Genre: Horror. Why do people enjoy it?

One of the most popular genres of films is horror, which intends to scare its audience. Different people have different reasons for watching horror films, while some people find them disturbing and gross, others see them as a sort of thrill seeking, like riding a rollercoaster or extreme sports such as Bungee jumping, giving the participants a massive adrenaline rush.

Sigmund Freud spoke of how as humans, we have various aspects to our mental states; our survival instincts, commonly referred to as fight or flight, our pleasure principal, in which we seek to make our lives as pleasurable and comfortable as possible and lastly, an instinct that exists in all organic matter to revert back to an inanimate state, which for us can only be achieved by dying. It could be said that horror films allow us to achieve a sense of moving towards returning to an inanimate state safely, without having to literally risk their life. Maybe it could be said that by watching horror films, we can get as close as possible to experiencing death without actually having to physically experience it.

Some people just enjoy seeing people die, which is a regular occurrence in the genre, and films like the ‘Saw’ series play on this, with the films containing gruesome and painful deaths though not all horror films are like this and not all horror fans enjoy this. Jeffrey Goldstein, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands says "People go to horror films because they want to be frightened or they wouldn't do it twice," and he further went on to say "You choose your entertainment because you want it to affect you. That's certainly true of people who go to entertainment products like horror films that have big effects. They want those effects," He and other social scientists claim we watch horror films for other reasons too, such as enjoying the adrenaline and excitement, to be distracted from a mundane lifestyle, vicariously thumbing our noses at social norms, or enjoying a voyeuristic glimpse of the horrific from a safe distance.


As a group we plan to use the reasons why people enjoy horror films to create a professional and successful film concept