Why Do We Love Horror Movies?

Movies are one of the greatest forms of entertainment. You can get an interesting story in a couple hours, and now-a-days, some pretty great visuals. So why do people enjoy horror movies? Is it the feeling of suspense, the buildup to the inevitable scare? Is it the visceral murdering of people, like watching a car accident, where you just can't look away? Or is it something else entirely? Maybe a story that teaches us a lesson in an intense and sometimes gory way?

For me, it's a lot of those things. Horror movies do several things really well: mood music (tense, typically), carefully placed visuals and camera angles, and crafting an interesting story that doesn't typically feel bogged down by itself. The music in a horror movie is one of the most important aspects of the feeling of suspense. Go watch a horror movie on mute: you will still get hit by some of the jump scares but, for the most part, it's actually pretty boring. The music basically tells you when to be afraid. If they're building up to a jump scare, the music will slowly pick up until the jump. Simple, but an incredibly effective way to make the scare work. The lack of music can also be pretty interesting. If there is no music, that also helps build up to the scare. If there is a sudden drop or silence, you know something is coming.

Horror movies are also extremely efficient at the use of camera angles and lighting. More often than not, withholding something is the most effective form of visuals. Look at Insidious for example: the first 2/3rds of the movie are incredibly intense, in great part because you don't ever get a good look at the monster in the movie. I'm a HUGE fan of this method. There are countless movies where this works, and recently this method has found a new home in the style of found footage horror. With such a narrow view of events, it's easy to limit the visuals. Ghost movies are great for this — shadows in a hallway, a scratch on the floor, subtle queues that your monster is there, but not clearly visible.
 
Story in horror films is typically a simple affair. Person/people enter a situation, shit gets crazy, they do stupid things, shit gets even MORE crazy, people die, escape attempts, etc. There are of course variations, but horror film storylines are often pretty predictable. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That predictability brings familiarity, which makes it comfortable to watch, as strange as that sounds. But the real charge comes when you have a deviation from the familiar. When someone you don't expect dies, or is the killer, or when a third party intervenes — the twist is what makes a horror movie great. Cabin in the Woods, Signs, Saw, The Sixth Sense, The Mist...there are countless horror movies with great twist endings. Because while the familiar will keep drawing us in, we stay for the twist.

But there is also a scientific explanation for why we love horror movies. The fight or flight response is an age old one, and can save your life in the right situations, but it causes the brain to produce glutamate which triggers this response. For some people the beginning of their fight or flight response creates both adrenaline and dopamine, which can make you feel pretty damn good. Not everyone reacts this way (which is why your friend Steve legitimately doesn't like haunted houses), but for the people who have this reaction, it can be a powerful reward to the feeling of fear. Weird, right? Some people actually enjoy being afraid. But some behaviorists think that this may actually desensitize our fight or flight response, slowing our reactions in real-life threatening situations. So horror movies may actually be hurting us in the long run.

But then again, maybe they're just good old fashioned fun.