The thing about horror is that people who don't watch it think it's simple. A jump scare, a monster, some blood, roll credits. What those people miss is the taxonomy — the enormous variety of experiences that all happen to deal in fear as their primary currency. Haunted houses that build dread through architecture (The Shining, Insidious, The Others). Slow-burn folk horror that makes you feel faintly threatened by daylight (Midsommar, The VVitch). Supernatural films that earn their scares through character (The Conjuring, Sinister). Classic slashers that make no apology for what they are (Halloween, Friday the 13th, every Nightmare on Elm Street in descending order of quality). Creature features, Italian giallo, body horror, psychological thrillers that leave you unsettled for days. Occasionally something genuinely bad that I enjoy anyway, because entertainment, sometimes, is just entertainment and I've made peace with that.
I watch a lot of horror. More than most people would consider sensible. And for years I've fielded the same mild concern from people who watch less of it: isn't that bad for you? The short answer, it turns out, is no. The longer answer is more interesting.
What the Research Actually Says
Dr. Coltan Scrivner is a behavioral scientist at Arizona State University and a research fellow at the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University — which is exactly the kind of institution name that makes you wish academia had better PR. He's spent years studying what he calls morbid curiosity: the interest in information about danger or threats, whether real or fictional. His finding, which surprised people who expected a different result, is that this trait is pretty normally distributed. Most people have a moderate amount of it. Some have more. A few have less. It's not a pathology; it's a feature.
The pandemic, as it turned out, provided an unusually clean natural experiment. Scrivner surveyed US participants during the early months of 2020 and found that horror movie fans were reporting significantly less psychological distress than people who didn't watch the genre. His interpretation was that horror fans had been quietly doing something useful: practicing how to regulate their own fear. The threat was fictional. The emotional response — the racing heart, the spike of anxiety, the need to keep watching anyway — was real. And that practice, repeated across hundreds of films, built a kind of resilience that transferred to real-world uncertainty.
Anxious people might actually get better at handling their own anxiety by watching scary movies — and horror fans experienced fewer symptoms of psychological distress during the pandemic because they had years of practice regulating their own fear.
This connects to what researchers call stress inoculation. When you watch a horror film, your nervous system releases cortisol and adrenaline. Your heart rate climbs. Your breathing changes. Your body does what it does when something is genuinely wrong — except nothing is genuinely wrong, and your brain knows it. The result is something like a workout for your stress response: you activate it, push through it, and come out the other side. Over time, that response becomes more manageable. The fear doesn't disappear, but your ability to sit with it gets stronger.
A separate line of research found that people who watch horror regularly report better emotional regulation overall, and a study from the University of Southern Mississippi found an unexpected bonus: regular viewers of psychological horror specifically showed less stigmatization toward people with mental illness than non-viewers. Horror, particularly psychological horror, has always been interested in the interior — what the mind does under pressure, what fears look like from the inside. It makes sense that spending time in that space might make people more empathetic toward it in reality.
There's one important caveat in all of this: the benefits are contingent on choice. Forcing yourself through a horror film because someone dared you, or sitting through something you actively don't want to watch, produces no benefit. The mechanism only works when you're a willing participant — when the fear is something you're choosing to engage with. Which, if you think about it, is exactly what horror fans have always said. You don't watch it despite being scared. You watch it because you want to be scared, on your own terms, in your own living room, with the option to pause and make tea whenever you like.
Not All Fear Is Equal
None of this is an argument that anything goes. Horror is a broad church and it contains, at the extreme end, things that serve no purpose a reasonable person could defend. The distinction I'd draw isn't about how extreme something is — gore, intensity, and genuine discomfort are part of the territory. Films like the Terrifier series are loud and brutal and entirely unashamed of it, and they're operating within a legitimate tradition of splatter that goes back to Argento and Fulci and beyond. Whether they're your thing or not, they exist within the logic of filmmaking: someone made choices, built atmosphere, worked toward an effect.
What sits outside that, for me, are things like the original Faces of Death films — mondo-style shock compilations from the late seventies and early eighties that presented real and staged footage of death as entertainment, with no artistic intent beyond the provocation itself. No character. No story. No filmmaker's eye. Just the spectacle of harm, offered up like it had been found rather than constructed. That isn't horror. Horror, even at its most extreme, asks you to feel something beyond revulsion. It builds dread, creates identification, earns its impact. Pure shock exploitation that mimics real suffering doesn't ask you to feel anything except uncomfortable for having watched it. That's not a subgenre. It's a different category of thing entirely.
The irony of researching whether horror is bad for you is that it forces you to articulate something that was always intuitive: fear, in the right context, is one of the more efficient emotions available to us. It focuses attention, creates adrenaline, and — when it's over — produces a specific kind of relief that's genuinely pleasurable. Horror films manufacture that loop deliberately and then hand you the controls. You decide what you watch, when you stop, and how far you want to go.
I've watched horror across almost every subgenre going, from slow psychological dread to creature features to slashers that a more discerning person would have switched off after twenty minutes. Some of it has been great. Some of it has been cheerfully terrible. A small amount of it has been both simultaneously. What I can say is that none of it has done me any measurable harm, and some of it — particularly the stuff that stayed with me, that sat in the back of my head for days — has been some of the most affecting cinema I've encountered in any genre.
It's just film. It's just fear. And it turns out your brain is better at handling both than people who don't watch horror tend to assume.