Most people are attracted to things that scare them. Even that unpleasant feeling can become exciting and even cause a need to repeat itself.
And it is that, despite the unpleasant sensations that a horror movie can cause, for example, there is also an emotion, a euphoria that turns fear into something irresistible . Even if we leave the film halfway, the feeling remains residual in us to the point where we try to see the rest of the footage at another time.
Excitation transfer
This process is called arousal transfer . Basically, it consists in that, after receiving intense stimulation (caused by fear and consequent adrenaline), arousal and sensitivity to said stimulation lasts longer than the source of fear itself lasts. That is, other factors that would have been neutral then become more stimulating, more vivid, because the brain continues to be overexcited. The excitement produced by fear, in this way, is transferred to other things that would not normally be scary .
At the same time, fear is also addictive because it is pleasant to stop feeling it, it brings relief and happiness to have managed to survive it. In other words, the brain’s reward circuits are activated when we stop experiencing the feeling of threat, the feeling that something bad could happen. The relief of having survived the bad experience, then, is what feeds back the need to feel fear again , and thus again the relief of not feeling it.
Naturally, for both effects to take place they generally have to occur in a security context , that is, the person has to be aware that the danger, up to a certain level, is not real and that they have a certain degree of control over it. .
In that sense, a movie theater is the ideal place to experience this kind of controlled threat, as Dean Burnett explains in his book The Happy Brain : “Our brain, delighted to be alive, experiences gratifying sensations at that moment. They are heightened by residual arousal. If you ever see someone spellbound and shaky after watching a horror movie in a theater, know that this is probably what’s going on in their head. “
Finally, the gruesome scenes of a horror story attract us because we cannot help thinking about the forbidden, the immoral, what we should not think about. This inclination was perfectly demonstrated in a classic 1987 study carried out at Harvard University, in which the social psychologist Daniel Merton Wegner asked the subjects of an experiment not to think of a white bear , while another group did not. gave him such an instruction.
Finally, the subjects in the first group thought much more about the white bear, precisely because it had been told not to. Wegner’s experiment in suppressing thoughts was based on a well-known anecdote from the writer Leon Tolstoy : “Try to set yourself the task of not thinking about a polar bear and you will see the damned animal every minute.”
