I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like Halloween. In contemporary times, the Halloween season is defined by wearing a costume, sharing food, and, of course, watching horror films. At the same time, most would agree that fear is an unpleasant emotion, a sensation that courses through the body in the most visceral of ways: shivers down your spine, goosebumps that traverse your neck all the way down to your wrist, and a turned stomach that twists in anxiety.

Doesn’t sound all that pleasurable. Yet, I’m disappointed that with each passing year, fewer and fewer films can actually elicit this response in me. I want to experience a piece of writing, visual media, or artwork that terrifies me. But why? Why is it that I seek out the most horrifying art? I strive to find something that can render me jumpy for a whole evening, a film or story that has me questioning my own shadow. Even better if it taps into an intangible form of existential terror, something that’s just as frightening in the cold light of day as it is in the depths of night.

However, I’m not unique in this respect—we all enjoy scaring ourselves, albeit to varying extents. Simply put, why is it that we scare ourselves? There are several different ways we can answer that question, ranging from the psychological to the anthropological, from the physiological to the philosophical. Of course, if we are to understand the reasons behind why we scare ourselves around this time of the year, it first necessitates an understanding of the Halloween season.

As Noël Carroll describes in his essay Fear of Fear Itself: The Philosophy of Halloween, the festival originated in Ireland as part of a series of pagan rituals. On Samhain, which was celebrated on 31 October and 1 November, the boundary between this world and the next was weakened. Spirits could cross the threshold, passing from the Otherworld into the human realm. As the dead traversed the boundary, with a common belief being they’d return to their home looking for hospitality, the living would appease the lost souls with food and drink. Not only would they dress in elaborate costumes to disguise themselves from the spirits, but also as a playful means of imitating their incorporeal relatives.

Unsurprisingly, Halloween has always been a festival that’s preoccupied with the dead. The holiday’s roots reveal our morbid sense of humour and our innate curiosity regarding our mortality, our bodies, and our place in the world. However, while the tradition may have originated as a ritualistic pagan custom, it’s undeniable that the allure of frightening each other—and being frightened yourself—provides a large part of the festival’s appeal today.

halloween (1978)
Halloween (1978)

In fact, the desire to be frightened has become synonymous with Halloween. This is partly due to one of the horror genre’s most successful franchises being titled after the season, with John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) forever connecting the pastime of trick-or-treat with a deranged killer in a hockey mask. However, there’s more to this desire than the spooky season. I’ve noticed that even those of us with a lower tolerance for horror are perversely drawn into these dark tales of evil and depravity.

Part of the reason why is that we’re storytelling creatures. In his brilliant 2019 book The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr describes how our brains are moulded around narratives. Professor Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist and author who’s written extensively on how human minds are wired, has argued that our brains aren’t logic machines, but story processors. In other words, we both learn and comprehend things through stories.

Horror, then, is edifying. This is something that can be seen across both history and culture. Before terror became synonymous with slasher flicks and body horror films, there were a plethora of storytelling traditions that revelled in these unnerving musings on the unearthly and the uncanny. One only has to think of the creepy tales told at campfires, and the unsettling urban legends repeated at sleepovers. More often than not, these stories contain a moral: don’t go upstairs, don’t wander off on your own, and don’t engage in frivolous sex.

Hereditary (2018)

These examples demonstrate that our desire to be frightened, to be captivated by the perverse and the horrifying, finds itself embedded into our very DNA. We scare ourselves to increase our likelihood of survival in the real world. Fear essentially becomes didactic. In processing a scary story, we learn something about human behaviour, usually feeling more knowledgeable for it. This has been given as an explanation behind why women serve as the main audience of true crime documentaries: through the unfortunate stories of others, we can learn to spot the signs of evil.

However, there are other reasons why we frighten ourselves. In addition to explicating survival methods, horror stories codify fears and emotions we don’t quite understand into a more tangible, comprehensible form. This idea can be seen to mirror Sigmund Freud’s theories on dreams achieving wish-fulfilment, as well as the symbols and archetypes that dominate Carl Jung’s collective unconscious.

Think of Jack Torrance wielding an axe in The Shining (1980), trying to butcher his son as he runs away in a labyrinth. The reason this scene continues to disturb—perhaps more so than any slasher film—is because it goes against the traditional depiction of the father as a protector. Similarly, the maternal figures in The Brood (1979), The Babadook (2014), and Hereditary (2018) typify the monstrous feminine. They terrify because they are everything a mother should not be: violent, vengeful, and desperate to harm their children.

The Shining (1980)

Universal archetypes and primal fears, those that we innately feel even if we can’t articulate them explicitly, are given corporeal form in these stories. In doing that, we can comprehend them, confront them, and understand ourselves better. In scaring ourselves and by overloading our story processors with cortisol, we learn about ourselves as a species: why should this frighten me? Why is this inherently wrong?

With this in mind, it’s worth pointing out the social function that horror stories—and especially horror movies—have in our culture: we scare ourselves as a rite of passage. Like killing your first deer, watching your first slasher film in the company of friends is a bonding experience. Particularly for teenagers, this also serves as a safe space for someone to test their fortitude, to face fear and return emboldened.

Simply put, we use horror films to gauge how well we confront overpowering emotions. This becomes particularly stressful when in the company of others; when you’re a teenager, you certainly don’t want to be identified as a chicken. In his aforementioned essay, Noël Carroll also describes the meta-fear of fear that adolescents experience in this formative stage of their life: it can be very frightening thinking about how frightened you might become when presented with a scary story. Horror movies thus serve as an opportunity to learn more about ourselves as individuals: how do I confront fear differently to other people?

The Brood (1979)

However, it’s worth highlighting one important aspect of this fear: it’s all contained. A safe distance exists between you and the cinema screen, no matter how much the soundscape or 3D glasses attempt to convince you otherwise. This is David Hume’s sublime: we derive pleasure from being in the presence of overwhelmingly powerful forces, so long as they are experienced at a safe distance. Much like on a safari, I find great pleasure (in addition to the disgust, fascination, and horror) in watching the Xenomorph commit grisly murder in Alien (1979), but I wouldn’t enjoy being locked in a room with one.

I can always leave the cinema. While the choice remains open to me, it’s something that I’ve never done, because I genuinely appreciate the feeling of discomfort a great horror film can engender in me. It seems quite an irrational thing to do to one’s brain: flood it with stress hormones completely voluntarily and unnecessarily. However, as previously mentioned, these works of art partly serve as a training ground: jump scares pull on that sharp, precise trigger that accesses our fight-flight response, all with the understanding that we are actually safe from any real harm or genuine threat.

alien
Alien (1979)

After all, pulling that trigger forms a large part of the pleasurable-horror viewing experience. We don’t just scare ourselves due to custom. It also isn’t a mere social function, nor simply a means to better understand ourselves and our species. First and foremost, we scare ourselves because it feels good. Much like how people watch a chick-flick when they want a good cry (another sensation we seek out despite it being deemed an unpleasant emotion), we watch horror movies when we want to have the utter bejesus frightened out of us.

As much as horror films can appeal to the intellect, they predominantly serve as physiological tools. Watching a great horror film is almost like taking a drug: releasing adrenaline, sending synapses firing at accelerated rates to imagined stimuli, and pumping sweat as you’re overcome with anxiety. Every culture in human history has strived to find ways of altering our state of consciousness; horror movies are just one of the most recent methods we’ve finely attuned to overload our primitive brains.

And much like the subsequent addiction to powerful drugs, we’ll come back again and again to find that feeling, to recapture that sensation of near-death you felt in your own living room. That’s because catharsis is a giant component of the viewing experience, one that can take many forms. In watching a horror film, we feel catharsis at its most visceral: terror and relief, over and over again, hopefully until the credits close.

Ringu (1998)

I think a perfect example of all of this can be found in the opening of seminal Japanese horror film Ringu (1998): two friends take turns scaring each other, each telling a variation of an urban legend where delinquent teenagers experience grisly deaths. Everything that defines the horror experience can be found here. Stress and relief, fear being used as a social tool to forge strong bonds, all while learning from the mistakes of others. And unsurprisingly, a large dose of humour. Because when you realise there never was anything to be so scared of, being afraid all seems quite funny.

So then, why is it that we scare ourselves? It’s a method of triggering a potent evolutionary response, a primitive means of experiencing something beyond our everyday consciousness. It’s also a social practice which we use to strengthen unity and form strong connections with those around us. We use horror stories as a means of learning through mimesis to ensure survival in a dangerous world that’s ultimately unknowable. I would argue that a good horror film does all of these things. But most importantly, and very simply, we scare ourselves because it’s fun, and we all need a good laugh now and then.