As Halloween creeps around the corner, movie theaters, TV networks and streaming services gear up for a season of spine-chilling films, with a lineup of spooky movies that are sure to haunt viewers long after the credits roll.
But why do people seek out horror movies? It’s possible that there are psychological factors involved or that movies’ influence on popular culture has viewers excited to get scared.
“Certainly part of it’s the season,” English professor Timothy Richardson said in an email. “October means that we’re allowed to watch scary stuff. We’re almost required to.”
When viewers watch something frightening or tense in a safe environment, like in a movie theater or at home, they feel better afterward, he said. This is known as cathartic release, an ancient Greek term translating to “purgation” or “purification.”
“Given how much [Halloween] is commercialized now, it really lets people entertain, I guess you could say, a different persona,” said English doctorate candidate Sean Woodard.
The human desire to experience fear might be connected to an evolutionary past and can still have psychological benefits. Concepts like “morbid curiosity” and “scary play” can help viewers overcome current fears by gaining information to face new challenges and scary experiences, according to Scientific American.
“I don’t like jump scares at all, so I tend to prefer more psychological horror like Hereditary and Midsommar, along with older films like The Wicker Man, Bride of Frankenstein, and the Tom Hanks movie Big,” Richardson said.
Horror movies often work as mirrors for worries, Richardson said, caused by real-world social factors.
“Cold War stories about aliens who look like us, teen stories about the dangers of drugs and sex, any time a monster can stand in for some big and unsolvable cultural anxiety,” Richardson said. “That we often tell the same stories over and over suggests that, over decades, we often worry about the same kinds of things.”
Popular movies during the Halloween season range from horror classics like John Carpenter’s slasher classic Halloween and Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense thriller Psycho to more recent frights like Jordan Peele’s chilling horror Us and Zach Cregger’s psychological horror Barbarian, according to Reader’s Digest.
“There are always new scary movies, of course, but over the years I’ve seen students rediscovering classic franchises like Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream and so on,” Richardson said. “Because these series often span decades, they’re movies that almost every generation has a way into.”
There are some more lighthearted movies that have spooky elements like Kenny Ortega’s dark fantasy Hocus Pocus and Henry Selick’s supernatural stop-motion animation films Coraline and The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Some of Woodard’s favorite Halloween movies are Cat People, Misery and Possession, but he usually uses the holiday to discover horror films he hasn’t seen before. One of his favorite Halloween movies growing up was Halloweentown, he said.
“I think what’s really nice about the month of October, or Halloween in general, for horror films, is that there’s a wide variety of horror for people to choose, based off their own tastes and interests,” Woodard said.
