This is embarrassing, but scary movies freak me out so much, I watch with my hands covering my eyes. More embarrassing still? I keep going back for more.
We all know that feeling of being terrified by horror flicks yet strangely drawn to them, like a vampire to a bare neck. Fear isn’t a very pleasant feeling. In real life, it keeps us safe by alerting us to danger, but it comes with unpleasant side effects, like a racing heart and churning gut. So why put ourselves through all that?
To find out what’s behind our fascination with scary books, movies and podcasts, I talked to Coltan Scrivner, PhD, a behavioral scientist affiliated with the psychology department at Arizona State University and the author of the new book Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. Are we psychopaths for loving a psychopath flick? Are we sadists intent on ruining our own night? Here are the surprising, research-backed reasons we crave thrills, chills and gore.
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Why do people love to scare themselves?
One simple reason we’re drawn to scary stuff is that it gives us an immediate high. “Some people enjoy the adrenaline rush,” Scrivner says.
Watching a scary movie activates the amygdala, the defense center in the brain that gets involved any time we perceive a threat. Your heart speeds up, and your brain pumps out adrenaline, a stress chemical that prepares you to deal with the danger. So if you’re facing a bear, you have the energy and focus to fight back, play dead … or run for your life.
But as it turns out, most of us aren’t just hooked on the thrills. Keep reading for three other reasons we long to watch scary movies, listen to scary stories or step into haunted houses.
It gives us a feeling of accomplishment
Horror stories let us indulge our morbid curiosity and overcome our fears, Scrivner says. Surprisingly, many horror fans don’t actually love that feeling of being afraid, he notes, “but what they do like is the overcoming of that fear and the satisfying of their own curiosities.”
Let’s go back to your brain for a minute: When you get sucked into a scary film, a creepy show or the latest Stephen King hair-raiser, your prefrontal cortex—the command center of the brain—also starts pinging you.
“Our amygdala is saying, ‘Hey, there’s a danger.’ But other parts of our brain, like our prefrontal cortex, say, ‘Well, hang on a second. You’re sitting on your couch, and that’s on a TV, and so this isn’t really dangerous to you,” Scrivner explains, noting that the experience lets you feel more than just terror. “When people describe morbid curiosity, it’s a mixed feeling of fear but also curiosity, fascination or even comfort.”
While some of your brain components are telling you there’s a threat, others reassure you that you’re safe. So you get to delve into and work through your fears in a controlled way.
It reduces anxiety
Yes, you read that right! Tuning in to a spooky movie or terrifying podcast can make you feel less tense—it’s bizarre but true. When investigating why we like scary things, Scrivner was surprised to learn that a big chunk of people with anxiety like horror entertainment. Why would someone with anxiety subject themselves to something designed to make us anxious? “Horror movies can provide an off-ramp for anxiety,” Scrivner says.
Here’s the deal: Anxiety is famously difficult to shake. If you have generalized anxiety, in particular, you’re on edge and not sure why. Your brain gets the signals that there’s something wrong and searches hard for a threat. But most of the time, there’s not an obvious thing for you to latch that fear or dread onto. “You feel stuck on it because potential dangers have a premium on our attention, more so than any other stimulus that we might encounter,” he says.
But a counterintuitive way to kick yourself out of that rumination cycle is to turn on a scary movie, which will give your amygdala a concrete threat to focus on, Scrivner explains. “You’re sucked into the movie, and now you’re anxious about that, and you have a little more control in that situation,” he adds. You can turn on the lights, watch with a friend or even look up the ending as a way to avoid getting too rattled.
After you make it through the slasher in one piece, you’re like, Phew, what a relief! “Your parasympathetic nervous system will activate, and that is the brakes on your fight-or-flight,” Scrivner says. “It reverses what you’re feeling and physiologically calms you down.”
It helps us stay safe in real life
On a basic level, horror entertainment and true-crime stories tip us off to all kinds of dangers, including some highly improbable ones. I don’t know about you, but after seeing The Silence of the Lambs, I vowed to never, ever stop to help a stranger on the side of the road. (I can still see those fingernails in the side of the well. Shudder.)
While the main reason we gravitate toward slasher and devil flicks isn’t to pick up survival skills, it’s a definite part of their appeal, Scrivner notes. “Stories are incredibly safe,” he says. “They remove us from having any kind of risk associated with learning about potential dangers.”
Sometimes this alert system works better than others. Sure, horror flicks can teach you to stay safe in real-life situations, like when strangers knock at the door (don’t let them in) or you pass a hitchhiker on the road (keep driving). But no matter how many Dateline and Netflix true-crime docudramas you catch, you’ll have a hard time figuring out whether your spouse will end up poisoning you or giving you a shove off a cliff.
So wait—are scary movies and haunted houses actually good for you?
Weirdly, they are. Beyond helping us feel less stressed out, they may help us become better-adjusted humans too. “Horror movies are a good way for adults to practice emotion regulation—when you’re watching a horror movie, you’re not always trying to be the most scared you can be,” Scrivner says. “Often, you’re trying to hit a sweet spot and have to regulate your fear and anxiety up and down.”
Knowing how to adjust your emotional response can help you handle tricky emotions in relationships, at work and in all kinds of challenging circumstances.
Why do some people love scary stuff, while others don’t have the stomach for it?
Some horror preference comes down to personal taste. “The boring but true answer is because humans are just incredibly diverse when it comes to personality,” Scrivner says. It’s healthy for a society to have a wide range of personality types, including the horror-phobes.
If you’re a scary-movie diehard, horror-novel buff or a regular at your town’s Halloween haunted house, rest assured—you’re not a sociopath. In fact, you may actually be more empathetic than someone who steers clear. This was an unexpected finding from Scrivner’s research.
Using standardized measures of empathy and compassion, he assessed people’s taste for horror and their empathy levels in dozens of countries. He discovered that across different populations, horror fans—whether they prefer slashers, psychological thrillers or ghost movies—tend to be just as empathetic as non-horror fans. “In some cases, they are actually higher in levels of empathy and compassion than non-horror fans,” he says.
Now, wait a minute. You’re paying to watch someone’s head get chopped off. How can you be more caring? “If you think about it, a horror movie is a story about a vulnerable person being attacked by a more powerful antagonist or villain,” Scrivner explains. We watch horror because we want to be exposed to fear, for the thrills or to conquer our fear. “But in order to feel fear, you have to empathize with the victim,” he says, “so it makes sense that horror fans would be pretty good at caring about the well-being of other people.”
Is there a difference in how we experience scary films, books and podcasts?
The biggest difference is that film involves more of your senses. Whether you go to see The Conjuring sequel at the multiplex or screen American Horror Story in your living room, “you’re getting an audio-visual hallucination, so there’s not a lot left to our imaginations,” Scrivner says. “If it’s really well done, a scary movie can be more frightening.”
But if it’s filled with campy slasher scenes, it might be less terrifying than a spooky podcast or a book. Horror novels make you use your imagination, after all. You’re also experiencing the characters’ emotions—unease, fear, scares—through more intimate narration, which amps up the terror. And as Scrivner notes, a horror author takes pages to describe one quick movie scene, so the frights in a novel can really get in your head and linger.
As for audio gore, a bone-chilling podcast like My Favorite Murder falls “in the middle,” Scrivner says, “because you have a little more control than a film of how you visualize it.”
Have people always had a fascination with scary things?
As long as we’ve been telling ourselves stories, we’ve been attracted to dark and unsettling themes. “Predators are a universal feature of folklore and children’s stories,” Scrivner says.
A classic like Little Red Riding Hood doesn’t just tell a good yarn—it informs kids what a wolf looks like and, most importantly, what that furry animal is capable of doing to them. Those big teeth? The better to eat you with!
“It’s entertaining for them because they’re morbidly curious, but it also teaches them what to watch out for,” he adds. “If you are a child living a thousand years ago, your only exposure to a wolf would be if you saw one, and by then, it’s probably too late for you. So one way to teach people what they look like is through fairy tales.”
Kids’ and teens’ morbid curiosity also comes out in the games they choose to play: Ghosts in a Graveyard! Ouija boards! Call of Duty!
Is morbid curiosity unique to humans?
Nope, many animals like to watch too. Prey animals like zebras and gazelles choose to stare at scary scenes—but they do it as a survival tool. A zebra’s main predator is a lion, while a gazelle’s main predator is a cheetah. “You’d think they would just run away any time they see a predator. That should be instinctive,” Scrivner says. Get out of Dodge, right?
But zebras and gazelles, as well as many other prey animals in the wild, will sometimes stop and observe their predator to try to learn something about it. It’s more dangerous, but it’s helpful for them to lurk and watch what the lion does … so they don’t become its next victim. “We do the same thing,” Scrivner says, “but we do it through stories.”
That’s a far better idea than creeping up on a lion.
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Sources:
- Coltan Scrivner, PhD, author of Morbidly Curious and a behavioral scientist affiliated with the psychology department at Arizona State University; interviewed, October 2025
- The Journal of Neuroscience: “Neural Predictors of Fear Depend on the Situation”
- Nature: “The role of excitement and enjoyment through subjective evaluation of horror film scenes”
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