Why some fans say watching horror helps them escape — and confront — the terror of real life

If you're afraid of the dark, a logical solution is to turn on a light. But some horror aficionados say there might be another approach — face your fears head-on by watching a scary movie.

While it's not for everyone, some horror fans believe the genre is a relatively safe space to engage with their deepest, darkest fears.

That's because life in the real world is unpredictable. We don't know if something bad might happen or when. But horror movies are predictable: they have a beginning, middle, and end.

Erin Mick — a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto's Cinema Studies Institute with a focus on horror — says that's why horror films offer comfort to some viewers.

"When I do look at the online fandom for horror, lots of people are saying exactly that, that horror films absolve them of less predictable anxieties because, to some degree in genre art, there's a formula," says Mick.

"Fans of that genre take great pleasure in engaging with that formula and knowing the rules and knowing that … bad things are going to happen but there are these rules and this level of safety within the world of fiction that doesn't exist in the real world."

As a kid growing up in Alberta, Mick recalls being drawn to horror imagery, through films by directors like Tim Burton and Guillermo del Toro, before slowly working her way up to spookier fare.

At a sleepover when she was 12, Mick became enthralled with films from the early '00s like The Ring and The Grudge 1 and 2.

But when she went to bed the next evening, the images she watched the night before came flashing back, with one spine-tingling scene from The Grudge sequel in particular proving hard to shake.

After that, she began to pull away from horror, for the most part, until she began to embrace it in an entirely new way near the beginning of her undergraduate degree.

Away from home and anxious, nightmares started to wake her up. Wide awake in the middle of the night, she began to turn on horror flicks, which had the strange effect of helping her fall back asleep.

As it turned out, the devil she knew was better than the devil she didn't know.

"I do think I found horror movies comforting during this period of my life … because they are nightmares rendered beautifully in this very amazing, very compact, accessible frame," said Mick.

"It was a way of imagining my nightmares as something other than a flaw in my brain. I could understand them instead as movies or stories."

Horror may help some people deal with trauma

Now working on her dissertation, Mick has managed to turn her passion for horror into a vocation.

But while the genre can provide an escape, Dartmouth, N.S., writer Peter Counter found it helped him deal with something more complex: the lingering effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Counter is the the author of How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory, released this month, and Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays, released in 2020.

In both collections, Counter examines the role horror and popular media have played in his life since developing PTSD after witnessing his father being shot during an attempted mugging in Costa Rica while on a family cruise in 2006.

"Spoiler alert: I'm about to tell you that my dad survived his shooting. I helped carry him to safety," he writes in the opening chapter of How to Restore a Timeline. "We ended the day drinking under a sunset on the ship's lido deck, where the party never stops."

In the wake of this incident, which was over nearly as soon as it had begun, Counter developed PTSD which he wouldn't discover for some time. Instead, he began escaping into television shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica and horror films like 28 Days Later.

It wasn't until a professor asked his class how many hours of media they consumed each week — and Counter answered with a whopping 90 — that he began to realize his consumption habits were concealing a more significant problem.

"That was maybe the first time what I was doing to cope had been challenged," he said. "It wasn't too much longer after that that things started to spiral out of control."

Eventually, he ended up in therapy, and was officially diagnosed with PTSD.

But while he credits much of his recovery to therapy — and acknowledges that what has worked for him won't work for everyone — Counter says he came to see the horror films he escaped through were also a tool to help him process what he went through.

"In that moment, [horror] was providing an outlet for some of the emotions that I was repressing," he said. "I've really come to understand it as a safe space to explore these terrible emotions that we all have the capacity to feel." 

He also wrote about his PTSD at length and found he could regain some power over it.

"For me to talk about these things and share them, I think that helps me make them real, but for a long time I didn't have the language to do that," he said.

"As I started to get into horror, especially from a critical standpoint, that really gave me the language and the tools to better express myself … and that I think, kind of built horror into a life philosophy."

Not for everybody, says behavioural scientist

Coltan Scrivner, a behavioural scientist at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University in Denmark, said Counter and Mick's experience with horror films isn't uncommon. 

"When you watch a scary movie, it does two things. One: It gives you a source for your anxiety and two, it draws your attention in and kicks you out of a cycle of rumination much better than other genres or other kinds of entertainment," he said.

"And then when the movie ends, your body recognizes the source of anxiety going away … and that helps you physiologically relax."

In 2022, Scrivner was one of the authors of an article published in the Journal of Media Psychology, titled The Psychological Benefits of Scary Play in Three Types of Horror Fans, which found that "the allure of horror may have as much to do with learning and personal growth as it has with high-arousal fun."

Horror isn't a magic bullet, he acknowledges, but the genre offers more than just cheap thrills.

"There's very few treatments for anything that works for everybody," said Scrivner.

"But there do seem to be a large portion of people for whom horror helps them with their anxiety or their PTSD or their depression or other kinds of just difficult, negative feelings that they experience."

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