Psychology Today
Image Credits: The Swaddle
Love a good horror film or a creepy true crime story? Turns out, your spooky obsession might actually be doing you some good!
Indulge Your Morbid Curiosity
Author: Abigail Fagan
Do you run to a haunted house every Halloween? Do you rubberneck after a grisly car crash? Do you devour grotesque true crime documentaries? If so, that’s natural—and it may even be good for you, according to Coltan Scrivner, a researcher of all things macabre and a fan as well—he recently founded a horror film festival in the Ozarks where he lives. In his new book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away, Scrivner extols the virtues of entertaining our darker interests.
— Abigail Fagan
Q
: What are the benefits of morbid curiosity? Morbid curiosity challenges you to feel afraid or anxious, but then overcome those feelings in a safe setting. You’re not actually in danger. You can pause and practice down-regulating your emotions, skills that are also taught in cognitive behavioral therapy and exposure therapy. Over time, if you practice that in a playful setting, you’re going to get better at it and better at doing it unconsciously. That can transfer to real-world scenarios.
You can do that by exploring haunted houses. True crime. Horror movies or scary books. You could also just go somewhere you’ve never been before by yourself. Or somewhere you don’t speak the language. Anything that makes you feel afraid or anxious and, more importantly, gives you the opportunity to pause, reflect, and get over your fear.
We did a study in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic peak, and asked what movies people were fans of—horror, romance, action, comedy, pandemic, apocalyptic, prepper, etc. Even when we controlled for personality, age, gender, and income, people who were high in morbid curiosity were more resilient in those early months. They felt better about the situation, and they weren’t as distraught. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t difficult or they weren’t scared; they just had a little more confidence in themselves and society that they would get through. They had more positive resilience. We also found that people who watched even one prepper movie felt more prepared. And people who were horror fans were more resilient to the negative effects of stress.
Credits: TCA, LLC.