Our Love of Horror Movies and the Masochistic Search for Fear

Society’s craving for horror speaks to something strange about our shared psychology

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

It may not sound like a particularly bold statement, but I begin each movie with the hope that I’ll enjoy it. It’s certainly not every movie that I turn on expecting it will change my life forever, but never will I enter these cinematic worlds craving an unpleasant time. And yet, my relationship with horror has an interesting way of bringing that notion into review.

Few would argue that the burn we feel when we touch a hot stove is anything to be savored, or that the visceral sensation of fear is anything that could be simply called pleasant. But still, there’s a masochistic sort of pleasure we derive from meals spicy enough to make us sweat through our shirts and crave for sweet release, and movies scary enough that they keep us awake at night with strange and tormented imagery.

The horror experience isn’t supposed to make viewers miserable, of course. But nor is the joy and catharsis that scary movies offer supposed to come from the textbook sort of entertainment that we expect walking into other genres of movies. Horrors are dark and foreboding and creepy and imbue us with dread. They’re gory and traumatic and oftentimes even hard to watch. And still they keep people coming back.

As with the rollercoaster we board expecting to be shaken to our core, the bargain we make in beginning a horror movie is unique. And just like the most unrelenting ride in an amusement park, there’s a safety in the rails we’re locked into and the metallic harnesses that descend over our hips. There’s a machinist consistency that comforts us as we scream at the top of our lungs.

Psychologist Paul Rozin refers to this sort of willingness to expose ourselves to mild discomforts as “benign masochism.” In an article, entitled “Spicy Foods: To Eat, or Not to Eat” he explained, “As for why people build this painful habit in the first place: Social influence… is what makes a person want to try a spicy dish a second time — because they see another person doing it, and feel compelled to join in. Over time, the mind and body tolerate the spice and even learn to feel pleasure from it….” It’s that same dichotomy that underpins our relationship with horror.

Simulated danger creates a useful paradox: we can enjoy the thrill of fear without real consequences. We can revel in the adrenaline rush without the real risk of danger or bodily harm. This contradiction is also referred to as “safe fear.”

We hope to be scared, but we subconsciously know that the creatures, ghosts, and monsters depicted within these films can’t truly hurt us. As adults, we’re often ruled by that understanding. As with kids who’ve had the allure of Santa stripped and can never regain that fantastical magic of Christmas morning, the visceral terror that our first experiences with horror films instill us with is often hard to recreate.

Of course, nostalgia can affect our relationship to all film and entertainment. Movies can mean more than the sum of their parts when they come into our lives at the right moment. But it’s often those early memories of horror movies that reach back into the rawest, most primal part of ourselves. There’s nothing quite like being young and petrified.

Going into an action movie I hope for bombast and entertainment, and going into a comedy film, I hope for uncontrollable fits of laughter. I walk into other movies hoping for a philosophical revelation. But broaching each new horror movie, it’s with the lofty hope that it might be the rare film to make me feel like a kid again in its utter, unrelenting fear.

I want horror movies to tap into something innate and deep-rooted. I want to be terrified of whatever twisted surprise they have in store. I want them to rattle me down to a cellular level, and I want to be powerless to keep my hair from standing perpendicular. I want to wrestle with the ancestral urge to flee from my seat as I forget about the popcorn growing stale at my side.

When I watched 1408 in theaters with my father on a weekday in a mostly empty theater, it terrified us both so much that my dad had to quell my first mild existential crisis after we left the theater. (This was a surefire sign of a successful horror.)

Having grown up in the 50s and 60s, seeing that 2007, Stephen King short story horror unfold on the screen with his son at his side was a vicarious thrill that changed his relationship with the horror genre moving forward. To this day, he refers back to it as one of the great psychological horror movies of his lifetime.

And while 1408 isn’t quite the greatest horror movie ever made, I’m not sure there’s ever been a movie that scared me more.

Watching Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead on TV one night past my bedtime in the mid-2000s, it marked the first time I understood why children have curfews. My father lulled me into security after I confessed my trauma-inducing transgression. Flesh-eating monsters lurched in my mind's eye and I struggled to muster a single minute of sleep that night. In those days, I wanted nothing more than for those scary thoughts to go away.

But as an adult, there’s an odd sort of wistfulness encased within the memories of those tormented, sleepless nights. There’s a halcyon magic in the ability to be so deeply affected by movies. And for me, it’s horror films that pull that child-like wonderment and sensitivity from me most reliably.

It’s rare when watching an action movie that I find myself under the throes of something so raw, impulse-driven, and irrepressible as what I felt when I first watched Hereditary or Midsommar. And it’s all but impossible for films today to do to me what The Grudge did to a living room full of kids during my tenth-birthday sleepover extravaganza. But each time I bargain with a new horror movie — alone and late at night or in a theater beside a friend — it’s with the hope it will make me confront the hardwired terrors that once sent chills up my naive young spine. It’s with the strange urge to feel a biological discomfort.

That raw sense of unease that the best horrors inculcate is transcendent. If only for a moment, they send us somersaulting back to the bygone world where we splashed in puddles and feared the dark and asked whatever adult was within earshot colossal, fantastical questions. They can take us to that place in time when the world was more mysterious — when we were paralyzed with fear over monsters under our beds and inside of closets. And they remind us of the child alive within all of us who’s still afraid of the unknown.