The psychology of horror

Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein, a professor of social and organisational psychology at the University of Utrecht  was quoted as saying:"People go to horror films because they want to be frightened or they wouldn't do it twice. You choose your entertainment because you want it to affect you. That's certainly true of people who go to entertainment products like horror films that have big effects. They want those effects…[Horror films must] provide a just resolution in the end. The bad guy gets it. Even though they choose to watch these things, the images are still disturbing for many people. But people have the ability to pay attention as much or as little as they care to in order to control what effect it has on them, emotionally and otherwise."

More reasons as to why the majority of young people like to watch horror films because although it may be gruesome, its draws the viewers attention to the film. This encourages them to watch more. A New York University neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux has mapped out neuron by neuron how the brain's fear system works. He says the complex human brain with its enormous capacity for thinking, reasoning, and just plain musing, allows us to worry in ways other animals can't. An example of this is fear, which isn't a biological reaction, but is an emotion derived from both deep-seeded evolutionary factors as well as newly learned cautions. Conversations between the brain’s primitive amygdala and the more recently acquired cortex allow humans to interpret an environmental event and respond with an emotion such as fear.

Scary movies can play on this, LeDouz says, "If you have a good imagination, you can connect to your hardwired fears simply by thinking about a scary situation." We can relate this to young people considering as young people grow up their imagination expands and therefore watch the horror film with a bigger and set. Due to this, lots of young people like horror films because they can image what they watched in their brain without feeling a sense of real fear as they are aware it is in their imagination.