By Diya Dronavadhyala
With Halloween creeping closer and closer, it feels like everyone’s watching something spooky. From replaying classics like It and The Shining to streaming the latest releases like Wednesday on Netflix, scary season is in full bloom this October. Spines tingling, palms sweaty, we subject ourselves to late nights of caramel popcorn and horror movie marathons. But what intrinsic qualities make us humans so obsessed with being scared? What keeps us coming back to the jump scares and psychological thrills in Halloween media? To answer these questions, we can turn to neuroscience to understand the fundamentals of what makes us scared in the first place.
At an evolutionary level, fear developed as a response mechanism to the stimuli that our brains perceive as threats. Fear as a system is one of the oldest responses in the animal kingdom; it’s conserved across many species, presenting itself in behavioral studies on organisms ranging from fruit flies to humans. A 2022 review by Pribadi and Chalasani found that even invertebrates like Aplysia (a type of sea slug) and fruit flies can learn to associate certain cues with danger; put simply, they get “scared” in a biological sense. Their nervous systems still use chemical messengers like dopamine and serotonin to form fear memories, just like ours. Fear is a defense mechanism so effective that it’s been copied and refined over millions of years, and as such, it’s a popular subject of study for neuroscientists and psychologists. Over time, many theories have been developed to explain how fear works and why we experience it the way we do.
The most recognizable model of fear is related to the concept of classical conditioning hypothesized by Ivan Pavlov, a nineteenth century Russian physiologist. The theory poses that when a neutral stimulus (like a bell) is paired with a stimulus (like food) that evokes an emotional (unconditioned) response in a subject (like a dog drooling over food), over time, the subject will respond with the unconditioned response to the previously neutral stimulus (the dog will drool when it hears the bell). This same framework extends to fear; if a neutral stimulus is associated with an aversive stimulus, eventually, the brain will learn to avoid it. This mechanism is how we sense danger based on learned experiences. You might notice that when you’re watching a horror movie, you start to experience the feelings of fear and anticipation before the climactic scare itself. For example, when we hear a scary soundtrack crescendo in the background of a horror movie, our brains automatically assume a jumpscare is coming. Filmmakers deliberately play with suspense to evoke an emotional response to major events in the movie.
Sometimes, stimuli that would normally go unnoticed are unusually scary when we’re in the middle of a horror film. Imagine your roommate opening a door right after the climactic build-up on-screen. The sensitization model explains how repeated stress or trauma can crank up the brain’s threat sensitivity, making it react faster and harder even to new situations. A study by Nishimura and colleagues in 2022 demonstrated this phenomenon using the “Stress-Enhanced Fear Learning” (SEFL) paradigm in rodents. After experiencing an intense stressor, the animals later froze and panicked in entirely new contexts, even when the threat was weaker or unrelated. This research, originally used to model PTSD patients, translates to the reason why we get jumpy right after we watch scary media. Instead of relying on a direct cue, as modelled by Pavlovian conditioning, this framework describes a more widespread amplification of the experience of negative stimuli.
So what does it mean to really experience fear? Harvard professor Richard Lazarus proposes the cognitive appraisal theory, wherein emotional responses are not inherently triggered by a stimulus, but by the individual’s interpretation (Cambell 2013). By this model, our response to terror-inducing situations depends on how you evaluate a situation and whether you believe you can cope. A recent study attributes fear to two key judgments: first, “Is this threat real and important to me?” and second, “Can I deal with it?” (So 2016). When you enter a haunted house, your brain may first appraise the environment as dangerous, then quickly add, “but I know I’m safe because it’s a fun event.” That second appraisal helps flip fear from panic to excitement, redefining your overall experience. Cognitive appraisal theory helps explain why we keep returning to the horror genre knowing that our brain will experience discomfort in response to scary scenes.
In 2016, a study by Ledoux and Pine proposed that fear should be classified as a two-system response. They suggest a crucial distinction between defensive physiological adjustments like sweating, increased heart rate, and spine tingling, and the conscious feeling of fear. They attribute these two systems to different parts of the brain as well; the amygdala and related subcortical circuits drive the physiological, automatic responses your body launches when it perceives a threat, while regions in the prefrontal cortex and insula are responsible for the conscious awareness and emotional experience of fear. In other words, your amygdala can spark visceral reactions to make your pulse race and pupils dilate before your brain overlays the context to understand exactly why. This two-system framework makes sense when we turn to our experience of horror movies too. Our instinctive physiological reactions can be rewired in the cortex to be interpreted as fun or exciting instead of terrifying or alarming.
A 2024 study on horror film audiences found that people’s enjoyment of scary scenes depended on how they evaluated them. (Kiss et al.) When viewers perceived scenes as intense or realistic, their excitement increased; however, if they found the content disgusting or distressing, enjoyment dropped, even if their physiological arousal remained elevated. In other words, the authors argue that what determines whether fear feels good or bad isn’t just what’s on the screen, or even your physiological response alone, but rather how one understands the content of the film in the broader social and emotional contexts. The separation between automatic and conscious fear is exactly what makes “safe fear” so fun. During a horror movie, the amygdala rapidly signals potential threat, while the prefrontal cortex simultaneously modulates this response, integrating contextual cues that indicate safety.
Fascinatingly, our experience of fear can also lay the groundwork for social connection. Research shows that moderate stressors, when faced in groups or socially connected settings, can actually strengthen social bonds by triggering neurochemical mechanisms like oxytocin release and synchronized physiological responses (Mulej Bratec et al. 2020). That’s why hosting movie marathons with your friends or loved ones is so much more rewarding than experiencing fear on your own. A 2024 study on adolescent rats found that when a peer was present during a fear-inducing situation, the animals’ fear responses were significantly reduced through a process called “social buffering,” and this soothing effect sometimes carried over even after the threat was gone (Wall 2024). Whether it’s a first date or a family tradition, horror movies bring you closer to the people around you.
Fear, originally an evolved threat response and survival mechanism, has adapted into a feeling that we celebrate, especially at this time of year. So why do we like horror movies? Maybe it’s an innate need for thrill and adventure, or maybe a desire for social connection and bonding. Whatever the case, we hope this midterms season, you make the time to grab some popcorn and enjoy your favorite Halloween flick.
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