Every creeping October, the streets are lined with burlap and orange tool, children are adorned with fist-fulls of candy, and the cinemas are restocked with new thrillers and remakes for the spooky season. These unsettling movies are welcomed with open, severed, arms—and even encouraged, an infatuation brought to light through dead leaves. Yet a looming question is raised (much like the undead) that why is it that modern society is so obsessed with the concept of fear and gore, how did society evolve from shunning women’s ankles to showing a child limbless on the big screen?
Psychologically speaking, there’s no apparent reason as to why an individual would yearn to see torture of their fellow man… or is there? From a 1994 psychological study INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN SENSITIVITY TO DISGUST: A SCALE SAMPLING SEVEN DOMAINS OF DISGUST ELICITORS (by Jonathan Haidt, Clark McCauley, and Paul Rozin) on college students exposed to non-fictional gore, McCauley presents his findings on the matter. Within the study, the students are asked to watch three separate videos, one depicting the slaughtering method of cows, a monkey having his skull bashed in with a hammer, and a child’s facial skin being pulled back for surgery. Obviously, most people couldn’t finish the videos, and those who did still were thoroughly uncomfortable still.
McCauley’s take on this experiment basically boils down to control. Within this study he explains, “Similarly, death and contact with corpses are powerful disgust elicitors because a human corpse is the clearest evidence of human mortality.” The psychology behind thrillers and gore is that people want control over their feelings and emotions. The disgust produced in the observation is all reliant on the fact that none of the individuals had control over the reality within the videos. Fictional pieces of media are easy to consume because the audience can realize that it’s staged events, that they can see these unsettling images and choose how they let themselves feel about it.

Humans are a breed who craves domination—impeding on omnipotence—and they seek this in every corner they can colonize with this notion.

What’s your favorite horror film?