From NewScientist (11 July 2020):
Everyone is entitled to one good scare – and it may be good for us. People who watch a lot of horror films and those who are morbidly curious about unpleasant subjects seem to be more psychologically resilient to the covid-19 pandemic, a study reveals.
“Horror users tended to have less psychological distress,” says Coltan Scrivner at the University of Chicago. …
Fans of horror movies were less prone to negative mental states. “Which suggested to us, maybe with horror it’s about emotion regulation,” says Scrivner. Watching scary movies “allows me to give myself the experience of being afraid and then conquering that fear”. This may be one of the underlying reasons for people’s fascination with scary stories.
The prepper genres, which all feature society’s institutions collapsing, had an additional benefit. “We find that same decrease in psychological distress, but you also find an increase in preparedness,” says Scrivner. The team found a similar pattern for pandemic-themed movies. “People who’ve seen none at all were much less prepared than people who said they’d seen many.”
Some of it will be in the promptings of considering how things can go wrong, rather than how they can go right. Consider a fan of romantic comedies, searching for the right person to date, the anticipation of the pleasures and ecstasies, all that sort of thing.
Meanwhile, the horror fan is screaming “Don’t open that door where the fumes are coming,” because they’ve learned to think ahead on a more realistic level. The researchers note that just watching horror movies isn’t enough, as if seeing The Omen would be helpful in preventing social anxiety. No, it takes an active interest, in my opinion, the inquisitive mind that looks at how things may go wrong.
And figure out how bad it can get.
It’s the unknown that causes anxiety; the horror fan who thinks they have the worst figured out, right or wrong, can now take actions to mitigate the worst. And that leads to less anxiety.
I am not a horror fan, although I must say I enjoyed Alien and Aliens.
