The Science Of Scary: 10 Reasons Why You Love Being Scared
6. Youre Not As Scared As You Should Be
One of the most surprising things about horror movies is actually how little they scare us.
By all rights, most horror movies should have us expelling things from both ends of our bodies and crying for our mothers, but actually we just calmly sit and eat popcorn whilst a series of unfortunates are eviscerated before our eyes.
If, in real life, you came across the disemboweled corpse of a friend of yours, you would probably collapse, scream, cry and vomit all at the same time. If you were being pursued by a murderer with a chainsaw, you probably wouldn't have the presence of mind to fashion a DIY flamethrower to fight your way out - you'd be more likely to just fall over a lot and end up playing dead.
We're not frightened nearly as much by movies showing us this level of terror and worse, due to the certain level of unrealism in them. In 1994, psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin showed three gruesome documentaries to a group of students, one showing a slaughterhouse, one showing a monkey being killed and eaten and one showing surgery on a human child. The students couldn't get more that halfway through these disturbing videos, and yet would probably watch something much more gruesome if they knew at the back of their minds that it wasn't real.
This also explains why we're much more able to watch scary movies as adults, as children have more difficulty separating fiction from reality.