Why Horror Movies Can Make You Feel Less Anxious

I grew up afraid of everything: death, the dark, my own face in the bathroom mirror.

Eventually, I learned that my bottomless fear belied several anxiety and anxiety-adjacent disorders that I had treated as an adult with the help of therapy, medication, and an unlikely third balm: voracious horror movie consumption.

Contagion helped me get through the first night of confinement in 2020, and Dad’s head helped me release my pent-up tears on the anniversary of my father’s death. I felt my own indescribable rage and grief mingling with that of the Graham family around the dinner table. Hereditaryand my desperation and nastiness during a particularly bad time boils over into senseless murder in a breathtaking part of the Australian outback. Wolf Creek.

Although this type of catharsis is counterintuitive, I am far from alone in using it.

Dark cops, as researchers have dubbed us, use “horror as an instrument to navigate a world they perceive as frightening,” says Mathias Clasen, co-founder of the Recreational Fear Lab at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. And we get a lot of pleasure, self-discovery and personal growth from this quest, according to the lab’s findings.

Contrary to popular belief, their research shows that seeking fear for sport – watching a horror movie or visiting a haunted house, for example – is linked to greater resilience in adults and, when age-appropriate, a lower risk of childhood anxiety.

As humans, “we’re constantly making predictions,” says Clasen. “In a sense, horror is like a formalized worst-case scenario that is a very natural product of how we deal with it.”

Why we seek fear

Besides the “black copper” archetype invented by the lab, two other major categories identified in previous research are “adrenaline junkies,” who are most motivated by the physiological excitement – the rush – they feel during a fun, scary activity and the resulting improvement in their mood, Clasen says, and “white knuckles”, who build muscle not for the feeling during, but for the feeling of accomplishment after.

Whatever the motivation, “learning is at the very heart of recreational fear,” explains Marc Malmdorf Andersen, the other co-founder of the Recreational Fear Lab. This is an opportunity for people to engage with the fear part of our human “emotional palette” that many of us don’t feel in modern daily life. “As you become more familiar with these states, we think they essentially become more predictable” and less overwhelming, Andersen says.

Learn more: The Worst Things to Say to an Anxious Person and What to Say Instead

For people like me, turning to horror to ease anxiety can train our brains to better predict fear cues and suppress overwhelming physiological cues, says Andersen. Because anxiety can cause someone to overestimate a threat or underestimate their ability to cope with it, watching horror films could help reset “the comparison that would say, ‘This is the worst,'” says Greg Siegle, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Separate fact from fiction

Despite its restorative effect on people like me, horror has a reputation for the opposite. Much of the concern about the impact of recreational fear-seeking—that it might traumatize or corrupt—comes down to little more than “folk belief” stemming from “a very long cultural history of deep distrust of frightening mass entertainment” that then made its way into early studies of horror psychology, Clasen says.

Victorian England, for example, saw widespread concern over “penny dreadfuls”, sensationalist serialized crime or horror stories. “In the minds of the intellectuals involved,” the fans of these stories, who were often from the working class, “would become criminals, sadists and so on from reading these bloody, gory stories,” Clasen says. Instead, they increased literacy rates.

Similar moral panics erupted in the United States in the 1950s, when comic books, particularly the horror and crime varieties, were widely vilified because they were thought to incite children into delinquency or homosexuality (then considered a mental disorder), and in the United Kingdom in the 1980s because of “nasty videos”, horror films banned for fear that they do not lead young people to violence.

Unlike these baseless panics, horror can be a barometer of collective suffering and a tool for treating it, says Adam Lowenstein, founding director of the Horror Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh, which opened in September. “Some of our biggest waves of horror films have coincided with some of our most traumatic historical moments,” he explains, pointing to classic monster films that emerged during the Great Depression: Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), and The Wolf Man (1941). With this year’s commercial successes like Sinners And Weaponshe says we are in another “horror renaissance.”

Aren’t scary things traumatic?

Clinically speaking, “fear” and “trauma” are distinct, Siegle explains. The latter has a significant effect on a person’s long-term functioning and is a rare outcome of recreational fear. He cites a study he conducted with colleague and sociologist Margee Kerr, which measured people’s brain waves and reported their emotions before and after walking through a “pretty extreme” haunted house. “What they mostly said was that they liked it,” he said. “It was scary, of course, but it was uplifting and positive and happy for them.”

Of course, people who voluntarily visit a haunted house are a self-selected group, and trauma can occur when a person is subjected to something against their will or pushed beyond a limit. That’s why context and consent are important elements of a recreational fear experience, says Kerr, who also helps design haunted attractions. “You agree to suspend your disbelief and enter a new world, but [know] in the background that you always have the option to leave,” she says.

Staying in the scary sweet spot

To get the most out of a scary chase, it’s important to find the “happy medium” between too much and not enough fear, according to the lab’s research. Storytelling can help.

If you’re in a haunted house, your brain may register that your palms are sweaty, your heart rate is elevated, and your breathing is rapid and shallow. The story you tell yourself in that moment plays a big role in determining whether you’ll walk out of there or venture into the next room to see what’s in store, says Siegle.