Why Horror Fans Handled the Pandemic Better
Quick Answer
Why do people like horror movies? Because watching them appears to be practice. A 2021 study in Personality and Individual Differences found that horror fans reported greater psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic than non-fans, and that fans of apocalyptic, zombie and alien-invasion films were both more resilient and more prepared. People who score high on morbid curiosity showed the same pattern. The leading explanation is that horror lets a person rehearse fear and problem-solving in a situation they know is not real, which builds regulation skills that transfer when something real arrives.
In December 2019, Contagion was the 270th most popular title in the Warner Bros. catalogue. A nine-year-old Soderbergh movie nobody was thinking about. By March 2020 it was number two. Traffic to piracy sites looking for it rose 5,609 percent in a single month. The cast eventually reunited to film public health messaging with Columbia University, which is not a sentence anyone expected to write about a 2011 thriller.
Millions of people, locked in their homes during a plague, decided the thing they wanted to watch was a plague.
The 310 people in April 2020
You would assume the people who spend their weekends watching strangers get dismembered would be the first to come apart when something real showed up. April 2020 says no.
Coltan Scrivner, John Johnson, Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen and Mathias Clasen surveyed 310 people in April 2020, at the point when nobody knew anything yet. They measured film genre preferences, trait morbid curiosity, psychological resilience and pandemic preparedness. The paper ran in Personality and Individual Differences.
Horror fans reported greater resilience than non-fans. Not less anxiety about the pandemic, which is a different thing. Resilience, meaning less psychological disruption from it. People high in morbid curiosity showed the same association.
The prepper genre did something else
The researchers split out what they called prepper genres: zombie films, apocalyptic films, alien invasion films. Fans of those scored higher on resilience and also higher on preparedness, which was measured separately and practically. They had thought about supplies. They had thought about what they would do.
Horror generally correlated with handling it better. Movies specifically about societal collapse correlated with handling it better and having already considered the logistics. The films function as a very cheap simulation, and the simulation includes a supply list.
110 people in a Danish haunted house
The same research group went at the question from the other end. Marc Malmdorf Andersen and colleagues, including Scrivner and Clasen, ran a field study at a commercial haunted attraction in Vejle, Denmark, published in Psychological Science in 2020. They put heart rate monitors on 110 people, walked them through roughly fifty rooms of a horror attraction, filmed them on closed-circuit video, and asked them after each encounter how scared they were and how much they enjoyed it.
The relationship between fear and enjoyment came back as an inverted U. Barely scared, not much fun. Extremely scared, also not much fun. Enjoyment peaked in the middle. Andersen's phrasing was that a just-right amount of fear is central to maximizing enjoyment, and the heart rate data agreed: people had the best time when their physiological arousal deviated moderately from baseline, not minimally and not maximally.
Horror fans are not chasing terror. They are calibrating. The whole hobby is locating the edge and standing as close to it as possible without going over.
The part that makes it practice and not trauma
The Vejle researchers landed on play as the closest category. Recreational fear behaves like play, they concluded, in that just-right levels of uncertainty and surprise are what drive the enjoyment. A dog play-bowing before it bites is doing the same trick with the same signal underneath.
The signal is the exit. The attraction has a way out. The movie has a runtime. You can look at your phone. Your body does not know any of this and produces a real stress response anyway, which is the entire point. The gap between what your nervous system is doing and what you know to be true is the thing getting exercised. You are rehearsing the part where you feel it and keep going.
Remove the exit and it stops being practice immediately. That is the difference between a haunted house and a mugging, and it is why the research on recreational fear never generalizes to actual danger.
Morbid curiosity has a scale now
Scrivner's larger argument is that morbid curiosity is a stable personality trait rather than a defect, and he built an instrument to measure it. It shows up across cultures and across history, which is why public executions drew crowds and why people slow down at car accidents they would rather not see.
The evolutionary case is that attention to danger is useful, and that learning about threats from a safe distance is cheaper than learning about them directly. A person who has thought carefully about how outbreaks spread, even via a Soderbergh film, has a template when one starts. The template is crude. It is still better than nothing, which is what most people had in March 2020.
This is the same machinery that makes dark humor a coping mechanism rather than a symptom. Both of them work by getting close enough to the terrible thing to look at it, while keeping enough distance to stay functional.
What the research does not say
It is correlational. Three hundred and ten self-selected people online in one month of one pandemic. Nobody randomly assigned anyone to watch 28 Days Later for a year and then measured them. It is entirely possible that resilient people gravitate to horror rather than horror making people resilient, and the authors say so.
It is also not a prescription. Horror is not a treatment for anxiety, and for people whose anxiety runs toward intrusive imagery or panic, it can make things meaningfully worse. The finding is about a population, not about you specifically.
What it does undercut is the oldest complaint aimed at the genre, which is that liking this stuff means something is wrong with you. Horror has spent a century being blamed for whatever a society was already worried about, which is a pattern we wrote about at length. The people who kept watching it anyway were, by one measure taken during the worst month in recent memory, doing slightly better than everyone else.
Consider Let's Watch Horror Movies a training schedule. It runs with Horror Queen, and the rest of the horror collection is for everyone else who has been quietly preparing this whole time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people like horror movies?
The leading explanation is that horror is practice. It produces real fear responses inside a situation the viewer knows is safe, which lets them experience threat and regulate their reaction to it at no cost. Research on recreational fear has found that enjoyment peaks at a moderate level of fear rather than a maximum one, which suggests fans are calibrating an experience rather than chasing intensity.
Why do we enjoy being scared?
Because the fear is bounded. A haunted house field study published in Psychological Science in 2020 put heart rate monitors on 110 people walking through a fifty-room horror attraction and found an inverted-U relationship between fright and enjoyment. Too little fear is boring. Too much is unpleasant. In between is where people report having the best time, and the physiological data matched the self-reports.
Are horror fans more psychologically resilient?
One study says yes. Scrivner and colleagues surveyed 310 people in April 2020 and found horror fans reported greater psychological resilience during the pandemic than non-fans, with fans of zombie, apocalyptic and alien-invasion films scoring higher on both resilience and practical preparedness. The study is correlational, so it cannot establish that horror caused the resilience.
What is morbid curiosity?
The drive to seek out information about danger, death and threat. Coltan Scrivner's research treats it as a measurable personality trait that varies between people and shows up across cultures rather than as a personal failing. Higher morbid curiosity was associated with greater resilience in the same 2020 pandemic data.
Is watching horror movies good for your mental health?
Not as a treatment, and not for everybody. The research points to an association between horror fandom and resilience in a general population, not to a clinical benefit. For people whose anxiety involves intrusive imagery or panic, horror can make symptoms worse. If it genuinely feels good to watch, there is no evidence it is harming you.
Why did everyone watch Contagion during the pandemic?
Because the impulse to study a threat gets stronger when the threat is real. Contagion sat at number 270 in Warner Bros.' catalogue in December 2019 and climbed to number two by March 2020. People were not looking for comfort. They were looking for a model of what was happening to them.
