Research reveals the motivation behind our love of horror

IT'S terrifying. It's horrible. It's unavoidable. A new study reveals our love of horror is deeply burnt into our DNA.

Terror. Disgust. Fear. It seems odd that we would deliberately place ourselves in a theatre, knowing full well we're about to be shocked to the core.

But a research paper by a PhD student in Denmark shows we may have an ingrained urge to learn how to adapt to stressful situations.

This motivation, buried deep within our survival instincts, emerges in force at the prospect of a new, fearful situation, Mathias Clasen of Aarhus University reports.

Thus the appeal of horror movies, books, comics and theatre - even though we're unlikely to run into a lion or human carcass on the way to the supermarket

"When our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers in the East African savannah, it was important that they were prepared for possible attacks by predators and vermin," Clasen said.

"They had to train their reactions to stressful situations, and the desire to do so became stored in their DNAwhich we still carry today. When we watch a horror movie, we're satisfying that desire. We're training our danger preparedness."


The chestburster scene from 'Alien'. We have an ingrained desire to learn how to adapt to stressful situations, motivating our love of horror in all its forms.

Clasen takes his idea further, examining the specific fascination we have with zombies.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors learnt early on to fear rotting corpses due to their association with disease, he said. Combine this with the basic fear of being eaten, and you have a double-barrelled fear whammy.

"It's actually just like other mammals young, who fight for fun because it makes evolutionary sense later on in life when they will need to fight to the death ... We use fiction as an 'emotional simulator' to broaden our horizons," he said. "Horror fiction exercises our reactions to what's terrible and frightening."

Clasen analysed numerous horror movies and books to extract the
essence of terror common to them all. But, beyond teeth, creepy crawlies and decay, he identified many cultural, temporary fears.

Not everything is based on biological impulses, it would seem.

"Of course there is also a cultural aspect to our understanding of horror. It is, for example, necessary to understand the language in which Dracula is written. And a film like The Exorcist was made at a special time when some specific problems were debated," he says.
"The mother loses grip on her daughter, and thats a parable on other things that occurred in society. In order to understand this, we need to know about Western culture in the 70s'

Now, it is time for Clasen to turn his hypothesis into a full-blown theory.

"I would, for instance, like to see if the brains of people from different cultures react uniformly to the same scene in a horror movie," he said. "If they do, that would support my theory."

He did not specify whether the brains still had to be attached to their parent body...
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