Speaking of Psychology - Why do we love scary movies? with Coltan Scrivner, PhD

Episode Date: October 25, 2023

October may be the month that our fascination with all things ghoulish and grisly reaches its peak, but for many people, a fascination with the darker side of life isn’t limited to Halloween. Coltan Scrivner, PhD, talks about why people are drawn to horror, true crime and other scary genres; and whether terrifying entertainment can actually be good for some people’s mental health and leave them better equipped to handle real-life challenges. For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How many of you have watched a horror movie this month, or decorated your lawn with skeletons and zombies, or visited a haunted corn maze? October may be the month that our fixation on things ghoulish, grisly, and scary, reaches a peak. But for many people, a fascination with the darker side of life isn't limited to Halloween. Some of us love being scared out of our wits all year long. There are a dozen Friday the 13th movies, the Scream franchise released its sixth film this year, And a list of the top 25 podcasts in the U.S. include shows called crime junkie, morbid, and my favorite murder. Clearly, there's a big appetite out there for horror, true crime, and other types of terrifying entertainment.

So why is that? Why do we love to scare ourselves silly? Are there certain personality traits that people who are drawn to horror, true crime, and other scary genres share? And are those people onto something? Could watching horror movies be good for our mental health? Can scary entertainment improve our well-being and leave us better equipped to handle real-life challenges? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Colton Scrivener, a behavioral scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab

at Urhus University in Denmark and a research project manager at Arizona State University. He studies the psychological underpinnings of our fascination with the darker side of life, including horror, true crime, and all types of scary play. He's also interested in how morbid curiosity relates to personality and mental health. Dr. Scrivener has published research on morbid curiosity and scary play in scientific journals, including psychological science and nature scientific reports, and has been interviewed by media outlets such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and NPR.

He's working on a book about the science morbid curiosity to be published next year. Dr. Skrivenor, thank you for joining me today. Hi, Kim. Thank you for having me on. So how do you define morbid's curiosity? You've developed a scale to measure it. What kinds of things do you ask about? Yeah, that's a good question,

because that was actually the first problem I came across when I started studying it, is that there wasn't a great definition of it, or at least there wasn't kind of an agreed-upon definition. So after a bit of research, the definition that I landed on was that morbid curiosity is simply a curiosity or an interest in things that are potentially dangerous. So that could be things that are fictionally dangerous that kind of tap into our minds a little bit or things that are actually dangerous, like the things we read on the news or hear about from others. Have you found that most people are at least a little morbidly curious? How wide is the range?

Yeah, I think morbid curiosity is sometimes talked about as if it's this fringe trait or a fringe thing that only some people have. But in all the research I've done, if you give people, for example, the morbid curiosity scale, you find that morbid curiosity is pretty normally distributed, meaning that most people have a pretty moderate amount of morbid curiosity. Some people have a lot and some people have a little bit. And this has been true not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well as well. including Canada, Brazil, Denmark, and several other countries that have taken this test. Let's talk about horror specifically. For people who don't like watching horror movies, and that does not include me. I like a good, scary movie.

It can be hard to understand why so many other people love them. What have you found in your research? Why do people enjoy watching horror flicks? So the traditional answer from psychology about why people have enjoyed, watching horror films has been that simply because they're adrenaline junkies. And one of the first things I looked into is whether or not this assumption was true, because there were kind of a few studies in the 1980s that looked at this, kind of when the slasher genre became popular, people got interested in this question.

You know, the psychological tools that were available, especially in personality science, weren't as robust in the 80s and one as varied and widely distributed in the 80s as they are now. And so what I've found is that, yes, there are some people who enjoy horror because they are high in something called sensation seeking. They like the feelings of strong sensations. These are the same kind of people that would go bungee jumping or skydiving or any number of things like that that kind of give you an adrenaline boost. However, it seems to be actually only a small portion of the horror fan base. So, for example, one of the studies we conducted at a haunted attraction during Halloween,

found that even at this high intense situation of scary play, like a haunted house, only a small number of people are adrenaline junkies or sensation seekers. And the remainder of them actually are pretty afraid before and actually feel genuinely scared when they go through the haunted house. And so, of course, we asked, well, why are they there if they're genuinely afraid and don't necessarily love the adrenaline rush for the adrenaline rush's sake? And what we found were that a lot of people feel as if they learn something about themselves and sort of develop as a person through these experiences.

And so you hear about this in real tragedies a lot, this kind of post-traumatic growth or I'm glad I went through this so that I, because I learned something and I grew as a person. And it seems like different kinds of scary plays, such as even just watching a horror movie or if you're a small child like playing hide-and-seek or playing scary imaginative games. These can help you kind of feel out the sort of limits of your fear and what you're able to handle. And they kind of, in many cases, can give you sort of self-confidence that you can overcome things that feel scary. But is there a point where fear is no longer healthy? Or do most people who like to watch horror movies know when it might be causing them more stress than enjoyment?

It's tricky, I think, to know. I mean, that's probably true of most things in life, right? It's too much of a good thing is always a bad thing, right? And certainly the same is true of scary play or fear. I do think people have a good intuition about when enough is enough, right? Like when they're too scared and they no longer have a good grip on like, you know, that the best kind of scary play, you have kind of one foot in reality and one foot in this imaginary world where you're sort of letting things scare you. And when we go through experiences like haunted houses or horror movies or we read a scary book,

we kind of tow that line, right? And we're partly at the whims of the narrator of the creator of the game. And when things get too scary and we get pushed too much into that imaginary world, we perform certain actions that help draw us back in. So for example, in some of the studies I've done, we found that people will actually suppress their fear

if they get too scared. So they'll cover their eyes. They'll imagine that it's not real. They'll sort of avert their attention to something else or cover their ears. They'll do things to kind of dull the sensations. And if they're not scared enough, they'll do things to actually heighten the sensations. They'll immerse themselves a bit more.

They'll, you know, look at the scare actors in a haunted house, or they will let themselves scream when they're feeling afraid. And so people do kind of regulate their arousal and regulate their immersion to hit this kind of sweet spot when they're watching horror movies and going through haunted houses and even listening to True Crime Podcasts. So are you a horror movie fan yourself? I am. I'm probably I'm probably not as big of a fanatic.

people assume I am. I mean, I do love horror movies. I am a, I would consider myself a, definitely a horror fan. But I kind of fell into this line of research accidentally. It's, you know, it wasn't that I was a horror fan and decided I needed to study that. It was more just, I was a horror fan and I was interested in these paradoxical things that humans do. And one of those things is that we scare ourselves for fun. Do you have a favorite horror movie yourself? And are Are there horror movies that you would consider more therapeutic than others? Ooh, more therapy. I mean, you know, to the extent that a scary story can help you sort of work through things

and conquer your fears, I think that depends on the person because some people have a higher threshold for fear and some people have a lower threshold for fear. So there probably isn't a good sort of single movie out there or single game out there for that. As far as my favorite, I mean, I really love the... The Haunting of Hill House, which is actually, I guess, a mini-series, not a, not a movie. But it's a really great example of sort of long-form scary story and long-form storytelling and horror. The Autopsy of Jane Doe is another really great one.

After I watched that, I realized that it incorporated a lot of elements from my work on morbid curiosity that, you know, kind of had these different facets that I'd been studying, kind of all smashed into one movie. Yeah, probably those two would be my story. my favorites. Well, let's talk about some other scary genres like true crime podcasts or TV shows like you just mentioned. What about these programs and podcasts that are about serial killers? Do people enjoy those for the same reasons?

Or is there something else going on psychologically? I think that they can enjoy them for the same reasons. True crime tends to be a little bit less in your face with the violence and gore and horror movies tend to lean into that a little bit more. And so horror movies lend themselves to, you know, adrenaline rushes a bit more easily if that's what you're after. However, a lot of people who watch or read or listen to true crime also get very scared from it often times after the fact when they're at home alone later or, you know,

when they're thinking about it later. But I think people do derive a lot of the same pleasures out of it. That is this kind of pleasure of learning about something, right? I mean, learning is intrinsically rewarding. I think there are quite a few studies that have shown that across a variety of different circumstances. And I think learning about threats is especially rewarding because, you know, your brain sort of feels like it's getting a good deal because you're safe, yet you're learning about something that typically would be very costly to learn about. So if you're listening to a true crime podcast or watching a, you know, a docu-series about a serial killer, your brain sort of cataloging all these things about what kind of clear. did the police miss or what kind of clues did their friends and family miss?

And you're sort of creating this rolodex of behaviors and attitudes and traits that serial killers might have. And that can feel very rewarding. So I want to talk for a little bit about your morbid curiosity test, which is available on the web for anybody who wants to know where they fall on the continuum. And just to out myself here, I came in at 3.96 out of a 5, which is a little bit higher than the end. average, which I think is 3.41. I found it interesting that you included so many questions about things that are really gory, like whether you'd want to watch a head transplant if such a thing were possible, or attend a public execution in the Middle Ages, or watch an autopsy.

And it seems to me that there's a really big difference between seeing something gross in a movie or a TV show and seeing it in real life. Is there a strong connection between the two, horror and gore, because I have to say, it seems to me that it's, it's pretty unhealthy to want to watch these gory things. So why do you link the two? Well, I think you could say that about probably a lot of different things that, depending on your motivations for watching it, right? So if I, let's say I enjoy boxing or MMA, millions and millions of people enjoy that and spend a lot of money doing it. Now, if you're watching it because you enjoy watching people get hurt, the intention there is maybe what's unhealthy, rather than watching it for entertainment for other

reasons. And I think the same thing could be said of sort of gory horror movies or sort of more disgust-based horror movies. Some of the things I've been looking into with perspective, like, why do people enjoy the gory aspects? Or at least, why are those interesting to us, right? Why is that sometimes we find things interesting, but we don't necessarily enjoy them. And I think with with gore, what it can be is that at least when it comes to my morbid curiosity scale, it seems to be that it's more about learning sort of the limitations of the body and learning about the consequences of interacting with something dangerous. And so you can imagine that if you're watching a horror movie and the protagonist comes

across a dead body, and the dead body has, you know, maybe a small cut on its neck, that doesn't give you a lot of information about the killer, right? It doesn't instill a lot of fear in you because anybody could cut another person's neck. It doesn't require a lot of strength or stealth or anything like that. But if their protagonist is walking along and they come across a body that's, you know, missing both of its arms and has its head smashed in, that then causes you to imagine something much more ferocious and terrifying and awful. And so, again, according to some of the studies that I've done and others have done, gruesome injuries seem to index formidability really well.

And so if someone can cause more damage to you, they're typically more dangerous, larger, scarier, and more of a threat. And so I think that horror stories often use gore as a kind of index of how terrifying and threatening the monster actually is. And so it's kind of a foreshadowing sometimes, or if you've already seen the monster, it might just be a clear example of how dangerous the thing you're dealing with is. And so in that way, I think it actually ties into this idea that you're interested in dangerous, potential dangers or threats, right?

Because the Gore indexes how threatening or how dangerous the monster might be. So what does it mean if somebody scores a five on your test? Is that a sign of possible psychopathy? No, I don't think so. You know, it's not a, I should say, you know, it's not a clinical test, right? It's not a, it's not meant to diagnose you with anything. There are plenty of people who score fives that are perfectly healthy. And there are plenty of people who score ones who are probably not perfectly healthy.

And so I don't think that, at least in the studies that I've done, you know, morbid curiosity does not seem to indicate any kind of pathological trait, right? Just because you're high or low in morbid curiosity does not seem to correlate strongly with any kind of pathological traits. Then how do you suggest other researchers use the scale, if not for that? Well, I think it can tell us a lot about why humans do the weird things they do. I think morbid curiosity probably explains a lot of our entertainment choices. I think it explains, potentially could explain a lot of themes and things like religion. You know, if you go through a lot of religions and mythology, there's a lot of violence and death and scary things that go. on. And it's kind of a curious thing that in stories where you would imagine people want to have,

want to escape reality and have this purely pleasant experience. And yet there's, there are no stories that I can think of, whether they're written or oral or audiovisual, where it's just a happy story, right? There's always some kind of tragedy and often some kind of threat that goes on. Right. And that kind of mirrors, I think, the human experience that, you know, life is not this just pure, easy, joyful thing. There are things that we have to overcome. There are challenges. There are threats. And certainly that has been true historically, more so than it even is now. And so I think stories, you know, do a good job of showing how people can overcome these kinds of scary things. And so the morbid curiosity scale is a great

way to capture people's kind of inherent interest in that. And because it seems to be a widely distributed trait. I think that, you know, there's a lot of room to better understand what it could lead to and what it's related to, what other personality traits or potentially pathological traits, or potentially beneficial traits or beneficial things that could be related to. Let's talk for a minute about kids and fear. You've written that in general, it's good for kids to experience scary play. Why is that and what's the balance? between things that are healthy, scary, and things that are going to give children nightmares for weeks or months. Well, you know, one of the key hallmarks of juvenile mammals broadly is play, right?

And in most cases, juvenile mammals engage in different kinds of rough and tumble or even what you might call scary play. They chase each other, they hide from each other, they explore new terrain that they're unfamiliar with. they, you know, lose their, they engage in vestibular play where they sort of lose their sense of direction or they're going too fast and spinning and they can't walk straight. For example, kids love to spin around and then try to walk, right? Yeah. Why is that fun? Well, it kind of throws you out of your element and it teaches you how to quickly regain

composure in the face of something that's uncertain, how to overcome things that seem scary. So if you're out playing and you're climbing a tree and it feels very scary. but your friends maybe are egging you on to keep going higher, or maybe you just want to go higher so you can see what's up there. These kinds of play teach kids how to manage their emotions, because if you go through your entire life, always avoiding any kind of a negative emotion, you're eventually going to have a negative emotion occur, right?

Like something bad will eventually happen. And if you've never experienced fear before or anxiety before, in a safe setting, you're going to feel really unprepared for it and you're going to be really surprised and shocked to not know how to handle those kinds of feelings. And so, you know, these kind of scary play or adventurous play or risky or thrilling play,

there's quite a bit of evidence that it's good for kids and can teach them emotion regulation, self-competence, and just kind of help them grow as, you know, young learners that the kids are. Now, there's a stereotype that horror fans must be cold-hearted and lack empathy. But you've done some research that's contradicted that. Can you talk about it? What did you find? Yeah, this is this is another one of those things that came out of a handful of studies in the 1980s in psychology journals showing that,

well, horror fans are just these adrenaline junkies with no empathy. And, you know, being a horror fan myself and knowing lots of horror fans and having gone to various conventions and haunted houses and things, it certainly didn't ring true with my intuition and with my experience, right, which is not a good place to build scientific data, but it is a good place to build hypotheses. And so I decided to look into this a little more, and I've conducted some studies recently looking at, like you mentioned, cold-heartedness, which is kind of, you can think of it as the opposite of compassion, right? You just have no care for another person's well-being.

And what I found is that people who are morbidly curious and people who enjoy horror movies tend to actually be lower in cold-heartedness than those who don't enjoy them. That is, they have greater compassion. And with respect to empathy, which is a slightly different measure, but similar and complementary in some ways, I just have a paper right now that's soon to be published in Journal of Media Psychology. And it's kind of a multi-study paper showing that horror fans actually. don't have any different levels of empathy, whether it's effective or cognitive, than anyone else who doesn't enjoy horror.

And so part of the reason this might deviate from past studies is that in those studies in the 80s, they would often, you know, the stimuli would be, for example, just a murder scene from a horror movie. So you just show someone a two to three minute clip of the killer killing someone and ask the participant how much they enjoyed it. Well, if you take that as a measure of how much you enjoy horror movies, you probably are going to find that people who are low in empathy enjoy it more, right? It would be like if I showed someone just a breakup scene from a rom-com and I asked them,

how much did you enjoy this? And I take that answer to be how much people enjoy rom-coms. It's probably not going to tell me much about how much people enjoy rom-coms. Or certainly it's not going to tell me much about the fans of romantic comedies. But it might tell me something about status, right? It's going to tell me something about people who enjoy watching others in pain. And so I think part of what happened was that the stimuli were just a little bit, they weren't operationalized very well, you know, because people had this assumption that you must enjoy horror movies for the violence specifically and for the harm to others. And so they took that, they took the stimuli that matched that and it sort of confirmed their own bias in some ways. But it turns out, you know, if you show people full-length movies or if you take different measures like how many horror movies they've seen, you get it. different answers on whether or not they are very empathetic.

Are there other personality traits or characteristics that morbid, morbidly curious people tend to share? Like, have you looked at the Big Five, for example? Yeah, it's actually not that strongly correlated with the Big Five, which is another reason I think it's an important measure to kind of look at in the future, because the Big Five does capture a wide range of variance and in a lot of different life circumstances and other individual differences. And it varies a bit from population to population and different ages. It varies a bit.

But in general, it's somewhat associated with higher openness from time to time. So, for example, people who enjoy horror movies tend to be a little bit higher in openness, sometimes also higher in neuroticism. So they're a bit more anxious, maybe experience negative feelings a bit more. One of the traits that is commonly associated with is rebelliousness, which is maybe not surprising because it also tends to be younger people who enjoy horror movies and younger people tend to be more rebellious. So there's probably some collinearity going on there.

Some other traits, you would think that it would be associated with low disgust, but actually morbid curiosity is not that strongly correlated with low disgust. And it could be because, again, disgust is one of those traits where it's difficult to operationalize. You know, there's disgust from bodily injuries, which is something that morbidly curious people would certainly be low in. But then there's disgust from other kinds of things that have nothing to do with threats. And those are much less associated with how morbidly curious you are. Is there a connection between morbid curiosity and our dream life? Do people who are morbidly curious tend to have more nightmares or scary dreams than other people?

I would love to conduct that study. So if anyone listening would love to do it, I would have to do it. I would love to know. I've had this idea that maybe, and this is, you know, hypothesis, speculation, but I've written about it a little bit, this idea that nightmares might be sort of the original form of morbid curiosity, right? And there's a great, there's a great program of study by this, I believe he's Finnish philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist.

His last name is Ravonsuo. I think his name is Auntie Ravonsuo. And he's come up with this idea that, you know, if you think of dreaming, you have to imagine, like, well, why did that evolve? Right. Why do humans have, and potentially other animals, have this ability to dream? Because, you know, there's some speculation that, well, maybe it's just random firing in your, you know, the neurons in your brain. But if you think about it, I mean, dreams are sort of directed in some way. You know, they're weird, but they do have some kind of story to them.

They do have, you know, the visuals are often vivid. They might be a bit fantasy oriented, but they do seem real, right? And so that suggests some kind of order and some kind of directedness to it. And so his idea is that, well, maybe dreaming is a way to rehearse things that happen in the real world while you're, you know, you spend eight hours a night, you know, ideally a third of your life sleeping, right? And that's a lot of time lost when you could be gathering resources or finding mates or, you know, doing things that help you. you in the waking world. And so his idea was that, well, maybe dreaming is a way to kind of capitalize on this downtime.

And it's a way to simulate potential experiences. And if so, then it would be really, really adaptive to be able to simulate threats. And again, for the same reason that it might be useful to engage in scary play, it could be useful to simulate these kinds of threats in your dreams and then practice or rehearse your responses to them. There's some evidence that, for example, during COVID, the early, might be able to months of COVID-19, people were having more nightmares, certainly more pandemic-related dreams. So they were kind of dreaming about this new threat, right?

They were kind of dreaming about potential problems that they might be facing. And so it's possible that, you know, dreaming or nightmares are kind of their very early form of morbid curiosity in humans and potentially in other animals. Speaking of the pandemic-related movies that we've seen over the last few years, for some people, they feel that they're too soon or too close to home. Why is it that some people find them therapeutic while others are not ready to relive it in the form of entertainment? Yeah. That's a, yeah, it's a tough question to answer. Again, one of those areas that is so ready for people to dive in, unfortunately, I only have so much bandwidth. And so I've only, I've conducted a few studies

on this. But as far as why some people find it useful or therapeutic and others don't, I think that's a huge question that should be answered. Because if we could figure that out, I mean, we might open up new avenues for therapy, for things for anxiety or for difficult life circumstances or PTSD. There's pretty good now, I think, empirical evidence, even that some people do use fictional scary events or scary play to help them deal with real scary events. And it's not clear to me or I think anyone else yet why this works for some people or in some

circumstances and maybe not for others or in other circumstances. So I think that's probably, in my opinion, the area of research around morbid curiosity that's most ripe, most ready for research and has the potential to impact people's lives the most. So you mentioned that you are a horror fan, or are you a Halloween aficionado as well? I am a Halloween aficionado. In fact, the town that I live in has a, it's a kind of a tourist town, and it has a lot, it has lots of events throughout the year, but the biggest event of the year is their Halloween parade or their Halloween event. And it's actually a zombie crawl, and I'm the organizer of it. So I organized this huge, uh, uh,

This is in Denmark? No, this is in the Ozarks. This is in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Oh, okay. And it's called the Eureka Springs Zombie Crawl. And it's a day-long event where people come and there's spooky music and spooky vendors and dancing. And everybody is dressed up as zombies of some kind. And right around dusk, we have a big, huge, you know, thousands of people engage in this zombie crawl where they crawl through the streets and people have their apocalyptic cars driving to the streets.

And it's kind of this way to embrace, you know, these scary things and play with them in a safe way. It's a kid-friendly event. Kids come and I get a lot of questions like, you know, will my kid be scared? And I mean, the real answer to that is I don't know, right? But I can say that a lot of kids do come. And it helps when children see, you know, the monster transforming. If you watch them putting on makeup, it helps them understand that this is just play. Right.

It's like a dog wagging its tail to another. dog. It's kind of a signal that we're just engaging in play. And so that does help children, I think, kind of overcome their immediate first response to this person walking around with flesh falling off of their face. You know, it's a, it's a way for them to understand that not everything is always as it seems. So any big questions that you still want to answer research-wise? Oh, so many. I mean, you know, when I first started, so I, I graduated with my PhD just in 2022. And when I first started doing work on morbid curiosity during my PhD,

nobody was doing that. I mean, nobody was, was publishing on it. There was no operational definition of it. I mean, it was like this untouched thing in science, which was weird to me because it was something that every person I talked to

understood. When I told them I was studying that, they understood some sense of what that meant. And they had their own examples of this in their life, for their friends that were morbidly curious, but they weren't. I mean, everybody had this sense of,

of this being something that existed in the world. And yet, at least psychological science had not really touched it much. Now that I'm a few years out of that, and I've been publishing on it for four or five years, um, I get emails, you know,

weekly of students who are doing their master's thesis on it now, who are other people who I'm collaborating with. And so I think in the next like, five to 10 years, there's going to be a huge boon in research on this because everybody's kind of doing that research right now. I think in part, because the pandemic, for example, I think woke a lot of people up to this idea that, you know, real disasters can happen, not just to anyone, but to me, right? Like this, the scary, apocalyptic, almost like things can happen not just in the movies, but in the real world. And I think it's woken people up to this

idea that, you know, maybe being curious about these kinds of things and being interested in them, in them is not necessarily such a bad thing. I think as far as, you know, the most pertinent questions or the most interesting questions, I mean, I think certainly the one that I had mentioned earlier in our chat about who seems to benefit from this and why and under what circumstances, I think that has the most potential for therapeutic contexts and the most potential to impact people's lives. That would probably be the area that I think, you know, I would hope that a lot of, you know, clinicians and people like that would take seriously and do some studies on.

Well, Dr. Scrivener, I want to thank you for joining me today. It was really interesting chatting with you. Thanks. Yeah, thank you. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology. APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyion. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.