Life can be pretty scary. So why do we enjoy turning off the lights to watch movies that scare us?
Lance Lusk is an assistant professor of instruction in the School of Interdisciplinary Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas who, among many things, specializes in film. He explained how horror movies provide a safe space to process real world fears.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the full conversation, click the play button above.
Why do we like horror movies?
Lusk says some people are just drawn to them.
“For the people who do love horror movies, they love that feeling that their body gets, and the attraction of horror is really two-fold, right?” he said. “As humans, we love stories, but we also are wired to recognize fear. So when you combine those things and you do it in a way that horror does for films, it’s sort of a controlled scary environment.”
An important element that watchers get from horror movies: the ability to walk away.
“You know you can turn it off, you can turn your eyes away, you walk out of the room, right? You can’t do that in a real situation,” Lusk said. “So that’s the kind of play between your body gets those feelings but your mind is still in control.”
The communal theater experience
Lusk describes seeing a horror movie in a theater as a “safe sandbox.”
“This is what horror I think does better than any genre, is that it’s a communal experience,” he said. “It heightens those emotions in ways that your body feels more fear, but then when there’s that catharsis of now everything’s OK, there’s that sort of laughter in the theater or even hearing the shock gasps. And it’s something that we all share.”
Are horror movies back?
From Lusk’s perspective, the popularity of horror movies never really goes away.
“Horror movies or horror as a genre never really goes away, it just lies dormant and it rears its head again when we were feeling particularly anxious as a society,” he said. “Post-World War I and II, the Great Depression, the Atomic Age, the Cold War, post-911, of course most recently the pandemic and of course fears of A.I. and isolation and mental health issues… I like to argue that every era gets the horror movie it deserves.”
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