OddballGreg - Why Do We Like Scary Things?

Ah, what a beautiful... thing... Just in case you weren't having enough nightmares lately.

In continuation of the Halloween special and it's appropriately themed topics, I thought it might be interesting to discuss a more thoughtful and perhaps philosophical topic relevant to Halloween. Which is to say, why is it that humans like scary things?

We've all seen it, or heard of it, or experienced it. Horror. We watch movies filled with gory death and frightening supernatural beings; we play games that subject us to terrifying experiences in the name of fun and we read and listen to terrifying stories of ghosts and demons because that's fun too. Anyone else wonder why on earth that would be fun? In a world so full of traumatic occurrences and horrific accidents... and not so accidents, why are people so happy to subject themselves to these fearful experiences?

In Michael Stevens' video which discusses relatively the same subject as this topic: "Why are we morbidly curious?", he points out many interesting points about human psychology which can be attributed to as the cause for our morbid curiosity and, moreover, why it is that we like scary things.

Perhaps most notably, (in my opinion at least), he points out that humans seek out these frightening and occasionally harrowing experiences because there is comfort in knowing. A very common historical trope in human history is the fear of the unknown, with supposed witches and inexplicable natural phenomena being feared simply because the general human populace didn't understand them or what they may or may not be doing. Consider a baby born with a tail for example. While this is a now documented medical phenomenon, people of the past had no idea of genetics or mutations, and could only chalk such an incident up to magic and the supernatural.

Of course, assumptions like that tend to lead to more questions.
"It's supernatural? What caused it? A demon. Satan himself? Will my children also be born with tails if they stay near. Will this child try to kill us as soon as it's old enough to try?"
Brutal and disgusting as such a thought process sounds, the human mind takes comfort in patterns. Anything that doesn't fall into the pattern of friend or foe, is typically frightening because you don't know if it's going to shake you hand, or eat your face. So naturally, the next step was:
"It's too risky... Kill it."

So what does this have to do with liking scary things? Simply, by exposing ourselves to these harrowing stories and nightmare inducing movies and games, we bring some comfort to ourselves by feeling that we know just a little more about what's out there. That if we had to see Slenderman outside our window, or a red skinned and horned creature in our living room, we would better know how to deal with such an occurrence.

However, in perhaps a more interesting take on the idea as pointed out again by Michael Stevens in his video, is the idea that by subjecting ourselves to these horrors and becoming familiar with the darker aspects of life and death, we come to better accept the terms upon which we are born. Essentially, this is an expansion of the idea in his video from Caitlin Doughty's book "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, and other lessons from the crematory." in which she says: "Accepting death does not mean you will be any less devastated when someone dies. It means that you will be able to focus on your grief, unburdened by larger existential questions like 'Why do people die?' and 'Why is this happening to me?'. Death isn't happening to you. Death is happening to us all."

By playing these horror game, and listening to these ghost stories, watching these movies and in general just subjecting ourselves to these horrors, we come to better terms with the fragility of life, ours included, and are able to change how we live our lives, according to what we believe the lesson behind such fragility may be. For some, it is a motivator to experience all that life has to offer, given how very finite said life is, and how easily stolen it can be. Our enjoyment of horrors and by extension of his relevance to the topic, our curiosity for the morbid, essentially boils down to every humans' quest for knowledge, survival and meaning, as we hope that these experiences will help us better know about the world we live in, better survive it, and perhaps most importantly, understand why we're bothering in the first place.

In my article about The Challenges That Define Us, I pointed out that what people do, and who they are, is determined by what they experience, and how they succeed or fail to do within those experiences. It could be conjectured that our search for meaning in the horror and terror does more than simply comfort us and expose us to the world, but helps us to find ourselves and decide who we are. A punching bag against which we learn whether we prefer swift jabs or powerful swings, or a textbook that we can peruse or ignore as we will, in the search for the information that helps us know what we need or want to know so that we can act accordingly. Horror and scary things are, essentially, a learning experience.

And with that, I leave you to ponder what next you will learn this Halloween. If you have anything you would like to add, or simply liked the article, do please let us here at TCSA know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter. We do so love to hear from you. If you have any friends who enjoy horror or perhaps like to contemplate the reasons behind people's actions, consider sharing this post with them as I am sure that they will find it interesting. Of course, if you yourself would like to read more interesting articles such as this, consider liking the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or following us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left to get all the latest posts, as they're published. Regardless of what you do, I thank you having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had an absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Happy scares my friends.