The Psychology of Horror, Part Two

Why Do We Like Horror?

Hello all.

This is the second in a three-part series in which a psychology professor (me) takes a good long look at the psychology of horror fiction. In the first entry, I spent some time with the work of Noël Carroll on defining “art horror” (which is different from our responses to real-life horrible things) in terms of emotion research. Carroll’s claim is that “art horror” is an audience’s sympathetic response to a story, combining the basic emotions of fear and disgust. Carroll also describes the core of our uneasiness about monsters, that being their violation of our mental categories.

Today, I will take a look at a different question, one that takes us in some surprising directions: Why do we like horror?

It’s obvious that we do like horror; people have been telling spooky stories around campfires since the invention of the campfire. And the attraction to horror remains as strong as ever, as evidenced by the billions of dollars brought in by horror films, and the enduring popularity of horror novels (There’s a reason why Stephen King has a net worth of five hundred million dollars).

But why? When we look at psychological theories and research involving emotions, we try to figure out the functions of those emotions. Fear is an obvious one: the emotion of fear motivates us to avoid things that would likely lead to injury or death. While fear tells us to avoid a threat, anger motivates us to take action to eliminate that threat. Sadness is our response to loss or failure. Disgust motivates us to avoid contamination by diseases and parasites. Shame warns us of loss of status.

Here is the problem: Horror is a compound of fear and disgust. Fear and disgust motivate us away from the stimuli that bring about these emotions. So why would we be motivated toward stories that make us feel fear and disgust? Berys Gaut calls this the “paradox of horror:” Why would we enjoy experiencing negative emotions? Answering that questions brings us into contact with some of the classic theories of emotion and motivation, which I will present in three categories: (1) psychoanalytic, (2) cognitive, and (3) existential.

1. Psychoanalytic

Time for the F Bomb.

No, not that F Bomb.

This F Bomb:

In 1919, Sigmund Freud directed his attention to the question of horror in an essay entitled “The Uncanny.” In it, Freud argues that the things that bring about feelings of dread or horror come from primal and/or childish fears that we have pushed down into the subconscious. Basic Freudianism, of course, includes the idea that the things that we repress are never gone; they are only metaphorically thrown into the metaphorical basement of our minds. Like a monster in a horror film, anxieties lurk in that metaphorical basement, pushing at the locked metaphorical door, wanting to come out. If they cannot come out directly, they will emerge in some kind of symbolic manifestation, and that will include telling and listening to stories. Childish uncertainty about whether or not one’s toys are alive gives us stories of evil living dolls and similar inanimate-yet-animated objects. Basic narcissism makes it difficult for us to be fully genuinely aware of our mortality (“No more me? At all? That does not compute.”), and so we are drawn to stories about spirits that survive after death. Basic narcissism also causes us to overestimate the powers of our thoughts, and so we have stories of curses.

And because it’s Freud, many of the anxieties will involve a person’s parents, often with strong sexual themes (Freud’s gonna Freud). Freud describes a story about a monster that rips out eyeballs, and declares it to be grounded in castration anxiety. Fears of being buried alive he interprets as anxiety of being reabsorbed into the womb.

(On that note, I will point out that I consider the Peter Jackson film Dead Alive to be one of the most Freudian horror films ever. When most people talk about that movie, they focus on the Sumatran rat-monkey, or the baby zombie, but the climactic conflict in the film is between the main character and his over-controlling mother, who mutates into a giant undead monster that opens up her abdomen and pulls the main character inside her. The Freudian themes there are not exactly subtle.)

And so, from a psychoanalytic perspective, we can see horror stories as a way for our unconscious fears and conflicts to be brought out to play in a safe and socially-acceptable format. Fear of the dark. Fear that dead people might get up out of the coffin. Fear of losing self-control and hurting the people we love.

A related psychoanalytic concept is catharsis. Catharsis was originally an Aristotelian theory of drama; Aristotle argued that audiences enjoy tragedy because watching the suffering of characters allows them to “purge” their own negative feelings away. Seymour Feshbach promoted the idea that this applies to aggression as well as sorrow. I might not be allowed to physically attack people, but my desire to attack people is still tucked away in my metaphorical basement. So instead of physically attacking people, I might go to a hockey game and enjoy watching the players slam each other into the boards and maybe get into a fight. Or I could go to the movies and watch a kung fu film. In the case of horror, I might indulge in catharsis by watching a werewolf tear someone apart.

The problem with this theory, though, is that catharsis is not generally supported by the research evidence. Goldstein and Arms found that fans’ hostility levels were higher after watching football than before. Watching violent media does not reduce aggressiveness. So as much as I might enjoy watching Jason Voorhees chopping up young people, I can’t justify it by saying that it makes me a less-violent person.

2. Cognitive

For those who like a little more science in their psychology, we can set psychoanalysis to the side, and ask the neuroscientists why we like horror.

One possible explanation has to do with emotion and neurological excitation. Most theories of emotion, such as the one presented by Schachter and Singer, describe emotions as having at least two basic components: neurological arousal and a situationally-influenced cognitive label. If my central nervous system is in a high state of excitation, and the situation is that I am being chased by a bear, then the emotion I experience is fear. If I am in a high state of excitation, and somebody just insulted my mother, then that will be anger. Anything that we do to increase neurological excitation will amplify the emotion (take a sad person and administer a stimulant, and that person becomes obnoxiously sad).

This theory can be applied to horror. Although the stimuli in horror are negative, a well-made scary movie or book will have the effect of amping up our nervous systems, especially when the story involves shocking and surprising elements (fun fact: the first film to include a “jump scare” was Cat People in 1942). This is also the explanation for why people like roller coasters: If I am in a good mood, and get into a machine that flips and spins me around, and sets my nerves all a-jangle, the result is that I am in an even better mood. So, if I am in a good mood, and I watch interdimensional torture-fiends rip someone to pieces for solving their puzzle box (thank you Clive Barker), I will end up feeling very good indeed afterward.

Dolf Zillmann picks up this line of thought with his excitation transfer theory. The plot of a movie (including horror) generally involves some kind of resolution, which is experienced by the audience as relatively pleasant. The neurological excitation created by the frightening scenes lingers after those scenes end, enhancing the pleasure of the resolution. To that I might add the pleasure of whatever events happen after the movie has ended, including chatting with friends about how gnarly the movie was.

Noëll Carroll also focuses on the resolution of the plot in his explanation of why people like horror. If monsters violate our mental categories, we are curious about them, and motivated to solve the mystery of the monster. Where did this creature come from? What exactly is it? What are its powers? What are its weaknesses? How can the main character survive?

There is much to recommend these cognitive theories of horror. On a personal level, I find that I am most often in the mood for horror when I am having a good day (Gaut agrees with me on this), and the effect of neurological excitation on emotion is well established. Further, the idea that we see the monster as a problem to be solved has strong historical roots, and fits with the pattern of including exposition and discovery scenes in horror stories in which we learn about the monster. When I watch a horror film that has no resolution or explanation (I never did figure out what exactly the Tall Man was trying to accomplish in the Phantasm movies) I find the experience unsatisfying and annoying.

3. Existential

I came across an interesting idea about horror while reading the work of the German theologian Rudolf Otto. In his famous book The Idea of the Holy, Otto examines the human encounter with the divine, employing the term mysterium tremendum. God is literally “beyond” us, so much so that accounts of mortals getting a glimpse of divinity show us a response that blends stark incomprehension, inescapable fascination, and pants-wetting terror.

While discussing this phenomenon, Otto makes a digression and speculates that our fascination with ghost stories is a low-grade offshoot of this mysterium tremendum. This account bears a certain resemblance to Carroll’s category-jamming theory, as monsters do not fit our cognitive schemata, but Otto’s explanation goes far beyond mere curiosity and unease over a creature that does not make sense.

Existential psychologist Kirk Schneider picks up on this theme, putting forward the idea that horror touches on the infinite: “Ecstasy is a glimpse of the infinite,” he writes, “terror is its full disclosure.” Schneider talks about the many ways that a little bit of deviation from the norm can be delightful, but limitless deviation is nightmarish: Lay around the house a little bit instead of getting work done, and it’s very nice; but imagine an infinite extension of that principle, being unable to ever move again, without even death to relieve the torment of immovability. Having a lover who wants to be with you is wonderful, but make that desire limitless and we have an obsessive stalker. Schneider argues that horror is what we get when we push past deviation into contradiction and impossibility: “Contradiction taken to its logical conclusion brings us to infinity. Why infinity? Because, as we have seen, the more a thing differs, the less manageable it becomes; the less manageable it becomes, the greater its linkage to extremity, obscurity, and, ultimately, endlessness.”

Horror stories that Schneider considers the ultimate examples of this bring the reader face to face with the never-ending, the incomprehensible, and the genuinely chaotic (I’m waving my hand toward my copy of the collected works of Lovecraft right now). Lesser—but still enjoyable—horror stories are content to deal with creatures that are confusing and deviant, but explicable, gesturing toward these infinite themes but avoiding their fullest expression.

Drawing from this account, horror becomes attractive because a world with vampires is a bigger, more complicated, more mysterious and interesting world than a world without vampires.

Comparing Theories

Each of these three major approaches has something to recommend it, but none emerges as a complete explanation for why we enjoy horror stories. Catharsis doesn’t work, but the psychoanalysts are clearly on to something by pointing toward the connection between horror stories and childhood anxieties. In addition to the usual problems with Freud, though, I would push back against the idea of these anxieties being buried in the subconscious, as there are plenty of examples of horror deliberately tapping into fears that are 100% conscious, like radiation (Godzilla), artificial intelligence (Terminator), biotechnology (Resident Evil), and racism (Get Out).

The cognitive approach provides us with a more scientifically-grounded set of ideas, and a good empirical evidence base. Excitation transfer theory could explain why I don’t want to read or watch horror when I’m in a miserable mood. However, mere neurological arousal does not explain why a person would be drawn to negative emotion for stimulation; why would I want to feel bad in order to feel good when I could watch an exciting adventure or comedy film and feel good in order to feel good?

Carroll’s focus on curiosity about monsters explains why I am unsatisfied if we have no explanation. But why would I stay interested after the explanation? Once it has been explained to me that the residents of Innsmouth made an evil pact with the Deep Ones, wouldn’t I put the book down? The secret ingredient of Farmer Vincent Fritters is given to us right on the movie poster, so why bother watching it? And why do audiences come back for sequels? If I already know who and what Freddy Krueger is, why watch any Nightmare on Elm Street movies after the first one?

I did my doctoral dissertation on experimental existential psychology, so I should have a dispositional attraction to the existential view. The idea that we are both drawn to and terrified by that which is beyond finite human experience makes a lot of sense, and the parallels between Otto’s mysterium tremendum and Carroll’s category-jamming theory are too strong for me to ignore. But this approach also strikes me as insufficient. It explains some of the picture, but not all of the picture, and does not account for parts of horror that are addressed well by the other theories.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section what you think of these approaches, and offer your own thoughts about why horror has such an enduring hold on us.

One obvious issue with all of this, of course, is the fact that these theories describe the attraction to horror in terms of universal human motivations. They explain the attraction to horror, but not everybody is attracted to horror. So maybe the best approach is to turn our attention to individual differences. Why do some of us love horror, while others can’t stand it? Is there a “horror fan” personality? In the next entry in this series, I will present researchers’ attempts to construct a profile of the horror fan.