I’m too afraid to watch horror movies because I think that they could happen in real life,” said freshman athletic training major Shanygne Bitna. “All the stuff that happens in horror movies needs to stay in the movies and out of my life.”
Valerie Starratt, assistant professor in Farquhar’s Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences, believes one reason young people choose to watch movies about zombies or serial killers is because they are in the prime of their sensation-seeking age and enjoy the feeling that comes out of having conquered a dangerous situation. In the case of a creepy movie, the protagonist’s triumphs over evil characters are also the viewer’s triumphs.
“Just feeling safe isn’t enough,” said Starratt. “So humans have evolved psychological mechanisms, like the feeling of fear, that motivate behaviors to help us survive.”
During a movie, the viewer’s body reacts in harmony with the reactions of the characters onscreen; when they scream, so does the audience. When they laugh in relief after surviving the zombie apocalypse, so does the audience. We get worked up and excited, which is the body’s way of practicing for an actual threatening situation.
Starratt said, “Eventually, once the threatening stimuli are no longer threatening, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over and returns the body to a resting state. When all is said and done, it turns out that surviving a threatening situation can feel pretty good.”
Because the brain can’t immediately process the difference between real danger and the fake danger happening in a movie, we feel a rush as we watch the scary events unfold. Our affinity for this high can be explained by evolution.
Sternglanz said, “An evolutionary explanation for this phenomenon might be that it was beneficial for our ancestors to demonstrate bravery and adventurousness as they entered adulthood and found their place in dominance hierarchy of their social group.”
With age, people feel less of a need to display their courage, because they might have already found a mate or a niche in society. For this reason, a theater showing a psychological thriller is more likely to be packed with college students than middle-aged adults or seniors citizens.
“Horror movies may provide a means of intense stimulation that young sensation seekers are looking for,” said Starratt. “It could also be that older adults have experienced enough genuine intense stimulation in their lives that they don’t need to seek out a faux-fear experience. But those are just possibilities.”
Horror and thriller movie series, such as “Saw” and “Paranormal Activity”, are wildly popular among viewers between ages 17 and 21. Over the course of the seven “Saw” movies, viewers willingly agonized through the 61 traps that resulted in about 60 onscreen deaths, most of them depicted in vast, bone-chilling detail.
These are just a few examples of the on-screen terror that has an effect on the minds of young viewers; scenes of death, torture or suspense still linger in people’s minds for days after seeing a horror movie, often manifesting as heightened nervousness, nightmares, or even changed behavior.
A study conducted at Ohio State University in 2006 showed that exposure to violent or aggressive behaviors in media leads to an increase in aggressive behavior, especially among younger viewers who absorb new ideas and beliefs with less effort than adults.
Research also indicates that media violence has not only increased in quantity, but has also become more graphic, sexual, and sadistic. It is possible that young people who enjoy these aspects of scary movies are becoming desensitized to tragedy and will be more likely to commit acts of violence.
But despite what psychology says about the effects of movie gore and violence on young viewers, some students enjoy their annual dose of horror too much to give it up.
Briana Prieto, junior biology major, said “I love the thrill and I love watching scary movies with my friends, because sometimes their reactions are funnier than the movie itself.”
Fictional terror has the possibility to change our behavior, and the popularity of horror movies might be the precursor to a changed society, but Halloween traditions will not be forsaken; people are determined to get their thrills this month, to either have a laugh with friends, albeit nervously, or prove to themselves that they are brave enough to stomach a gory movie.
If psychology is correct and horror movies continue to dramatically desensitize young people, a truly scary future might await humanity; we might all be current participants in a grand real life horror movie.
