When life/work/family/the state of the world is weighing you down, to what do you turn to help you fight those feelings of anxiety and stress? Music? Yoga? Breathing exercises? There are many things that people do to ease the dread. Me? I turn to horror films.

I love horror films. In fact, it might just be my favourite genre. I watch them quite consistently, with a higher concentration in October, so much so that I ended up creating a section dedicated to shocks and frights on my film website and named it Terror Tapes. I recently realised that I tend to verge towards them more when I’m feeling particularly stressed or anxious, and I was curious to know if there is any kind of psychological correlation. As it turns out, there is.

In a BBC article, Mark Miller, a research fellow at Monash University in Australia and the University of Toronto, says “Horror is an opportunity to play with being scared, play with being disgusted, play with being under duress.” Basically, our brains process the horror we see (or other fictional media) and use it as ‘practice’ in the event we find ourselves in a similar situation. Perhaps not to the degree of coming face to face with a serial killer or, even less likely, a herd of zombies, but in ‘rehearsing’ our reactions to being under pressure we’re training our brains to remain calm and figure out a solution or how to get out of a predicament, akin to the way astronauts are trained in various simulations of trouble before being sent into space, I suppose. Whether we’re running from a rabid dog, dangling over the edge of a cliff or just trying to make that deadline lest we get fired, the ‘fight or flight’ response somehow always remains the same, and how we deal with that comes down to experience, or in this case, fake experience.

One of my absolute favourite horrors is a Spanish film called Rec, as in ‘record’; it is shot in the found footage style and the protagonist continually insists that the cameraman record everything. The reason I enjoy it so much is not necessarily because it’s THE most terrifying, but because it builds up extremely well, has a few twists, crosses horror sub-genres and is unsettlingly immersive. The first time I saw it I was enthralled, and it has become a permanent part of my Halloween movie-viewing. I also like to remember that it’s not me in that situation; I’m safe at home trying not to hide under my blanket. It’s a reminder that things could most certainly be worse, and perhaps my troubles aren’t quite as bad as I thought.

Similarly, Paranormal Activity has always had me in a fear chokehold (just the first one, mind you – none of the sequels compare). The suspense, the lack of sound, the darkness – in my humble opinion, it is the perfect horror film. I cannot sleep after I watch it, that’s how terrified I get. I remember seeing it at the cinema with friends when it first came out, and when we returned home we watched Bruno (that daft Sacha Baron-Cohen film) to take the edge off. It prevents me from sleeping, and yet I watch it again and again and again out of pure enjoyment.

Why the hell do we keep returning to these films if they frighten/stress us so?

There’s an interesting study that the BBC article links to entitled (Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films. I’ve so far only read a small section (warning: it’s loooong), but it’s very interesting and really delves into various aspects of the enjoyment of horror. Ultimately, this was what I was looking for: The vital aspect of the theory [Zillmann’s (1980, 1996) excitation transfer theory] is that enjoyment is derived from the degree of negative affect built up during exposure to the horror film and from the positive affect/reaction that results from the resolution of the threat. We know that one way or another, the threat will be extinguished by the end (90% of the time, anyway). We can suffer through the anxiety of a film because we know our suffering will come to an end. We don’t get that same feeling in reality: we suffer through until the situation is resolved, but how and when it will be resolved is not always clear. It gets a bit more complicated psychologically when we see protagonists and/or ‘good guys’ bite the bullet in these films, but that’s a whole other part of the study.

I have no doubt that I will continue to watch horror films as a source of entertainment, and I’m keen to learn more about why some filmmakers go to literal hell and back to make some extremely disturbing films (looking at you, Srdjan Spasojevic and Ruggero Deodato), but now knowing that there is a psychological reason for the enjoyment, I feel like I can excuse them as medication. They are the chicken soup for my soul, and a reminder that no demon is keen to torture that soul (not to my knowledge, anyway). So maybe if you’re feeling life weighing you down, pick a horror film (let me help you out with that over at Terror Tapes) and let the bad times roll.