Here’s why you love watching horror movies

“The most powerful human emotion is fear. The essence of any good thriller is to be able to make you believe in the Big Bad Wolf for a moment,” confides director John Carpenter. The time on November 16, 1987. A few days before Halloween, how can you explain the taste of excitement on the big and small screens?

Pleasure hormones and satisfaction

Fear is a natural emotion. Every day in times of danger our survival instincts are triggered to put us on alert. “It allows us to check that our alarm system is working,” explains psychoanalyst Laura Gelin. When we feel this emotion, “hormones like endorphins and adrenaline are released,” the expert reveals, and help overcome fear. Once the emotion has passed, “dopamine, the highly addictive satisfaction hormone, is a real reward,” the psychoanalyst continues. Satisfied with overcoming fear, we experience pleasure. However, we are not all equal in the face of horror. “Some people are so easily scared that they don’t choose to watch these movies, while others can become addicted to them because of the strong satisfaction benefit of overcoming fear,” explains Laura Gelin.

Watching images of death sitting on a movie bench or couch also allows you to “tame it and conquer it. Repetition of death kills death,” comments Hollywood classic film expert and professor emeritus Dominique Sipierre (1). University of Paris-Oest-Nanter.

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Feel alive

What scares us the most is what we imagine

Laura Gelin, psychoanalyst

We are talking here about so-called “voluntary” and not “real” fears, “no one wants to face them when we live in an atmosphere of war or attacks every day,” Laura Gelin corrects. Experiencing fears that you know are unreal is also a good way to forget your real worries. For an hour and a half, it attracts attention and cuts us off from reality and the problems we may have in real life. Not forgetting that by not taking risks, we expose ourselves to a dangerous situation. “At the end of the film, we know that the terrible monsters will be punished,” comments Dominique Sipierre.

“Watching a horror movie is a way to feel alive. It gives you strong sensations that allow you to have self-confidence,” the professional begins. A phenomenon especially attractive to teenagers who watch horror movies in pairs or groups. “Confronting fear in a group allows for increased excitement and sharing of strong emotions. Living the same experience is a means of social cohesion,” explains Laura Gelin.

Fascinated by cinematic processes

Great directors manage to play with emotions. They master surprise and despair, both ways of inducing fear. With the former, “we find ourselves face to face with a monster when we see it,” notes Dominique Sipierre. With the second, we know there is something monstrous somewhere, but we don’t see it. We invent and construct our own fear.” And here, perhaps, is the most terrible version. “The most fearful thing is what we imagine,” explains psychoanalyst Laura Gelin.

The effect of contrast sonically, in the importance of music and silence, but also in the embodiment of evil, contributes to this felt fear. In many movies, the scary object is a music box or small object. “Give the example of a film adaptation of a novel That by Stephen King. The clown, the world’s most reassuring object for children, represents absolute terror,” reveals Dominique Sipier. A horror that has lured many audiences. Released in France in 2017, the film garnered more than 2 million viewers. entries (2,223,006), according to CBO Box Office.

(1) Dominique Sipierre is also the author of the book The story in the detective series, Ed. Armand Colin, 240 pages, 22 euros.