It was a random Tuesday night, and I was winding down, going through my usual bedtime routine, when I got a text from one of my closest friends back home.
She messaged me to say she had finally watched a movie I’d told her about a while ago. I had seen the trailer in theaters, and it left me deeply unsettled. I’m not a fan of horror movies—in fact, I hate them.
She, on the other hand, loves them.
She told me how disturbing the movie was, but also how much she enjoyed it. The film in question? Bring Her Back.
As we chatted, I couldn’t shake the question: Why do some people love horror movies while others absolutely hate them? Is it the adrenaline rush? A way to escape the monotony of everyday life? Or something deeper—something in the way our brains are wired?
I could’ve gone down a rabbit hole of speculation, but I decided to do something better: I found an expert. I spoke with Ajay Satpute, PhD, at Mass General Brigham to understand how our brains process fear, and why horror movies affect us so differently.
Dr. Satpute is an investigator in the department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and director of the Affect and Brain Science Lab at Northeastern University.
He studies how the mind, brain, and behavior are connected, especially in social and emotional contexts. His lab builds computer-based models to understand these relationships.
Satpute and his team combine theories about how the brain constructs experiences and predicts outcomes with advanced tools like machine learning and artificial intelligence.
In their latest study, they used machine learning to analyze brain activity across different fear-inducing situations.
Their findings suggest that there isn’t a single, universal “fear circuit” in the brain. Instead, fear is constructed differently depending on the context in which you are exposed to it.
This means that our experiences, culture and personal history play a major role in how we experience fear.
Q: Why do some people love horror movies, while others can't stand them?
A: People's reactions to emotionally evocative situations, including horror movies, are highly individualized. In general, when it comes to feelings and emotions, variability is the rule, not the exception.
The same event—even in curated horror movies—can produce a wide variety of experiences in people. There are lots of factors that might matter here, but one of them is how people's brains process arousal.
Some people experience a jolt while watching horror movies and find the experience to be thrilling, energizing or even funny.
Ajay Satpute, PhD
Others don't like the bodily feelings that horror movies create and would prefer to avoid them.
Past work—not necessarily in horror movies—has shown that people can learn to think about these bodily feelings differently, which can lead to different emotional reactions.
Another factor that matters is how much the horror movie content reminds someone of their own past experiences, which in some people could link to aversive or even traumatizing memories.
There's also a social aspect: Some people may enjoy the shared experience of watching a horror movie with friends.
It could be that the social bonding that happens when experiencing something intense together—even under fictitious circumstances, or it could be that having friends around reduces the aversive qualities of fright and increases the fun.
What's happening in our brains when we watch horror movies?
Our brains are constantly trying to predict what's going to happen before it happens and then processing what actually happens as deviations (or prediction errors) from those predictions, which in turn are used to make better predictions in the future.
In other words, your past experiences profoundly shape how you experience the world—and so the same horror movie will be interpreted differently depending on what prior experiences you are using to process the movie.
After you've watched a lot of horror movies, you might develop better predictions about what's going to happen in the next movie you watch, which will also shape your emotional reaction to that movie.
For some people, prior experiences (or the lack thereof) may lead to feeling a high level of fear, whereas for others, it might lead to amusement or curiosity as the tropes and beats of horror movies become more familiar to them.
Q: Is fear something that we're born with, or do we learn it?
This is a big debate in psychology.
Some scientists believe fear is innate, while others argue that the emotion of fear itself is learned as we grow and interact with our environment.
My research supports the view that fear is not a single, universal response, but is composed of a collection of experiences that themselves may differ depending on the fear-provoking situation and are shaped by our culture, upbringing and personal history.
For example, looking down from the edge of a cliff or encountering a bear may both evoke fear, but the brain creates that fear using different neural pathways in each situation.
Q: Why do horror movies feel so real, even though we know they're fake?
Our brains are built to seek information and learn from our environment.
Horror movies tap into this by presenting situations that feel threatening or dangerous, prompting us to imagine how we'd respond if we were stuck inside that haunted house or being chased down by a horde of zombies.
Even though we know it's fiction, our body's reactions—such as a racing heart or tense muscles—are real. Our brains are simulating a threat and preparing us to deal with it.
This is part of the brain's predictive processing, which is a key focus of my research.
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