Why Some People Like Being Scared

Some people like being scared when they chose the threat and the fear stays mixed with enjoyment, which a haunted-house field study tied to arousal that is strong enough to matter and still feels manageable. Film-specific accounts of that appetite, including excitation transfer and sensation seeking, are covered in HighFear’s article on horror films.

A haunted-house field study found that chosen fear can be enjoyable when the arousal is strong enough to matter and still feels manageable. The film research sits in a separate HighFear article.

Some people like being scared when they chose the threat and the fear stays mixed with enjoyment, which a haunted-house field study tied to arousal that is strong enough to matter and still feels manageable. Film-specific accounts of that appetite, including excitation transfer and sensation seeking, are covered in HighFear’s article on horror films.

Wanting a scare is easy to misread as a missing alarm. The field research is more specific. It asks what happens when people pay to be frightened, and it separates a fear that stays optional from a fear that runs the day.

A threat you lined up for

Andersen, Schjoedt, Price, Rosas, Scrivner, and Clasen studied what they call recreational fear: frightening experiences people seek because they want to enjoy them. At Dystopia Haunted House, a Danish attraction of 42 connected rooms, 110 visitors aged 12 to 57 wore heart-rate monitors, were filmed at three jump scares, and rated fear and enjoyment. Sixty-two were women. The mean age was 30.45. They went through in groups, the way ordinary visitors do (Andersen et al., 2020).

Enjoyment had an inverted-U relationship with self-reported fear across repeated ratings. Too little fear was flat. Very high fear was less fun. The middle was better. Self-reported fear rose in a straight line with large heart-rate fluctuations. Enjoyment had an inverted-U relationship with smaller fluctuations. The authors describe that pattern as arousal that is “just right.” Fear and enjoyment were present together. The visitors had chosen a house built to frighten them.

The paper is frank about what it is not. It was one evening at one attraction. The sample was whoever agreed to take part. It does not show that a love of scares treats an anxiety disorder, and it does not claim every frightening setting works this way. A threat that is not optional — a trauma reminder, a phobia trigger, a place you cannot leave — falls outside the frame they studied.

What the same paper treats as speculation

Andersen and colleagues list older guesses about why anyone would want this feeling. Among them is benign masochism, the idea that people can enjoy safe negative sensations, which they attribute to Rozin, Guillot, Fincher, Rozin, and Tsukayama (2013). They also mention sensation seeking and lab studies of horror films. Those are hypotheses and neighboring literatures in their introduction, not results from the heart-rate data. The result they report is the shape of the fear-enjoyment curve inside that haunted house.

Horror films have their own evidence, including excitation transfer and sensation seeking. That account is in Why We Love Being Scared: The Psychology of Horror Films. This page stays with the chosen, in-person scare.

When the scare stops being a pastime

A middle dose of fear can be play if you can step out. It is a different problem when the alarm fires at costumes, darkness, or ordinary rooms and then shrinks the week. That distinction — a fear versus a phobia — is spelled out in Is it a fear or a phobia?. Masks, haunted houses, and clowns are in a separate note on those triggers. Exposure therapy is the structured clinical version of staying with a feared situation, not a louder haunted house.

If fear is affecting daily life, talk with a licensed mental health professional. HighFear is educational and does not diagnose, treat, or provide crisis care. In the United States, call or text 988, or text HOME to 741741. More information is at 988lifeline.org.

Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do some people like being scared?

Some people like being scared when they chose the threat and the fear stays mixed with enjoyment, which a haunted-house field study tied to arousal that is strong enough to matter and still feels manageable. Film-specific accounts of that appetite, including excitation transfer and sensation seeking, are covered in HighFear’s article on horror films.

What is recreational fear?

Andersen, Schjoedt, Price, Rosas, Scrivner, and Clasen define recreational fear as a mixed experience of fear and enjoyment. In their 2020 field study, 110 visitors aged 12 to 57 wore heart-rate monitors in a haunted attraction. Enjoyment had an inverted-U relationship with self-reported fear: very low and very high fear were less enjoyable than a middle level.

Is liking horror the same as having no fear?

No. In the haunted-house study, feeling frightened rose in a straight line with large heart-rate fluctuations. Enjoyment was tied to smaller fluctuations in an inverted-U pattern. The scare was a real feeling inside a threat the visitors had opted into.