Desperately seeking scares: How horror movies can help us feel less anxious

Some people just don’t get it. You tell them you love horror movies and their faces contort in confusion – maybe a little disgust. How could anyone enjoy being scared? 

It’s a question that the Recreational Fear Lab, based at the Aarhus University in Denmark, has dedicated itself to exploring, conducting studies to better understand the ways in which recreational fear – think rollercoasters, true crime podcasts and horror movies – can bring us joy, connection and meaning. 

“Even though it’s very common, probably close to universal, to find pleasure in some kind of frightening activity, it’s scientifically under-studied,” Mathias Clasen, co-director of the Recreational Fear Lab, tells Euronews Culture.  

“One interesting finding that’s emerged from many of [our] studies is that it seems to be healthy for people to play with fear,” Clasen says, adding that through exploring the intriguing relationship between anxiety and recreational fear, they’ve found that horror movies could be a “potential medicine”. 

It’s welcome news for those of us that have always sought solace in scary movies, choosing to escape any internal swell of doom through an external vision of terror that’s visceral and sometimes violent, yet controllable – we can switch it off at any point. 

“For some people with anxiety, they sort of walk around and act in a fog of bad feeling that doesn’t have any clear cause, and over which they have no control,” Clasen explains.“But that totally changes if you’re putting on a horror movie. You know you chose it. You know exactly why your heart is pounding or why you have butterflies in your stomach.” 

The return of blood-splattered cinema

‘The Substance’

“There is an interesting empirical fact, which is that the horror genre beat all previous records in terms of box office share during the pandemic,” Clasen says. “So, when the world started getting scary and unpredictable, with a worldwide mysterious disease and war in Europe and, you know, all kinds of bad things happening, at that moment, people turned to scary stories. We used that kind of thing to cope with the horrors of reality.”  

Horror movies have continued to dominate the box office this year, with Damien Leone’s gory clown slasher Terrifier 3 becoming the highest grossing unrated movie of all time, and Parker Finn’s pop-inflected parasitic demon sequel Smile 2 grossing over $84 (€77) million worldwide at the time of writing. 

Then there was the huge success of Coralie Fargeat’s squelchy body horror spectacle

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