With Halloween just around the corner, this is a timely article from The Daily Beast delving into the question why do some people enjoy watching horror movies:

When Paranormal Activity 3 chalked up record-setting numbers at last weekend’s box office (its $54 million was the most ever for a horror film), Stuart Fischoff wasn’t surprised. “Films like Paranormal Activity 3 have a pre-registered audience just waiting for the latest Hollywood bouquet of blood, sweat, tears, and chills to exquisitely fill our lust for horribly sweet sensations,” says Fischoff, professor emeritus of psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and senior editor of the online Journal of Media Psychology.

More from the article:

The fact that some people like to be scared out of their wits never ceases to baffle those of us who would as soon see Freddy Krueger slash his way through A Nightmare on Elm Street as we would have surgery without anesthesia. But to masters of the genre, as well as to experts in media psychology, it makes perfect sense. In Danse Macabre, Stephen King described “terror as the finest emotion, and so I will try to terrorize the reader.” What makes it so fine? “One of the major reasons we go to scary movies is to be scared,” says Fischoff. But the scare we crave—and this applies to haunted houses and spooky corn mazes no less than to horror movies—is a safe one. “We know that, in an hour or two, we’re going to walk out whole,” says Fischoff. “We’re not going to have any holes in our head, and our hearts will still be in our bodies.”

But those hearts will likely be pounding a bit harder than if you had just seen, say, Dolphin Tale. And that accounts for a lot of the appeal. “If we have a relatively calm, uneventful lifestyle, we seek out something that’s going to be exciting for us, because our nervous system requires periodic revving, just like a good muscular engine,” says Fischoff. A 1995 study found that the higher people score on a scale that measures sensation-seeking, the more they like horror films. “There are people who have a tremendous need for stimulation and excitement,” says Fischoff. “Horror movies are one of the better ways to get really excited.”

That may explain why horror movies are most popular with younger audiences. Teens and twenty-somethings “are more likely to look for intense experiences,” says John Edward Campbell, an expert in media studies at Temple University. That fades with age, especially as people become more sensitive to their own physiology: middle-aged and older adults tend not to seek out experiences that make their hearts race, and feel that real life is scary enough. (Did we mention foreclosure? Unemployment? Divorce?) They don’t need to get their scares from movies. Or as Fischoff puts it, “Older people have stimulation fatigue. Life’s [real] horrors scare them, or they don’t find them entertaining any more—or interesting.”

Stories are safe contexts in which to experience all sorts of heightened emotions. That’s what Roald Dahl discovered with his stories. Attacked at the time by child experts, Dahl’s response was basically this: If a child can’t learn about the scary things in life from a story, where will they?

The bigger point from a screenwriting standpoint is to understand there is always a psychological relationship between the movie viewer (or script reader) and the story. If you understand your genre, if you tuned into the story type, you can craft story elements to arouse emotional responses on the part of the person participating in the story as a viewer or reader.

How about you? Do you like horror movies? If so, why? If not, why not?

For more of the Daily Beast article, go here.