A big question that will help me in my research is, Why do we watch horror's?
Glenn Spark studied for many years the “appeal of media violence.”
Sparks, a professor of communication at Purdue University, studies the effects of horror films on viewers' physiology. When people watch horrific images, their heartbeat increases as much as 15 beats per minute, Sparks tells WebMD. Their palms sweat, their Skin temperature drops several degrees, their muscles tense, and their blood pressure spikes.
One of the questions he studied was,
'Why do people enjoy watching violence?
Well, one of the reasons why violence is enjoyed has to do with a very powerful psychological principle that we bring to our entertainment experience—and that has to do with forming alignments with characters. We naturally tend, when we go to the entertainment experience, to identify characters that we either like or we don’t like. And once those alignments are in place, we want to stay around to see what happens to the characters that we’ve formed these alignments with. It turns out that if you have an alignment with a character that’s negative, if you’ve formed a dislike—and of course, Hollywood deliberately manufactures these kinds of situations where they encourage us to enter into the situation and form these alignments—people who don’t like violence, who would never use violence in their own lives, if they have a powerful negative alignment with a fictitious character in a film, they will tolerate and even enjoy a considerable amount of violence, if the violence is directed against the person they don’t like.'
Something I found out about a film trailer that i studied is,'Annabelle, the spinoff from last year’s The Conjuring. Critics thought it might break 2014’s horror slump, but the film far exceeded those expectations: It earned $37 million on opening weekend, a higher draw than any horror movie in years, and one of the largest openings for a horror movie ever'.
So why did so many people pay to go see it?
It had a strong social media presence, for one thing, and for another, people love a freaky doll. But there’s a deeper motive that likely propelled Annabelle beyond its merits: People who wanted to be terrified at some point this year just got tired of waiting. As movie analyst Phil Contrino told the Washington Post, “As a genre, it’s never completely dead, because people always want to be scared.
http://www.psmag.com/books-and-culture/psychology-horror-movie-fan-halloween-scary-cinema-93375
Another Theorist about the phycology of horror is Before we try to explain the psychological attraction to horror lets try to establish what the allure of horror is. Psychologist Dr. Glenn D.Walters identifies three primary factors of the horror film allure.
The first is tension – created through mystery, suspense, gore, terror, or shock. This is pretty straight forward elements of horror, the craft and technique of filmmaking.
The second factor is relevance. In order for a horror film to be seen, it has to be relevant to potential viewers. This relevance can take the form of universal relevance – capturing the universal fear of things like death and the unknown, it can take on cultural relevance dealing with societal issues. Audiences can find subgroup relevance – groups like teenagers which many horror films are about. Lastly, there’s personal relevance – either in a way that identifies with the protagonist or in a way that condemns the antagonists or victims to their ultimate fate.
The last factor, which may be the most counter intuitive is unrealism. Despite the graphic nature of recent horror films, we all know at some level that what we are watching is not real. Haidt, McCauley and Rozin conducted research on disgust, showing students in 1994 a series of gruesome documentary videos… few could make it to the end – and yet these same students would pay to see even worse acts conducted on a movie screen. Why? Perhaps its because when we walk into a theater we know what we’re seeing on screen is fabricated reality. Movies are edited from multiple camera angles with soundtracks and sometimes horror is tempered and made palatable with black humor – a sly wink that what you’re seeing on screen isn’t real. This also explains why we all remember that scary movie we saw when we were way too young but looks hokey now. Children have a harder time separating reality and fiction especially when its on a movie screen
http://filmmakeriq.com/lessons/the-psychology-of-scary-movies/
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