ResearchA Halloween question: Why is Fear Fun?
Psychologists have asked this. Stephen King wrote an entire book, "Danse Macabre", to try to explain it. "Danse Macabre" being the most excellent examination of the horror fiction genre ever created, it's worth a flip through. But even at that, Stephen King comes up with some answers which certainly explain why his novels sell so well, but leaves much yet to be explained for all of the ground that it covers. Cultures the world over celebrate holidays devoted to spooks and dead spirits, with nobody explaining much of why we bother. Doesn't it all seem a little... perverse?
The tendency to seek out thrills through scaring ourselves extends far beyond the Halloween visit to a haunted house or the enjoying of a good slasher flick. We ride roller-coasters, tell ghost stories around the campfire, and pursue extreme sports like sky-diving and bungee-jumping. Stage magicians like Penn and Teller weave a streak of malevolence and danger into their stunts. The controversial alternative sex culture of BDSM (sadomasochism as it's also called) explores mixing danger and pain with eroticism. And then there's the Goth culture, the current wave of teens surrounding themselves with an aura of morbidity. This all adds up to a lot of time invested in fiddling with the idea of mortality.
It can be argued that if we were not mortal and destined to eventually die of some cause or another, the fascination with fear wouldn't be so entrenched. It's hard to imagine what human society will be like, should we ever achieve victory over our built-in mortality. Will we still practice religion? Would we concern ourselves so much with an after-life, if we've largely eliminated it? The need to believe in an after-life could be a necessary defense mechanism to cope with the situation of being a sapient being who is capable of such soaring accomplishments, yet is powerless to put off their own demise.
To live with the certainty of death, we must play with it. But we have to make sure it's play. The roller coaster has us in an iron cage of a car secured in with safety harnesses, then drops us twenty stories. The movie must be assured to be fiction, with actors and special effects, but then shocks us with one fearful scenario after another. We see the haunted house built in the mall parking lot and staffed with mechanical scenes and actors in costumes, then pay our money to go through it being scared... or sometimes exaggeratedly pretending to be scared.
In some ways, it's a way to build up our courage. So there are many holidays and rituals in the customs and religions of the world whose focus in on scaring the evil spirits. This is even some of where our own Halloween costumes come from. It is a strange idea that that which we ourselves dread is so powerful that we're afraid of it and yet so cowardly that it can be warded off with an ugly mask. Indeed, aren't we really just becoming the monster to frighten away the monster? So, then, we would be empowering ourselves - taking the place of the feared thing to make ourselves seem worthy of fear.
It might be disappointing to take it all apart this deeply. Is that all it is? How childish of us! But then, compared to Sequoia trees and tortoises, each of which lives for centuries, that's pretty much all we are in the cosmic scheme of things. Children who never quite get to be grown up.