movies psychology research

101 Psychology Films You Must See

Here’s a list of psychological films that incorporate psychological concepts.

If you’re looking for psychological films on Netflix, click here . 

• A Beautiful Mind (2001) 
• A Clockwork Orange (1971)
• A Monster Calls (2016)  – Film review by Dr Berney Wilkinson and Dr Richard Marshall
• A Serbian Film (2010)
• About Time (2013) – Film review by Isabel William
• Adaptation (2002)
• American Psycho (2000)
• As Good As It Gets (1997)
• Awakenings (1991)
• Berlin Syndrome (2017)
• Black Swan (2011)
• Bridget Jones (2001) – Film review by Isabel William
• Cape Fear (1991)
• Cocoon (1985) – Film review by Jan Cutt
• Colors of Night (1994)
• Crash (2004)
• Dirty Filthy Love (2004) 
• Donnie Darko (2001)
• Dr Strange (2016) – Film review by Adam Knowles
• Duel (1971)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• Experimenter (2015) – Film review by Dr Berney Wilkinson and Dr Richard Marshall 
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2011)
• Faces in the Crowd (2011)
• Fatal Attraction (1987)
• Fight Club (1999)
• First Love (2019)
• Get Out (2017)
• Girl, Interrupted (1999)
• Gone Girl (2014)
• Good Will Hunting (1997)
• Hannibal Rising (2007)
• Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
• Identity (2003) 
• I am Sam (2001) 
• Inception (2010)
• Inside Out (2015) – Film review by Dr Berney Wilkinson and Dr Richard Marshall 
• Jacob’s Ladder (1990)
• Joker (2019)
• Journey’s End (2017) – Film review by Dr Stella Compton-Dickinson 
• Killing Me Softly (2002)
• Limitless (2011)
• Memento (2000)
• Me, Myself & Irene (2000) – Film review by Scott Trettenero
• Missery (1990)
• My Life (1993) 
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) – Film review by Maxwell Guttman
• Paprika (2006)
• Pretty Woman (1990)
• Psychology of Secrets (2013)
• Rain Man (1988)
• Raising Cain (1992)
• Red Dragon (2002)
• Requiem for a Dream (2000)
• Robocop 2 (1990) – Film review by Maxwell Guttman
• Room (2015)
• Sex and the City (2008) – Film review by Isabel William
• Shutter Island (2010)
• Side Effects (2013)
• Spider (2002)
• Split (2016)
• Sybil (1976)
• Taxi Driver (1976)
• The 9th Life of Louis Drax (2016)
• The Aviator (2004)
• The Blind Side (2009)
• The Breakfast Club (1985)
• The Cable Guy (1996)
• The Deer Hunter (1978)
• The Experimenter (2015)
• The Game (1997)
• The Girl on the Train (2016)
• The Jungle Book (2016) – Film review by Jean-Luc Vannier
• The Machinist (2005)
• The Madness of King George (1994) –  Film review by Maxwell Guttman
• The Number 23 (2007)
• The Naked Face (1984)
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower (2012) – Film review by Dr Berney Wilkinson and Dr Richard Marshall
• The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)
• The Shining (1980)
• The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
• The Sixth Sense (1999)
• The Soul Keeper (2002)
• The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015) 
• The Stepfather (2009)
• They (2002)
• Three Faces of Eve (1957) 
• Titanic (1997) – Film review by Dale Burden
• Trading Places (1983) – Film review by Dale Burden
• Vanilla Sky (2001)
• Veronika Decides to Die (2009)
• Vertigo (1958)
• What About Bob (1991)
• What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1994)
• When a Stranger Calls (2006)
• 12 Angry Men (1957)
• 28 Days (2000)

The psychology of film is a subfield of the psychology of art that studies the characteristics of film and its production in relation to perception, cognition, narrative understanding, and emotion .

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• Published: 03 July 2018

A psychology of the film

• Ed S. Tan 1 , 2  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  82 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

The cinema as a cultural institution has been studied by academic researchers in the arts and humanities. At present, cultural media studies are the home to the aesthetics and critical analysis of film, film history and other branches of film scholarship. Probably less known to most is that research psychologists working in social and life science labs have also contributed to the study of the medium. They have examined the particular experience that motion pictures provide to the film audience and the mechanisms that explain the perception and comprehension of film, and how movies move viewers and to what effects. This article reviews achievements in psychological research of the film since its earliest beginnings in the 1910s. A leading issue in the research has been whether understanding films is a bottom-up process, or a top-down one. A bottom-up explanation likens film-viewing to highly automated detection of stimulus features physically given in the supply of images; a top-down one to the construction of scenes from very incomplete information using mental schemata. Early film psychologists tried to pinpoint critical features of simple visual stimuli responsible for the perception of smooth movement. The riddle of apparent motion has not yet been solved up to now. Gestalt psychologists were the first to point at the role of mental structures in seeing smooth movement, using simple visual forms and displays. Bottom-up and top-down approaches to the comprehension of film fought for priority from the 60s onwards and became integrated at the end of the century. Gibson’s concept of direct perception led to the identification of low-level film-stylistic cues that are used in mainstream film production, and support film viewers in highly automated seamless perception of film scenes. Hochberg’s argument for the indispensability of mental schemata, too, accounted for the smooth cognitive construction of portrayed action and scenes. Since the 90s, cognitive analyses of narration in film by film scholars from the humanities have revolutionised accounts of the comprehension of movies. They informed computational content analyses that link low-level film features with meaningful units of film-story-telling. After a century of research, some perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that support our interaction with events in the real world have been uncovered. Today, the film experience at large has reappeared on the agenda. An integration of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms is sought in explaining the remarkable intensity of the film experience. Advances are now being made in grasping what it is like to enjoy movies, by describing the absorbing and moving qualities of the experience. As an example, a current account of film viewers' emotional experience is presented. Further advances in our understanding of the film experience and its underlying mechanisms can be expected if film psychologists team up with cognitive film studies, computer vision and the neurosciences. This collaboration is also expected to allow for research into mainstream and other genres as forms of art.

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An agenda for the psychology of the film.

At the time of the first kinetoscope and cinema exhibitions in 1894–1895, thanks to devices such as the Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope and Praxinoscope, moving images had been popular for decades. Just before that time, academic psychology turned to the identification of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of the mind. Perception psychologists began to study apparent movement of experimental visual stimuli under controlled conditions because they found moving stimuli interesting cases in human perception, or as part of the study of psychological aesthetics founded by Gustav Fechner and Wilhelm Wundt. The publication of The Photoplay: A Psychological Study marked the beginning of the psychology of the film. Hugo Münsterberg was trained by Wundt and recruited by William James to lead the experimental psychology lab at Harvard. Importantly, Münsterberg was also an avid cinemagoer as his analyses of theatrical films of his time may tell, and a professing cinephile at that. Münsterberg set two tasks for the study of the film: one was to describe the functioning of psychological mechanisms in the reception of film; the other to give an account of film as an artistic medium.

Münsterberg shared his contemporaries’ and even today’s spectators’ fascination for the wonder of moving images and their apparent reality. He described the film experience as a 'unique inner experience' that due to the simultaneous character of reality and pictorial representation “brings our mind into a peculiar complex state” (p. 24).

In the first part of The Photoplay , explores how film characteristically addresses the mechanisms of the basic psychological functions investigated by experimental psychology—namely perception, attention, memory and emotion. Footnote 1 In The Photoplay the imagination is the psychological faculty that theatrical movies ultimately play upon; attention, perception, memory and emotion are also directed by the film, but contribute to the film experience as building blocks for the imagination in the first place. One of the ways that films entertain the imagination is by mimicking the psychological functions. Film scenes may represent as-if perceptions, as-if thoughts, as-if streams of associations, and as-if emotions or more generally: display subjectivity. Footnote 2 Second, the film creates an imagined world that deviates from real world scenes as we perceive these in real life. Liberated from real life perceptual constraints involves the spectator’s self in 'shaping reality by the demands of our soul' (p. 41). Third, Münsterberg has a nuanced view of the automaticity of responses to film. On the one hand, it is the spectator’s choice—based on their interest—which ideas from memory and the imagination to fit to images presented on screen; they are felt as 'our subjective supplements' (p. 46). On the other, the film’s suggestions function to control associated ideas, '… not felt as our creation but as something to which we have to submit' (p. 46). And yet in Münsterberg’s view the film does not dictate psychological responses in any way. Footnote 3

Finally, The Photoplay provides abundant and compelling introspective reports of the film experience and so probes into the phenomenology of film, that is, what it is like to watch a movie. I think it is fair to say that for Münsterberg the film experience is the ultimate explanandum for a psychology of the film. In order to account for that phenomenology by mechanism of the mind proper descriptions of the film experience are needed, and introspective reports are an indispensable starting point for these.

The other task Münsterberg set himself was to propose an account of the film as a form of art. Part two of The Photoplay proposes that the film experience includes an awareness of unreality of perceived scenes. This awareness is taken as fundamental for psychological aesthetics; all forms of art are perceived to go beyond the mere imitation of nature. Footnote 4 Münsterberg showed himself a formalist in that he theorised that aesthetic satisfaction depends not on recognition of similarity with the real world or practical needs, but on the sense of an 'inner agreement and harmony [of the film’s parts]' (p. 73). Footnote 5 But in order to qualify as art, according to Münsterberg film was not to deviate too much from realistic representation that distinguishes theatrical movies from non-mainstream forms.

Münsterberg’s agenda is in retrospect quite complete. The detailed investigation of psychological mechanisms and aesthetics of film is followed by a last chapter on the social functions of the photoplay. The thoughts forwarded in it are more global than those on perception and aesthetics. The immediate effect of theatrical films on their audience is enjoyment due to their freeing the imagination, and their easy accessibility to consciousness 'which no other art can furnish us' (p. 95). Enjoyment comes with additional gratifications such as a feeling of vitality, experiencing emotions, learning and above all aesthetic emotion.

In a final section behavioral effects of successful films are discussed. Here the film psychologist vents concerns on what we now refer to as undesirable attitude changes and social learning, especially in young audiences. The agenda of today's social science research on mass media effects (e.g. Dill, 2013 ) is not all that different from Münsterberg's in the last chapter of The Photoplay.

The two tasks that Münsterberg worked on set the agenda for the psychology of film in the century after The Photoplay . It is clearly recognisable in the psychology of the film as we know it today. Footnote 6 But the promising debut made in 1916 was not followed up until the nineteen seventies, or so it seems. James Gibson lamented in his last book on visual perception that whereas the technology of the cinema had reached peak levels of applied science, its psychology had so far not developed at all (1979, p. 292). The cognitive revolution in psychology of the 60s paved the way for its upsurge in the early 80s. But some qualifications need to be made on the seeming moratorium. First, Rudolf Arnheim developed since the 1920s a psychology of artistic film form. Second, although not visible as a coherent psychology of the film, laboratory research on issues in visual perception of the moving image—in particular studies of apparent movement—continued.

Gestalt psychology and film form

Rudolf Arnheim’s essays published first in 1932 added analytic force to Münsterberg’s conviction that film is not an imitation of life. Film and Reality ( 1957 ) highlights shortcomings of film in representing scenes as we know them from natural perception. Footnote 7 In the same essay, it is pointed out that comparing a filmic representation of a scene with its natural perception is what analytic philosophers would call an error of category. In The Making of Film ( 1957 ) Arnheim presented an inventory of formative means for artistic manipulations of visual scenes, including delimitation and point of view, distance to objects and mobility of framing. It is argued that chosen manipulations often go against the most realistic options. For example, ideal viewpoints and canonical distances are often dismissed in favour of more revealing options. Footnote 8 Arnheim’s aesthetics of film gravitates towards acknowledged artistic productions more than to the 'naturalistic narrative film' (e.g., 1957 , p. 116–117) the more moderate art form that Münsterberg tended to prefer.

Arnheim was informed by such founders of Gestalt psychology as Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka. This school held that natural perception results from the mind’s activity. It organises sensory inputs into patterns according to formal principles such as simplicity, regularity, order and symmetry. Arnheim developed into the leading Gestalt theorist of aesthetics of the 20th century. In his 1974 book he analysed a great number of pictorial, sculptural, architectural, musical and poetic works of art while only rarely referring to film. Footnote 9 The cornerstone aesthetic property of art works including film is expression, defined by Arnheim as 'modes of organic or inorganic behaviour displayed in the dynamic appearance of perceptual objects or events' ( 1974 , p. 445). Expression’s dynamic appearance is a structural creation of the mind imposing itself on sound, touch, muscular sensations and vision. Expressive qualities are in turn, the building blocks of symbolic meaning that art works including film add to the representation of objects and events as we know them in the outer world. Thus, Arnheim’s theory of expression and meaning in the arts seems to echo Münsterberg’s formalist position on the perception of 'inner harmony' as the determinant of film spectators’ aesthetic satisfaction.

Apparent motion

Münsterberg shared the amazement that moving images awakened in early film audiences. He considered the experience of movement a central issue for the psychology of the film. The experience of movement in response to a series of changing still pictures has been studied in psychology and physiology under the rubric of apparent motion . Footnote 10 In Münsterberg’s days, international psychology labs were probing the perception of movement in response to experimental stimuli that were perceived as moving images. Well-known examples include apparent motion induced by the subsequent views of single stationary lines in different positions that result in phi movement , the perception of one moving shape or line. Researchers in this area have continued to study the perception of movement in film as only one of many interesting visual stimuli, such as shapes painted on rotating disks, or dynamic computer-generated lights, shapes and objects of many kinds. Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we also need to understand how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion Footnote 11 Apparent motion in film viewing needs to be smooth, Footnote 12 and depends on frame rates and masking effects. (The latter effects refer to dampening of the visual impact of one frame by a subsequently presented black frame).

Münsterberg’s conviction that the perception of movement needs a cognitive contribution from the viewer clashes with alternative explanations that rely on prewired visual mechanisms that automatically and immediately pick up the right stimulus features causing an immediate perception of motion, without the mind adding anything substantial. The inventors of nineteenth century moving image devices explained the illusion of movement by the slowness of the eye, possibly following P.M. Roget’s report on apparent motion to the Royal Society in 1824. In the early years of cinema, the persistence of vision account was meant to add precision to this explanation. It proposed that the retina, the optic nerve or the brain could not keep up with a rapid succession of projected frames, and that afterimages would bridge the intervals between subsequent frames. Anderson and Fisher ( 1978 ) and Anderson and Anderson ( 1993 ) have argued why the notion is false and misleading. It suggests that film viewers’ perceptual system sluggishly pile up retina images on top of one another. However, this would lead them to blur which obviously is not the case. The Andersons refer to the explanation as a myth because it is based on a mistaken conception of film viewing as a passive process. Even with the characteristically very small changes between subsequent frames characteristic of motion picture projection, the visual system performs an active integrative role in distinguishing what has changed from one image to another. This integrating mechanism in film viewing is exactly the same as in perceiving motion in real world scenes. Mechanistic explanations have since been founded on growing insights in the neuroscience of vision, such as single cell activity recordings in response to precisely localised stimulus features. Footnote 13 'Preprocessing' of visual input before it arrives in the cortex takes place in the retina and the lateral geniculate nucleus, which have specialised cells or trajectories for apprehending various aspects of motion. There are major interactions between perceptual modules. Footnote 14 Physiological and anatomical findings in the primate visual system, as well as clinical evidence, support the distinction of separate channels for the perception of movement on the one hand, and form, colour and depth on the other (Livingstone and Hubel, 1987 ). Research on how exactly the cortical integration systems for vision are organised has not yet come to a close. A variety of anatomical subsystems have been identified Footnote 15 , and there is room for task variables in the explanation of motion perception. Footnote 16 The operation of task variables in presumably automated processes (e.g., attentional set, induced by specific task instructions) complicates accounts of apparent motion and the perception of movement based on lowest processing levels.

Non-trivial and clear-cut contributions of the mind to smooth apparent motion have been proposed by Gestalt psychologists. Arnheim ( 1974 ) considered the perception of movement as subsidiary to that of change. The mind uses Gestalt principles such as good continuation and object consistency to perceive patterns in ongoing stimuli. Movement is the perception of developing sequences and events. Footnote 17 Gestalt psychologists have attempted to identify stimulus features that are perceived as a spatiotemporal pattern of 'good' motion, and they discovered various types of apparent motion have been distinguished as a function of stimulus features. In an overview volume, Kolers ( 1972 ) presented phi and beta motion as the major variants. Phi , the most famous, was first documented by Wertheimer in 1912 . An image of an object is presented twice in succession in different positions. Footnote 18 Pure or beta motion that is objectless motion, was the novel and amazing observation; the perception seemed to be a sum or integration by the mind beyond the stimulus parts, and asked for an explanation. It is also experienced when the objects in the subsequent presentations are different.

Wertheimer and those after him looked for mechanisms of the mind that could complement the features of the stimulus responsible for apparent motion in its various forms. Footnote 19 Other studies of apparent motion, too, indicated that simple models of stimulus features alone could not explain apparent motion. Footnote 20 One of the best examples of what the cognitive system adds to stimulus features is induced motion (Duncker, 1929 ). When we see a small target being displaced relative to a framework surrounding it, we invariably see the target moving irrespective of whether it is the target or the frame that is displaced. Ubiquitous film examples are shots of moving vehicles, with mobile or static framing.

In this summary and incomplete overview of the field, we could not make a strict distinction between mechanist and cognitive explanations for the perception of movement in film. The current state of research does not allow for it. Footnote 21 Kolers’s conclusions on the state of the field closing his 1972 volume on motion perception seem still valid. He inferred from then extant research that there must be separate mechanisms for extracting information from the visual stimulus and for selecting and supplementing the information into a visual experience of smooth object motion or motion brief. He concluded that 'The impletions of apparent motion make it clear that although the visual apparatus may select from an array [of] features to which it responds, the features themselves do not create the visual experience. Rather, that experience is generated from within, by means of supplementative mechanisms whose rules are accomodative and rationalizing rather than analytical' (p.198). But even if after Koler's analysis some perceptual (Cutting, 1986) or brain mechanisms (Zacks, 2015) have been identified today we still do not know enough about the self-supplied supplementations. Footnote 22

Perception and cognition of scenes

Mental representation and event comprehension.

Contributions of the mind can go considerably beyond apparent motion, i.e., the perception of smooth motion from one frame to another. The cognitive revolution in academic psychology that took off in the 1960s broadened the conceptualisation of contributions of the mind to the film experience beyond the narrower stimulus-response paradigms that had dominated psychological science until the 1960s. The cognitive revolution went beyond Gestalt notions of patterns applied by the mind on stimulus information. It introduced the concept of mental representation as a key to understanding the relation between sensory impressions from the environment on the one hand, and people’s responses to it. Moreover, these cognitive structures were seen functional in mental operations such as retrieval and accommodation of schemas from memory, inference and attribution. These were quite complex in comparison to perceptual and psychophysical responses. In the past 30 years, they have come to encompass event, action, person, cultural, narrative and formal-stylistic schemas. The cognitive turn in film psychology has stimulated a growing exchange with humanist film scholarship, resulting in advances in the elaboration of cognitive structural notions. Early applications of the cognitive perspective in the psychology of the film can be found in the 1940s and 50s in work by Albert Michotte ( 1946 ) and Heider and Simmel. Footnote 23

Against mental representation: direct perception of film events

The psychology of the film as a subdiscipline of academic psychology really took off in the late 1970s. Münsterberg’s broad agenda that had been scattered across isolated studies of mainly movement perception regained general acclaim. This was due first to the booming supply and consumption of moving images through media television and computer-generated imagery since the 60s. Second, the cognitive turn in experimental psychology renewed an interest in perception and cognition as it occurs in natural ecologies. This is the backdrop against which James Gibson ( 1979 ) noted the virtual absence of a psychology of the moving image, motivating his chapter on the film experience. The chapter was important in that it applied his highly influential ecological principles of perception of real world scenes to perception in the cinema. Gibson’s general theory of visual perception (e.g., Gibson, 1979 ) hinges on the notion that the visual system has evolved to extract relevant information from the world in a direct fashion. A scene presents itself to the observer as an ambient optical array that immediately and physically reflects the structure of the real world. Changes and transitions in the flow of the optical array are due to natural causes such as alternations of lighting intensity of the scene, e.g., due to clouds, or movement of objects in the scene or of the observer. These variations in the optical flow enable the automatic pick-up of invariants. Example invariants are the change in size of portions in the array, and the density of texture in that portion when the observer gets closer to, or farther away from the object. Footnote 24 The changes in these parameters are linked with depth-information in a way that is constant across different scenes, observer speeds, lighting conditions, etc. Invariants enable the direct perception of the real world in the service of adaptive action. Disturbances of the optic flow can automatically be perceived as events. The events are categorised on the basis of the nature of the disturbances, e.g., as terrestrial, animate, or chemical events. Furthermore, the direct tuning of the perceptual senses to the structures of the environment enable an immediate perception of affordances , for example the slope of a hill causes the direct perception of 'climbability'.

The experience of motion pictures according to Gibson involves a dynamic optical flow exactly like the one an observer would have when being present at the filmed scene. Footnote 25 Film represents the world to the senses that are calibrated to that world. The field of view of the camera becomes the optic array to the viewer (Gibson, 1979 , p. 298). Perception of objects, movement, events and affordances is direct and realist, based as it is on the same invariants and affordances that the scene in the real world would offer. Deviations from these as emphasised by cognitivist film psychologists from Münsterberg through Arnheim to Hochberg as we will shortly see, are largely taken as non-representative exceptions.

A major affordance offered by conventional movies is empathy with characters. Empathy presupposes that we understand what happens to characters. Scenes present their actions, reactions and feelings. However, most scenes are not continuous. How do we understand scenes presented in pieces, and what are the limits to our understanding? Gibson’s reply to the question of how continuity is perceived in scenes that is, smooth movement and unitary events across cuts would be that the perceptual system extracts the same invariants from the two shots on either side of the cut. The elegant explanation again rests upon a presumed correspondence between perception of real world scenes and film scenes.

Gibson inspired important theorising on the film experience, notably by Anderson and Cutting that we will turn to shortly. Here we emphasise that his direct perception account of the film experience stands in perpendicular opposition to the key innovation that the cognitive turn introduced in experimental psychology. Gibson denied the necessity of mental representations in the perception of objects and events, be it in real scenes or in film.

Cognitive schemas and the canonical set-up of the cinema

The role of mental representations, be they cognitive principles or schemas or other mental structures was argued over a lifetime of work in the psychology of film by Julian Hochberg. A perception psychologist with an interest in pictorial representations and their aesthetics, he devoted a large part of his work to identify what is given in film stimuli and how perception goes beyond that, in often ingenuous demonstrations and experiments. (The demonstrations are, in fact, introspective observations of film perception under exactly specified, reproducible stimulus conditions). A comprehensive overview can be found in Hochberg ( 1986 ). Footnote 26 His legacy should be referred to as the Hochberg and Brooks oeuvre, because his wife Virginia Brooks a psychologist and filmmaker, contributed such a great deal to it. Hochberg found that cognitive schemata are necessary in the perception of film for two reasons. The most profound one is that completely stimulus-driven (or 'bottom-up') accounts of the perception of movement, events, and scene continuity do not really explain the experience. For example, Hochberg and Brooks point out that neurophysiological motion detectors do not explain motion perception, that is, they 'amend but do not demolish' an account based on a mental representation of motion (Hochberg and Brooks, 1996b , p. 226). The same would go for any other direct perception account, including Gibson’s optics plus invariant extraction model. The more practical argument is that the direct perception account fails to pose limits to the scope of its application, leaving thresholds and ceiling conditions for the mechanisms out of consideration. The canonical set-up of cinematic devices for recording and displaying motion pictures has evolved to produce good impressions of depth, smooth and informative motion, emphasis on relevant objects and continuity of action, often violating the course of direct perception in comparable real world scenes. Figure 1 presents a demonstration of active disregard that viewers of mainstream movies typically display. (See also Cutting & Vishton ( 1995 ) on contextual use of depth-information).

Example of perceptual disregard in the cinema. Hochberg ( 2007 ) discusses the view of objects moving in front of a landscape. In normal film viewing flatness of studio-backgrounds and quasi-camera movement is disregarded. Traditional films can use a painted or projected landscape at the backdrop of the set, and panning camera movements instead of a really mobile camera to create a convincing impression in the viewer of following a moving object in the scene’s space. A cycling woman is followed in a pan shot moving from left to right; frames A and B constitute the beginning and the end of the panning shot. In normal perception in the real-world objects on the horizon seem to move in the direction of the moving subject, whereas nearby objects move in opposite direction. Panning involves a stationary viewpoint, causing the image to lack this 'motion parallax'. For example, the scarecrow in the middle ground of frame B should be further to the left from the ridge on the horizon than in frame A (DA < DB), but the distance between the objects has remained identical (DA = DB). However, the lack of parallax and resulting apparent flatness can be and is disregarded and viewers experience smooth self-motion parallel to the moving object. Disregard such a this is part and parcel of normal film viewing or the "ecology of the cinema".

The most immediate demonstration of apparent motion is Duncker’s induced motion referred to above, a cinematic effect because it is dependent on canonical projection within a frame. The best analytic examples are about the perception of events in filmed dance. Footnote 27 For Hochberg and Brooks an ecological approach to perception in the cinema needs to take the ecology of the cinema into account.

The necessity of cognitive schemas in film perception was pointed out most pregnantly in Hochberg’s dealing with the comprehension of shot transitions or cuts. It was argued that known sensory integration and Gibson’s extraction of invariants, fail to account for viewers’ comprehension of frequent and simple cinematic events like elision of space and time. Overlap in contents between successive shots can be hard to identify or lack at all. Hochberg and Brooks proposed a principled alternative: films play in the mind’s eye. Viewers construct an off-screen mental space from separate views, and they can link two successive views by the relation of each of these to this space. In constructing a mental space, overlap may even be overruled by other cues, that have nothing to do with any invariance. The construction must involve event schemas and cognitive principles removed from anything immediately given in the film. Schemas may indeed outperform (mathematical) invariants picked up from the optical array offered by the screen. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) show, for example how gaze direction of film characters or personae in subsequent shots may be more effective in the construction of a continuous mental scene than overlapping spatial or visual symbolic contents. Footnote 28 Mental schemas seem to be indispensable in the comprehension of sequences of completely non-overlapping cuts. A famous demonstration by Hochberg and Brooks is reproduced in Fig. 2 . The succession of shots is readily understood when it is preceded by the presentation of a cross, which provides the integrating schema. Viewers’ schema-based continuous perception of scenes is supported by the ways that traditional cinema tells its stories. The presentation of an overall view in so-called 'establishing shots' followed by a 'break-down' of its object into subsequently presented part views is a cornerstone procedure in classical continuity film style (Bordwell and Thompson, 1997 /1979).

Role of mental schemas in the comprehension of continuous space across shots as discussed in Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 , 2007 ). a The sequence of eight static shots does not seem to make sense. b A static preview of the entire object as in A) would activate a mental schema of a cross. Subsequent shots are then recognised as consecutive camera relocations, counter-clockwise rotations offering subsequent views of corners From Hochberg and Brooks ( 2007 ). Adding a shot of the cross moving diagonally to the lower left corner of the frame would smoothen the transition between the entire object view and the view of its top right corner further and facilitate the perception of the subsequent parts. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996 ) reported that replacing one of the shots by a blank frame does not lead to confusion. For example, if shot 7 were replaced by a blank frame, the view of the lower left angle of the cross would seem to have been skipped, and shot 8 would be recognised as to present a view of the lower left corner. That is, the trajectory of the views would remain intact in keeping with the overall view of the object. This illustrates all the more the leading role of the schema of a cross in the perception of its parts.

A smooth understanding of non-overlapping cuts may require dedicated knowledge of discursive story units and rules for their ordering that only literary analysis types of study can reveal (Hochberg, 1986 , pp. 22–50). Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a , p. 382) pointed out that theoretical or empirical proposals as to the nature of such representations were lacking. They found Gestalt principles unsatisfactory (Hochberg, 1998 ). Current film psychologists have taken up this challenge as we shall see briefly.

As a final contribution of Hochberg and Brooks’ to the psychology of the film, we would like to highlight their view of film spectators as partners motivated to deliver their share in a communicative effort. Film viewers contribute to the canonical setup of the cinema in that they are astutely aware of the filmmaker’s communicative intentions: '… the viewer expects that the film maker has undertaken to present something in an intelligible fashion and will not provide indecipherable strings of shots' (Hochberg, 1986 , p. 22–53). Viewers must be assumed to have an associated motivation to explore the views presented to them. In a series of inventive experiments, Hochberg and Brooks gathered evidence for an impetus to gather visual information. Looking preference increased with cutting rate and with complexity of shot contents. Visual momentum , or viewer interest, (Brooks and Hochberg, 1976 ; Hochberg and Brooks, 1978 ) as they termed it is the absorbing experience typical of cinema viewing. These studies help us to understand how current cutting strategies meet the viewers’ typical motivation for cognitive enquiry. The reward of comprehension is carefully dosed by varying the time allowed to the viewer to inspect objects and scenes, dependent on their novelty and complexity.

Hochberg’s demonstrations of the involvement of mental structures in understanding portrayed events was in large part based on introspective evidence. They have been criticised for relying too heavily on top-down control of perception by too intricate mental structures, by Gibson and others. Footnote 29 Current research in the cognitive structure tradition uses more sophisticated experimental set-ups. Inspiration has been drawn from theories of discourse processing in cognitive science. In this research, the relationship of 'top-down' use of schemas in scene comprehension with 'bottom-up' processing of stimulus features has become an important question. Footnote 30 Zacks has extensively investigated how film viewers segment the ongoing stream of images and extract meaningful events and actions from it. Viewer segmentation depends on automatically detected changes in a situation (Zacks, 2004 ). Detection of the changes requires only minimal use of schemas, and triggers automated perceptual-motor simulations of events and subevents such as actions. Footnote 31 Segmentation follows the logic of events in the real world. Most importantly, multiple events can be organised in a hierarchical or linear fashion, as scenes, sets of events and subevents or actions (Zacks, 2013 ).

Theory of mind and layered meaning of events

Extracting events in understanding film scenes needs more than retrieving schemas of real world events. The fact that they are presented with an idea in mind, is reflected in their understanding. Understanding film scenes and especially characters, their actions, plans and goal has been argued to require a so-called Theory of Mind (Levin et al., 2013 ). TOM is a system of cognitive representations of what beliefs, needs, desires, intentions and feelings people have in their interaction with others and the world. It is acquired in early childhood, when children understand that others, too, have an internal life, similar to but also different from one’s own beliefs and feelings. Levin et al. explain how use of TOM, also referred to as mentalising is necessary for an elementary understanding of film character actions and feelings. For example, character gaze following that underlies our perception of what characters feel or want to do with respect to an object that they look at requires TOM. TOM underlies grasping spatial (and action-) relations in scene comprehension across cuts using gaze following. Understanding relations between more complex events require schema-controlled theorizing on what people believe, do, think, and feel. Finally, Levin et al. demonstrate through film analyses how film viewers construct multi-layered representations of a film’s action from the point of view of different characters, the viewer and even from the narrator’s or filmmaker’s. For example, viewer and character perspectives may clash as in dramatic irony , or the narrator may create false beliefs on story events in viewers.

Continuity of events and viewer attention

Hochberg’s question of what the mental schemas look like that enable us to perceive smooth progress of events across film cuts has recently been addressed by the next generation of film psychologists. They have sought answers in profound analyses of the canonical setup delivered by the founders of cognitive film theory in the humanities, such as Bordwell ( 1985 , 2008 ), and Anderson ( 1996 ). Bordwell’s extensive analyses of classical film narrative and his account of the viewer’s mental activity in the comprehension of the film’s story-world suggest a film-psychological hypothesis on the experience of continuity: Classical Hollywood film style serves smooth progress of the narrative. Continuity editing ensures fluency across shot transitions. Shot A cues cognitive schema-based or narrative expectations that are subsequently matched in shot B. Expectations can be perceptual or cognitive, i.e., requiring inferences supported by event schemas. Anderson added a Gibsonian perspective, arguing that the perception of film scenes mimics the perception of real world scenes. Continuity shooting and editing closely follow the constraints of the human perceptual systems that have evolved to 'extract' continuity from changing views of scenes in the real world. Recent research into the experience of smooth development of events and scenes across shot transitions draws on these principles of continuity narration. Footnote 32 Framing, editing and sound finetune the viewer’s top-down search to focus on candidate target stimuli. A quite complete and accurate explanation was offered by Tim Smith. His Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity ( 2012 ) explains the viewer’s sense of smooth progress by the continuity editing principles that mainstream filmmakers tend to adhere to. AToCC breaks away from Hochberg’s analyses to the degree that it holds that viewers do not need intricate spatial or semantic schemas to construct continuous events from separate shots. Rather it is built on the Gibsonian principle that perceiving continuity in film scenes derives from the continuity that we experience in perceiving scenes in the natural world. The ecology of the cinema renders it sufficient to follow a number of simple spatiotemporal guidelines. Continuity editing film style guides viewers’ attention in seamlessly following action across cuts. Attention, that is the focused selection of objects in a shot by the viewer, i.e., what and where the viewer directs their gaze, is led by the filmmaker. The viewers’ gaze in shot A is directed to the part of the screen where the target of interest in shot B, that is after the cut, will be. The shift of attention from one portion to another of the screen in shot A is shortly followed by the cut, and because the gaze 'lands' in the right place in shot B, the cut has become invisible. Footnote 33 The theory of continuity perception adds precise levels of analysis to the construction of mental scene spaces that Hochberg proposed. It distinguishes higher level and lower level control of attention. Higher-level ones include 'perceptual inquiries' as Hochberg and Brooks ( 1978a ) called them. The expectations or questions that guide the gaze may be minimally articulated, e.g., 'what or whom are these characters looking at' as in gaze following, but the operation of higher level cognitive schemas are not excluded. The best demonstration to date of the control of focus of attention by the narrative is given in research on suspense and its effects on film viewer gazes by Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) and Bezdek and Gerrig ( 2017 ). Footnote 34 Their results can be taken to imply that suspense, a state of high absorption, is associated with focal attention to story-world details supervised by expectations created by the narrative (see also Doicaru, 2016 ).

The study of film viewers' attention has delivered a firm account of the role of the ubiquitous Hollywood continuity film style in the typical experience of smoothly flowing film scenes and stories that audiences allover the world have. (See for a review Smith, Levin & Cutting, 2012 ).

A lead role in perception for cinematic low-level features?

Experimental psychology has always aspired basic explanations of perceptual responses, preferably through transparent mechanistic associations with physically observable stimulus conditions. The role of high-level narrative schema-based attention in smooth film experiences discussed in the previous section, is subject to debates in which experimental data support arguments pro and con. To begin with, AToCC emphasises the role of leading expectations in following cuts, but more akin to the Gibsonian approach of visual perception than to Hochberg’s schema position as it is, it tends to stress lower level features as directing attention bottom-up, too or even more so. One lower level is given by film-stylistic devices, for instance the use of sound that can orient viewers to direct their gazes to the next shot’s portion of the screen where the sound’s origin will be shown. Another are lower level stimulus features in a narrower and technical sense, such as bright lights and movements with sudden onset that automatically attract attention due to the make-up of the senses and the brain. Especially movement was shown by Smith to be an extraordinary low level attentional cue. The power of low level feature control of attentional shifts has inspired Loschky et al. ( 2015 ) to speak of the 'tyranny of film'. They start from research findings suggesting that the use of low-level stylistic features can result in attentional synchrony across film audiences, that is individual viewers of a scene gaze at exactly the same portions of the screen at exactly the same time. Footnote 35 Remarkable degrees of inter-viewer synchronization of visual attention has also been established in studies of localisations of brain activity in film viewers (e.g., Hasson et al., 2003 ). However, Stephen Hinde’s research has recently shown that the distraction effect of inserted low-level attention triggers is quite limited (Hinde et al., 2017 ) In line with this notion of top-down attention control overriding bottom-up attention triggers, Magliano and Zacks ( 2011 ) demonstrated that the perception of cuts is suppressed by higher order processes related to the construction of complex events.

Gibson’s idea of invariants in optical arrays can now be made concrete, enabling the prediction of bottom-up controlled attention and perception from objectively identified features. Developments in computer vision, image and sound analysis have paved the way for automated extraction of features and patterns in visual and auditory stimuli in terms of multiple dimensions. For example, machine extraction of saliency as a feature predictive of bottom-up attention has been developed and applied in numerous computer vision applications. A much-cited article by Itti and Koch ( 2001 ) illustrates the idea for static images. Specialised neural network algorithms detect features such as colour, intensity, orientations, etc. in parallel over the entire visual field. Each feature is represented in a feature map, in which neurons compete for saliency. Feature maps are combined into a saliency map. A last network sequentially scans the saliency map, moving from the most salient location to the next less salient one and so on. Footnote 36 An excellent explanation of how to obtain saliency maps is given at a Matlab page. Footnote 37

Psychologists of film in their attempts to explain the extraordinary smooth and intense perceptual experience that mainstream film typically provides, currently seek to join forces with computer vision scientists. In a next step, they may seek collaboration with vision labs in the world that attempt to link their low-level film image feature analyses with film narrative structures and viewer responses. Footnote 38

Examples of computational film analyses. Number of shot transitions as a function of acts. Cutting ( 2016 ), Fig. 2 . Under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). Note that ordinates are inverted; lower positions of titles mean larger number of shots and decreased shot durations. Normalised time bins refer to units of duration standardised in view of variable film length of separate titles. Left panel displays distribution of cuts over time and acts, right panel of non-cut transitions such as dissolves, fades and wipes.

The work of perception researcher James Cutting has carried the psychology of the film into the next stage of the Gibsonian ecological approach, while also linking it with insights in the structure of film narrative from humanities scholarship. Footnote 39 In an interesting essay on the perception of scenes in the real world and in film Cutting ( 2005 ) summarised the ecological perspective on perception stating that understanding how we perceive the real world helps to grasp how we perceive film and vice versa. Footnote 40 In the last decade Cutting developed powerful computational content analysis methods that reveal the patterning of low-level features in relation to dimensions of film style and technology, in representative samples of Hollywood films of well over a hundred titles. The theoretical starting point of the approach is that movies exhibit reality. The psychologist Cutting subscribes to the analytical distinctions made in literary and film theories between plot, form and style of a narrative on the one hand, and the represented story-world on the other. The Gibsonian proposal is that analyses of the fabula or story-world (i.e., the action, events, characters and so on) should lead to identification of syuzhet features (i.e., formal and stylistic features that are physically given in the film stimulus or can be perceived without substantial instruction) functional in the perception and understanding of that story-world; vice versa, variations in form and style reflect variations in the portrayed story-world. Cutting’s definition of low-level film features used in the analyses was informed by analyses of narrative, style and technology by David Bordwell, and methods for statistical style analysis by Barry Salt ( 2009 ).

Low-level features analysed by Cutting and co-workers are physically and quantitatively determinable elements or aspects occurring in moving images, regardless of the narrative. They include shot duration, temporal shot structure, colour, contrast and movement. The value of each feature can be expressed as an index for an entire film, or for some segment targeted in an analysis. Footnote 41 Inspection by an analyst complements machine vision analyses, but I would qualify the indexing approach as computational (objective) film analysis , because of intensive tallying and numerical operations developed by specialists in psychological data-processing. The features do not constitute events or scenes, but they accentuate these. A recording of their measurements for an entire film would constitute an abstract backbone to be filled with scenes and events. One possible comparison is with the rhythmic score of a song without melodies and words. In the hands of capable film-makers they are indispensable for conveying the narrative, due to their direct, predictable and automated effects on the visual system.

The primary use of the approach is in film analysis. The multi-feature configurations of indices can be used to reliably 'fingerprint' films or sections. Reliably because the indices are derived from large numbers of measurements. Computational film analysis uses a historical corpus of films and has been deployed over the past decade to corroborate and enrich historical analyses of film style. Footnote 42 The climax so far of efforts to integrate computational content analysis with film theory and analysis is Cutting’s ( 2016 ) report on narrative theory and the dynamics of popular movies. The corpus consisted of 160 English language films released between 1935 and 2010, ten for each year. As Figure 3 illustrates a typical course obtained of the number of shot transitions over film presentation time, interpretable as to mark the acts and the pace of narration, see Figure 3 . An important outcome of the analyses is that clear physical support was obtained for the four-act structure proposed by film historian Thompson ( 1999 ) across the entire period. It should be noted that Thompson’s act structure was identified largely on the basis of higher level narrative segmentation. Footnote 43 Shot scale was unrelated to the act structure. Cutting added analyses of higher order level film features that can be interpreted to co-vary with narration. Footnote 44 Cutting then ventured upon a multi-feature analysis of the entire corpus. Associations among all indices across all titles could be reduced to four dimensions: motion, framing, editing and sound. They correlated in a meaningful way. For example, shot scale was inversely related to shot duration; in classical narration close-ups tend towards briefer durations than wide shots. Each dimension represented polar opposites between features, e.g., music vs. conversation for sound and close-ups vs long shots for framing. Computational content analysis can explore the dynamics of the dimensional representations over subsequent acts of movies. Figure 4 reproduces Cuttings findings for prolog, setup, complication, development, climax, and epilog. Footnote 45 It would seem that the analysis winds up in a level of cinematic content representation that is grounded in directly given stimulus features, integrated with film-analytical features that can be readily indexed and seem relevant as production tools in regular filmmaking.

Five movie dimensions in narrational space. Reproduced from Cutting ( 2016 ) Fig. 9. under Creative Commons License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ). The displayed representation is obtained from dimensional reduction of the numerous associations between film titles in terms of their feature profiles. The results of the first stage of the analysis are not displayed here, see Fig. 8 in Cutting ( 2016 ). In that stage, the number of associations between all titles regarding all features was reduced to four dimensions (see main text) using principal component analysis. In the next stage the analysis was applied to the features and films for each separate act, to result in the configurations shown here. Arrows vary in length, correspondingly to differences in the range of values on the dimensions. Black dots indicate median values of the acts on the dimensions. Considering for example the sound dimension, it can be seen that the set-up tends to have more conversation and the climax has more music. The red bars indicate the dispersion of values on the dimension and the degree it is skewed towards one or the other end

What does computational content analysis mean psychologically, that is how do indices and dimensions function in the viewer’s perceiving and comprehending events? Patterns of features trigger changes in viewers’ physiological, attention, perception and emotion systems, according to Cutting ( 2016 , p. 27). Typical low-level configurations may correlate with possible effects on the viewer’s perception and experience of events. For example, shot duration may support interpretations of pace, mood and tension, think of drama’s long takes; temporal shot structure is functional for sustaining attention or suspense (e.g., when a sequence of brief shots abruptly merges into long duration shots), e.g., in thrillers; movement (of camera and objects on screen) serves arousal in the viewer, as in action movies; low luminance signals possible threat as in horror movies, while high luminance may lend 'a sense of other worldliness' (Brunick et al., 2013 , p. 141). All low-level features can help viewers in categorising films as to genre, and changes in these will support segmentation of events and scenes, which is at the basis of smooth narrative understanding. Combinations of indices enable more interesting interpretations of possible experience effects. Footnote 46 However, because the studies that the overarching computational content analysis was based on do not involve response measurement, a direct connection between cinematic form (especially narrative procedures) and cinematic meaning that Cutting argues for is open to further elaboration. Even in the face of the richness of directly given information that has been extracted using computers, Cutting sees room for the use of cognitive schemas. The very narrative acts that are underlined by immediately given information may be schematic in nature, but he finds it more likely that their functioning is less dependent on memory-processes than the very high-level cognitive structures implied in cognitive scripts and TOM reasoning.

To conclude the sections on the cognition of film scenes, we seem to have made important progress in understanding how movies construct events in film viewers' minds an brains, as put it in his state of the art review. Movies in part "dictate" events, actions and scenes to viewers' brains using an "alphabet" of visual and auditive features; viewers in turn contribute to the construction of story-worlds by developing and matching higher-order structural anticipations using embodied cognitive event, character and narrative schemas. Since 1916, the film units that have been analysed increased from paired single stimuli (as apparent motion experiments) to whole film acts (as in computational film analysis). Analyses of narrative structure from film theory have become for the psychology of film what harmonics and counterpoint analysis signify to the psychology of music or the theories of syntax and semantics to psycholinguistics. They inform psychological notions of film structure and organization.

The awareness of narrative film

The third part of The Photoplay deals with issues other than the psychological mechanisms or the psychology of film form namely the awareness offered by the photoplay. It was only natural to Münsterberg as a child of his time to designate the special awareness that film creates as the explanandum in psychological research, the mechanisms of film stimuli impinging on attention, perception and memory being the explanans . His characterisations of this conscious awareness, what it is like to watch theatrical films, or in other words the phenomenology of the film experience remains in my view as yet unparalleled. Apart from the sense of freedom that we have already discussed, they include attentional and affective experiences.

Münsterberg described enjoyment as the immediate effect of theatrical film, explaining it from the exceptional freedom of the imagination: "The massive outer world has lost its weight, it has been freed from space, time, and causality, and it has been clothed in the form of our consciousness. The mind has triumphed over matter and the pictures roll on with the ease of musical tones. It is a superb enjoyment which no other art can furnish us" (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 95). Light has been thrown on the remarkable fluency of the film experience noted by Münsterberg by current research in narrative procedures, and the mechanisms of continuity perception discussed in the previous section. Münsterberg also stressed that the enjoyment of photoplays depends on our experience of the film’s story as an emotionally meaningful world separate from reality: 'The photoplay shows us a significant conflict of human actions … adjusted to the free play of our mental experiences and which reach complete isolation from the practical world …' (p. 82). And finally, he singled out the role of focused attention in enjoyment. 'It is as if that outer world were woven into our mind and we were shaped not through its own laws but by the acts of our attention, …' (Münsterberg, 1916 , p. 39).

Twentieth century academic psychology did not develop much of a body of theory and research on human consciousness. Hence it is not surprising that alongside research into perception and comprehension one doesn’t find much work on the conscious experience of film. Measurements of perceptual, attentional, cognitive and affective responses in experimental psychology are extremely limited with regards to the contents of consciousness that they tap. Lab tasks enabling measurement are must be simple, e.g., identification, comparison or categorisation of visual stimuli, rather than free description or recall. Self-reports associated with such tasks must be quantifiable and take the shape of choice responses, simple intensity ratings or readily codifiable reports. Behavioural measures are farther removed from any contents of experience because these need to be inferred. Here, too, simple objective coding is a must. Descriptive and interpretative reports of the qualia and meaning of experiences afforded by film have been largely left to hermeneutic film criticism and phenomenologically oriented film philosophy in the humanities. Scholarship in these fields follows in the footsteps of Münsterberg. The present overview of the psychology of the film cannot go into it further; I refer to Sobchack’s ( 1992 ) volume on the phenomenology of the film experience. It opens with the proposition that film directly expresses perceptions, a proposition coming close to the observation in The Photoplay that the contents of the audience’s experience are perceptions, attention, thinking and emotion that are projected before them on the screen.

Absorption in film

Meanwhile, progress can be reported in understanding one aspect of the rich and complex film experience namely its intensity. Münsterberg observed that the film audience’s enjoyment is due to prolonged states of attention strongly focused on a fictional story-world, so strong in fact that the here and now escapes consciousness and it seems instead as if an 'outer world were woven into our mind'. Elsewhere we have proposed to refer to the experience of intense attention as absorption in a story-world (Tan et al., 2017 ), following Nell's ( 1988 ) groundbreaking description of "being lost in a book". Media psychologists specialised in research on media entertainment (Vorderer et al., 2004 , Bilandzic & Bussele, 2011 ) have developed a variety of measures capturing enjoyable absorption-like states afforded by narrative, television drama and video-gaming. We discuss four of these.

a. Narrative engagement (Bussele and Bilandzic, 2008 , 2009 ) is a pleasant state of being engrossed or entranced by the narrative as a whole as it is presented in a book or film, including the activity of reading or viewing it. Footnote 47 (Tele-)Presence (Schubert et al., 2001 ; Wirth et al., 2007 ; and others) refers to the embodied awareness of being in a virtual world: being there with your body, in other words absorption in a story-world. Footnote 48 The concept has its origin in research into the experience of virtual realities. Footnote 49 Attempts have been made to ground mechanisms of film-induced emotion on presence that is the audience’s basic and embodied awareness of being in the middle of the story-world as a witness to events befalling characters Anderson ( 1996 ); Tan (1994, 1996 ).

b. Green and Brock’s ( 2000 ) definition of transportation is the most frequently used conceptualisation of absorption in media-psychological research. It is considered a major gratification offered to readers of narrative and film viewers alike. It overlaps with presence in that it features a sense of being in the story-world, as well as a realistic and attentive imagery of details. The difference may be that as a metaphor transportation evokes associations with transition to or travel into the film’s story-world. Footnote 50 More than presence, the operationalisations of transportation entail personal relevance and participatory sympathetic feeling, amplifying the emotional quality of the experience.

c. Empathy is the common denominator for concepts referring to absorption in the inner life of fictional characters. Like transportation, it is seen as a major gratification in reading stories and watching drama and movies. Viewer empathy has been defined as perceiving, understanding and emotionally responding to character feeling in the seminal work on the subject by Zillmann (Zillmann, 1991 , 1996). Perceived similarity and sympathy for the character (grounded in moral attitudes) have been suggested and tested as determinants of spectator empathy in drama (e.g., Zillmann, 1996; 2000 ; 2003 ; 2006 ). Footnote 51 There is still a need to sort out possible forms of empathy specific to the canonical conditions of the cinema which may be quite different from situations in real life where we observe other persons. Footnote 52 Moreover, empathy with film characters can be less or more cognitively demanding. Footnote 53 Identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ) seems to stand for complete absorption of the viewer’s self by a represented character. Footnote 54 It can be argued that empathy is the rule in film viewing while identification is the exception (e.g., Zillmann, 1995; Tan, 1996 , 2013a , b ), as most mainstream film narratives are mainly geared towards provoking the former rather than the latter. According to Smith ( 1995 ) they use 'alignment' techniques that promote perspective taking and allegiance strategies that foster viewer sympathy for the character while the distinction between self and character is unaffected.

d. Finally, flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997 ) is the odd person out in the series of absorption-like experience concepts reviewed here, because it applies not only to absorption in movies, narratives or games, but to any activities that stand out for a certain intensity and intrinsic reward as well. The rather simple idea supporting the concept is that a pleasurable state is experienced when the challenges inherent in an activity just match the person’s capacities. In the canonical setup of mainstream film (and mainstream audiences) this balance is generally realised due to filmmakers’ skilful presentation of interesting story-events, and the overlap of it with attentional, perceptual and cognitive routines that film viewers have acquired in the real world. Mainstream movie continuity film style facilitates flow a great deal as it tedns to minimize challenges posed by transitions from one view or perspective to another. Smith's ( 2012 ) studies were discussed above as relevant to smooth continuity of visual attention, and I would also mention the research on comprehension of events by Schwann (2013; Garsofsky & Schwan, 2009 )

Obviously, these and other varieties of absorption are not mutually exclusive. Elsewhere we have presented qualitative empirical support for a dynamic interplay among the varieties of absorption (Bálint and Tan, 2015 ). Footnote 55

From the overview we may conclude that Münsterberg’s introspective psychology of the film experience is in large part echoed in the empirical observations gathered one century later. Viewers feel absorbed in another, exceptionally vivid reality, 'clothed in the [embodied] forms of our consciousness' (presence and transportation). Empathy is mentioned by Münsterberg as a prominent experience, and his notion of an unhampered stream of the imagination may correspond with the experience of flow. Focused attention is already in The Photoplay a major component of the film experience, that would later be investigated in research on bottom-up vs. top-down attention discussed above. Absorption, empathy and intensely focused attention can easily substantiate the enjoyability of watching films as Münsterberg already would have it. However, compared to Münsterberg’s conceptualisation of the typical film awareness, insights into how acts of imagination on the part of the spectatorcontribute to it have not advanced that much in the psychology of film. Footnote 56

A narrative simulation account of emotion in film viewing

Absorption is an affective state characteristic of the film expeirience. However, a description of the typical experience of narrative films is incomplete if more specific affective states are not considered. Watching movies has been identified with emotions. We go to the cinema to experience mirth, compassion, sadness, bittersweet emotions, thrill, horror, and soon in response to what we see and hear happening to characters and ourselves. Emotions of movie audiences have not received much attention since Münsterberg’s Photoplay . Twenty-first century film psychology has taken up where he left off, and a major step forward has been to regard the narrative structure of films as a fundamental starting point for explaining film viewer emotions. The narrative simulation account is, I think, dominant in today’s psychological approaches to the issue of why the cinema offers the intense and remarkable emotional experience that Münsterberg’s photoplays induced a century ago. Important work on emotion in media users has been done in media psychology, most on empathy with characters, but narrative induced emotion has not received much attention, as can be seen from a complete overview by Konijn ( 2013 ). Cognitive scholars in the humanities have highlighted different aspects of film narratives that induce perceptions of fictional events associated with intense emotional experiences (e.g., genre-typical film style: Grodal, 1997 , 2009 , 2017 ; Visch and Tan, 2009 ; narrative procedures, e.g., Smith, 1995 ; Plantinga, 2009 ; Berliner, 2017 ). I hope the reader will allow me to use my own work on the subject as an illustration. It is closely related to the cognitive - theoretical analyses just referred to. I have found a cognitive approach to emotion in general psychology fruitful for narrative modelling of emotion in film viewing. Footnote 57 Investigations of film-induced emotion have raisedthe issue of apparent realism : how can a clearly fictional world be taken for real to the effect of intensely moving emoting viewers? Oatley introduced a cognitive theory of narrative fiction as simulation ( 1999 , 2012 , 2013 ) that applies to film as a stimulus for possibly complex emotions. Narrative runs simulations on the embodied mind just as programs run simulations on computers. Footnote 58 I would add that filmviewers take part in a playful simulation in which the film leads them to imagine they are present in a fictional world, where they witness fictional events that film characters are involved in (Tan, 1995 , 1996 , 2008 ). Being a witness involves embodied perceptions of what happens in a fictional world, as well as in the imagination constructing and participating in events, without acting on these. In the process, events are taken for real for the sake of playful entertainment. This position is related to Walton’s ( 1990 ) well-known account of fiction as make-believe.

Frijda’s cognitive theory of the emotions (Frijda, 1986 , 2007) is the starting point for further explanation of emotional experiences in response to film. The theory posits that the emotion system has evolved for adaptive action in the first place. For example, the sight of a monster will spawn a strong urge to flee due to a basic concern for safety being jeopardised. Of course, film audiences do not run out of the auditorium. According to the cognitive theory of emotion, action responses are not fixed responses to emotional stimuli, but the result of appraisals of what they mean for a person’s concerns in light of the situational context. Playful simulation provides the contextual frame for the complex appraisal of apparent realism of film events. The appraisal has three stages: perceptual, imagination based and self-involved. Footnote 59

1. Many popular film stimuli provoke immediate and automated appraisals of concern relevance and ensuing emotional responses, due for instance to their nature of unconditioned stimuli in the real world. A snake popping out from the bush would be an example. Emotional appraisals in the cinema can be and often are empathetic. That is they include perspectives on events taken by film characters. Film technology in mainstream movies is used to emphasise emotional triggers; editing could strengthen the suddenness of the snake’s appearance, and photography could render fear releasers such as the typical movements of the snake more salient. Footnote 60 But popular films also present us with emotional stimuli that are immediately perceived as fake, for example a rubber prop snake. Due to the playful simulation frame further cognitive processing of perceptions takes place. In the first case, film viewers realise that just perceived events are not real but must be held true for the sake of a playful simulation. In the second, they realise that the fake stimulus is only a prompt, and comply with its invitation to hold the stimulus true and allow it to appeal to their concerns, also for the sake of playful simulation.

2. Once imagination takes over from perception, the reality status of stimuli is traded for believability. As part of the imagination fictional events are matched with higher order genre-specific narrative schemas, and then dealt with as possibilities in a particular world . As Frijda ( 1989 ) argued when he discussed the apparent reality of fiction: 'Seeing a fake snake approach a real person is not scary. But watching an imaginary snake approach an imaginary Jane is. The first is seen as unreal in a real word, and the second as real in an imaginary world. And this is how we appraise events in fiction. The fun of art is in the play with the duality' (p. 1546). Play with the possibility of events in the imagined world and entertaining as-if emotions can suffice for genuine emotion to arise. As I argued elsewhere (Tan, 1996 ) the appraisal of the possibility of events in a particular fictional world can and usually does lead to genuine emotion, because humans have been equipped with a capacity to have emotions in response to mental representations of counterfactual and imaginary events. Footnote 61

3. The genuine emotion can—but does not need to—open up considerations of the believability of fictional events in the real world. Moreover, it can lead to imaginations in which the viewer’s self is involved in the events or their ramifications. The appraisal of fictional film events is treated in more detail in Tan and Visch (2018). The search for film style and technology features that are conducive to particular emotional appraisals has only slowly lifted off. Cutting's computational content analyses were already mentioned There are scattered empirical studies e.g. of camera angle and editing pace by Kraft (1987) and Lang et al. 1995, respectively. Film technique manuals and critical anayles provide abundant intuitively convincing examples of how to produce emotionally appealing sequences. It is to be expected that computational film analysis will soon enable large scale studies of the use of style and technology in emoting scenes.

Back to emotion and action. As film viewers perceive film scenes to be projections on screen of a fictional world, they understand they cannot act, and their action tendencies are suppressed. Footnote 62 As importantly, one’s inability to act upon a fictional world is a strong trigger for emotional responses involving the imagination of action. Driven by sympathy, viewers desire that protagonists escape from a horrific situation. In their imagination they anticipate and hope that the protagonist is saved by someone or something and if need be by a fictional miracle. Footnote 63 Thus, they experience or exhibit a virtual form of action readiness (Frijda, 1986 ). Footnote 64 This readiness for action can be directly observed in film viewers from their "participatory responses" (Bezdek, Foy & Gerrig, 2013 ) - such as overt expressions of sympathy for a character (see also Tan, 2013b ). However, there is one thing that film-viewers as witnesses invariably do when properly emoted: eagerly watch the events on screen.

Following cognitive film theory further, I consider the emotional experience of film as the sum total of experience of the appraisal, internal and external bodily expressions and changes in action readiness integrated in consciousness in accompanying the sensory intake of units of film.

Film, interest and enjoyment

An account of `film - audience emotion is incomplete if it does not go into the question why we actually take the trouble of watching movies. Münsterberg already wondered how mature people can become so emotionally absorbed in fantasy worlds. Narrative films can be argued to address two basic emotional concerns in particular, curiosity and sympathy (Tan, 1996 ). All sorts of narrative fiction, including film provoke interest by presenting events with uncertain consequences. Thus, they address a basic curiosity , that is a need for novelty, knowing and exploration. Interest is the emotion that responds to appeals involving this concern. Interest in film viewing does have a real action readiness to it referred to above: watch eagerly. Because the response in interest includes spending and focussing attention to specific story-world events, its experience goes hand in hand with absorption. Mainstream film’s narrative is perfectly designed to support a characteristic systematic unfolding of interest as an emotion. Movies continuously present cognitive challenges that viewers know they can meet. Footnote 65 Silvia ( 2006 ) has shown in a greater number of studies that this is the condition for optimal interest. I have referred to the core appraisal of narrative interest as promise of rewarding outcomes , in terms either of desirability for a protagonist or mankind in general, or of coherence, completeness or elegance of a narrative’s structure, or both (Tan, 1996 ). In addition, the prospect of sought emotions, such as excitement, enjoyment and appreciation is as well part of the promise that ongoing film narratives constantly offer. Footnote 66 Interest is closely linked with enjoyment, the primary gratification that movies offer their audience. In the cinema interetst is pleasant because it is fun to entertain anticipations of as yet uncertain story-outcomes. Moreover, every outcome, even if it is unanticipated or unfavorable, is greeted with enjoyment because it answers one's curiosity. (In the case of sad, horrific or otherwise hedonically negative or mixed outcomes, "enjoyment" is not the proper label for the rewarding emotion. We return to the fun of unpleasant emotion in a later section).On a final note, interest in film viewing is a case of narrative interest as a broader category of emotions, but the sensory qualities of the medium are relevant for how interest feels. Curiosity to know is in part a desire for the closure of a propositional narrative structure, but in the cinema we do not only want to know but also to see and hear . The enjoyment of seeing a couple kiss or a heroine return after an odyssee of some sort is in the cinema incomplete when it is not shown. In the cinematic appraisal of interest, an anticipation of embodied completion of our narrative-led imagination is a major ingredient of the promise of reward.

Emotional responses to fiction film worlds

The second concern that movies touch upon is sympathy . That this concern is active throughout the reception of all traditional movies answers the question why film viewers care about damsels, hobbits or gorilla’s in distress. There is a fundamental human need for bonding with others and recognising whatever fictional character as someone 'like us' supposedly suffices for sympathy to arise. Footnote 67 Mainstream films activate the concern to the full as their sympathetic protagonists meet with ups and downs in on the way to their goals. Sympathy-based emotions like disappointment, regret, awe, mirth, suspense, hopes and fears, compassion and sadness occur in response to obstacles or their removal on the way to protagonists realising their projects. Footnote 68 Because these emotions arise in response to events (appraised as desirable or undesirable) in a fictional world, we refer to these emotions as responding emotions . Footnote 69 Some frequently experienced sympathetic responding emotions such as fear, sadness, compassion and being moved, can be empathetic , that is require mentalising a character’s inner life. Said more precisely, empathetic emotion requires that the viewer’s appraisal of any fictional events reflects the perspective of a character; the event is understood from a character’s imagined point of view and with her concerns, and feelings. In its most intense forms, sympathy can look and feel like self-indulgent sentiment . However, there is no point in condemning tears of sadness or joy as silly. The term sentiment is not necessarily pejorative. The appraisal of a character’s suffering or good doing can involve an acknowledgment of its superior measure, notably in relation to the self’s suffering or good doing. In my compassion with or admiration for a beloved character I can feel that her fate is really woeful compared to mine, or that her altruistic achievements make mine totally insignificant. Being moved , awe and having goose bumps are emotional responses accompanying such appraisals (Tan and Frijda, 1997 ; Tan, 2009 ; Wassiliwizky et al., 2017 ; Schubert et al., 2018 ) Footnote 70

However, not every responding emotion requires empathy or sympathy. Footnote 71 The sympathy concern does not only drive our siding with characters and responding emotionally to the ups and downs in their projects. As I proposed (Tan, 1996 ) it can make us invest affectively 'film-long' in characters, on top of going along in their hopes and fears, successes and failures. We are also witnesses of characters’ slower and more profound development into personae we would want them to be. The share of action or plot development relative to that of character differs from one genre to another. Footnote 72 Generally, action movies and especially comedies tend to allow for only minimal character development, whereas the drama genres may indulge into it. In these genres, viewer interest may depend in larger part on characterisation and character development.

Another class of emotions responding to the fictional world are 'spectacular' that is spectacle based . The spectacle of landscapes, buildings, natural objects and artifices, human or animal figures in motion, can surprise us and touch on a sense of beauty and invoke appraisals of harmony, elegance, or serenity. In some genres the spectacle of explosions, injury, cruelty disfiguration, etc. may incite disgust, fear raise emotions. Spectacle-based emotions do not rely on empathy of any depth, their stimulus being the mere view or sound of a fictional scene; they are neither dependent on sympathy. In more traditional terms, image and sound combinations of objects, events, and figures in the fictional world can be emotionally appraised as spectacular, beautiful, sublime, horrific, bizarre, absurd and so on. Amazement, enjoyment, awe (the wow-feeling), entrainment, being moved and aesthetic appreciation are apt labels for ensuing emotions. Like all emotional responses to fiction worlds, spectacle-based emotions can also arise when we read narratives, but in the cinema, they compete conspicuously with plot and character-driven interest and sympathy-based affective response. It seems like the viewer’s witness role is temporarily swapped for a spectator role. Footnote 73 The viewer can identify even further with patterns of motion or sequences of image and sound that lack reference to the film’s story-world. Viewers may contemplate lyrical associations of visuals, sounds, music and symbolic concepts in embodied consciousness as Grodal ( 1997 ) proposed. If story action imaginations give rise to emotions, lyrical associations are responded to with moods, e.g., nostalgic, tense or relaxed ones. The seemingly immediate representations on screen of emotions through camera movements and associative editing editing that Münsterberg described would be examples.

Emotion structure of narrative film

As a way to profile the dynamics of emotion across an entire film I proposed to represent these in a succinct model, the affect structure of a film (Tan, 1996 ). The model represents the course of interest and of responding emotions in time as predicted by theevents as they are subsequently presented by the film. Footnote 74 Generalising across titles, a most general hypothesis is that the level of interest during mainstream movies tends to rise globally. This is because on the way to protagonists’ goals, stakes tend to go up every novel complication. This will lead to increasing promise of reward roughly between the prologue and climax acts. Locally though, interest peaks and dips alternate over subsequent scenes, depending on genre and particular film. Figure 5 displays an example course of interest measured in viewers of the film In for treatment . In this study of emotions induced by a tragic drama on a terminally ill hospital patient, we found that an initial appraisal of the protagonist as increasingly suffering under the yoke of an oppressive hospital regime, was associated with a responding emotion of compassion. After the complication act, the protagonist’s acts of resistance against the hospital’s regime gave way to admiration due to an appraisal of the protagonist’s sense of self-determination. Both measures determined the level of interest measured continuously using a seven-point slider device (Tan and van den Boom, 1992). Affect structures can be more or less generic. That is, responding emotions are just like the plots, characters, and events that prompt these, characteristic for a certain genre. The study of genre-based emotion has been concentrated in research of undesirable effects of watching violence, sensation or horror in entertainment fare, see e.g. a volume edited by Bryant and Vorderer (2006). Psychological research into the role of viewer genre knowledge is on its way (e.g. Tan & Visch, 2009 ).

Continuous interest over the course of In for treatment; N  = 21; from Tan and Van den Boom (1992). Interest was registered every second using a slider rating device. Measurement was validated by self-report interest ratings. Numbers under the abscissa represent subsequent scenes. 1–6: prolog; 7–18: complication, 19–20 development; 24: climax followed by epilog.

The appeal of unpleasant emotions

A brief glance at the success rates of films featuring sad, violent or horrific content illustrates the appeal that unpleasant emotions can have to audiences at large. Münsterberg already objected to vicious effects of violent and repulsive imagery in 1910s photoplays, contents that he observed to be worryingly attractive. The psychology of the film holds various explanations in stock, but none as yet chosen. The best documented proposal is Menninghaus et al.’s distancing-embracing model that stipulates two complmentary mechanisms. One rids painful, disgusting or otherwise unpleasant aesthetic stimuli from an impact that would prevent any enjoyment or appreciation of the stimulus. The other allows for experiences that are 'intense, more interesting, more emotionally moving, more profound, and occasionally even more beautiful' (Menninghaus et al., 2017 , p. 1). The model is meant to explain the prevalence of negative emotion in all art forms, and harbours a great many classical approaches to the issue. Media psychologists have proposed what I think are regulation accounts of the pleasures of negative emotion. An emotion such as horror results from appraisal of monsters etc. as threatening and repulsive, but the emotion itself, too, can be subject to appraisal. Likewise, your crying in the cinema may induce embarrassment upon your realising that it is only a film you are watching. Footnote 75 Serious drama, the contents of which can be appraised as poignant or thought-provoking (Oliver and Hartmann, 2010 ), and more in particular independent arthouse titles that tend to provoke appreciation and elevation rather than enjoyment seem to compensate the most painful experiences they offer by a high instruction or (self-) reflection potential (Oliver & Bartsch, 2013 ). They offer continuous promises of broadening insights or revising one’s views of the world and the self, possibly only materialising to the full long after the show. In my own work I have pointed at the modulating effects of genre schemas (Tan & Visch, 2017) and narrative interest on negative emotions. Footnote 76

In closing the sections on film-induced emotion we need to note that the account of the cognitive appraisal of emoting events given here is simplified. Even straightforward film narratives can have complexities in terms, e.g., of plot lines, or character and narrator perspective that affect the intricacies of emotional events. I refer readers to Oatley’s ( 2012 ; 2013 ) discussion of in this sense more sophisticated appraisals of fictional events. More generally, film psychological research is needed into the use of more complex TOM heuristics in the comprehension of film narrative, and in emotional appraisals of film events.

The conclusion on the psychology of film awareness must be, I think, that the gripping nature of the film experience is as astonishing today as it was to early film audiences. Media psychologists have started to measure it, and cognitive film scholars have forwarded theoretical frameworks for an account of film viewer affect and emotion. But the phenomenology of film has not been expanded by film psychologists beyond the descriptions of what it is like to watch a movie provided in The Photoplay .

The psychology of film as art

Whether or not the awareness of film entails appreciations of artistry can only be a rhetorical question, but the psychology of the film has not explicitly addressed the subject. After Münsterberg and Arnheim hardly any psychologist considered film as an art form at all. And neither have general psychological aesthetics taken film into consideration. The psychology of narrative film as it developed since the 1990’s has addressed the aesthetics of movies, but rather implicitly. We have discussed psychologists’ efforts to explain the natural fluency in the perception of story-events that Münsterberg already found characteristic for the film experience. They pointed at the conventional use of continuity film style. Mainstream cinema’s narration has been demonstrated by cognitive film theorists to be at best marginally self-conscious (Bordwell, 1985 , 2006 ). That is formal features of a film’s composition, style and use of technology are non-salient and subservient to the viewer’s reconstruction of and absorption in a fabula . The viewer’s construction of a story-world is only discretely cued by the narration, and formal or stylistic patterns that do the job tend to escape consciousness to a more than considerable degree (see Tan et al., 2017 ). We could say, I believe, that the psychological aesthetics of popular film is as it stands, first and foremost about absorption , the intense and fluent imagination of being in a fictional world. And it should be added that a psychological aesthetics of forms other than popular narrative fiction film is missing. Available knowledge suffices to propose a psychology of the thriller, the romance drama or the coming-of age film, but not for a psychology of the documentary, the expressionist, the surrealist or the postmodern film, let alone of experimental, avant-garde and other museum film art forms. After all then, at present we are not far removed from Münsterberg’s speculation on the aesthetic experience of theatrical film as intense absorption due to the inner harmony of a film’s parts and conditional on only modest deviations from realistic photo-representations of the worlds that it plays.

However, as we write, everything seems set to embark on research in the film audience’s aesthetic appraisals of movies. We can rest assured that at present 'the inner parts' of mainstream film in terms of contents, style and technology have been well-described by film theorists such as those referred to above. They can help psychologists teaming up with computer vision and hearing specialists to develop computational analyses of 'the inner harmony between the parts'. As a favourable sign of the times we also note a growing interest in the implicit knowledge that the regular film audience has of patterned uses of film style and technology in various forms and genres (see, e.g., Visch and Tan, 2009 ). Moreover, the first attempts have been made to identify the psychological dimensions that underlie film audience aesthetic tastes. Footnote 77 Dimensions of what I called the Artefact emotions , that is the affective evaluations of films as aesthetic products will soon be identifiable from reviews by critics and the film audience at large that are already available in large data repositories. Footnote 78 Large scale highly data-intensive research can be accompanied by smaller scale laboratory studies of whether and how viewers attend to aesthetically relevant patterns of formal and stylistic features. Footnote 79

Concluding remarks

The agenda that Hugo Munsterberg set for the psychology of the film, explaining the film experience through revealing psychological mechanisms underlying it, and accounting for its aesthetic functions is after a century still leading. I believe that psychologists of film have over the century not added new questions, while the ones he posed have been shown to be complex or even resilient. Nonetheless the field has gradually expanded. After the 1970's growth accelerated and today we face what in modesty may be called a surge. Two film-psychological books, Art Shimamura’s Psychocinematics (2013) and Jeffrey Zacks’ Flicker: Your brain on movies ( 2014 ), have recently filled the void left after The Photoplay .

The review of psychological studies into the film experience presented in this contribution is highly selective. It was not meant at all to cover the entire field, if only because we selected achievements from the vast research area of moving images and their perception. This is why the essay is titled 'A psychology of the film' rather than 'The etc.'. Granted its basic limitations, an overview of a century of film psychology could conclude with a comparison with research agenda that was set in Münsterberg’s Photoplay . The typical gripping experience that mainstream movies offer the audience has now come to be characterised as a sense of being absorbed by and quasi-physically present in a film scene that feels like going on as smoothly and continuously as a scene in real life. Considerable progress has been made in understanding how the basic psychological functions attention, perception and memory contribute to viewers’ comprehension of film. An understanding has developed of how attentional, perceptual and cognitive mechanisms dovetail with the solutions and norms of traditional cinemascopy. In the conventional 35 mm theatre set-up, the dark environment where high-density projections extend over the limits of the foveal acuity field, screens are big enough to allow for sufficient stimulation of the peripheral motion-sensitive visual field and the spinning projector shutter makes for smooth stroboscopic movement. Moreover, the visual system is quite resistant against perspective transformations due to less optimal viewing points, probably through extracting invariants under transformation (Cutting, 1986 ). Mainstream narrative continuity film-style ensures a fluent perception and comprehension of a film’s story-world, action, characters and their inner lives. Emotional responses can be explained from the development of the story and the progress of protagonists’ projects.

And yet, a lot less effort has been spent in theoretically elaborating further on what the film experience is. There is a general disbelief that it would involve a mere recognition of events, situations, persons etc. as we know them in the real world. But what exactly the spectator’s imagination contributes to the typical awareness of the film is still mysterious. And how filmic events, and the ways they have been staged, acted, framed, photographed and edited exactly influence and prompt acts of imagination on the part of audiences, has only in part been understood.

Meanwhile, the supply of "photoplays" has immensely multiplied and diversified since 1916, but the mainstream narrative film has by far remained the most popular form. Today’s ubiquitous access to moving images through a multiplicity of screens has made it more urgent than ever for psychologists to understand the experiences associated with extremely different cinematic devices. They range from handheld phones to giant 3-D multiplex screens and surround installations in museums. Canonical set-ups of the cinema also tend to diverge because of networked interaction technologies seeking application in the production, distribution and exhibition of motion pictures. Psychologists of the film can use their current understanding of how audiences experience mainstream cinema as a basis for differentiating what film semiologists call 'dispositives': clusters of production, exhibition and reception practices characterised by specific expectations, attitudes and competences of their end users. Footnote 80

The psychology of film is rapidly developing into an interdisciplinary field. Münsterberg’s psychological study already reflected inspiration from fields far removed from experimental psychology such as the then conventional practice of the photoplay as well as from Aristotelian poetics of the theatre play. In the same vein, current psychologists of film as we have seen, improve their understanding of the perception and cognition of film in a collaboration with experts in the analysis of narration in the fiction film. Advances in current models of film viewer attention featuring narrative cuing are profoundly informed by (historical) film analyses. Footnote 81 Scholars in cognitive film studies, such as those collaborating within the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image are steadily producing in-depth analyses of film at work conjointly with the viewer’s mind. Footnote 82 The same goes for the (more modest) advances made in psychological models of film-produced emotion. Further collaborations with specialists in machine-analysis of image and sound can be expected to add to an objective identification of formal and stylistic film structures, also beyond the domain of traditional mainstream film, 'in the wild' of cyberspace, and in experimental art cinemas.

The technology of measuring psychological responses to film structures (perception, attention, memory and affect) has also developed tremendously since Münsterberg founded the perception lab at Harvard. Gaze tracking, fMRI and TMS have been added to the psychophysical and cognitive response registrations. Integration of large scale image analysis data with behavioural measures obtained in the lab or as 'big data' is the next step in the development of film psychology. The study of integral responses to units of film extending beyond a few seconds entailing entire actions, events, scenes and acts, or even films as a whole, requires new response recording devices and data models. Perhaps it will be feasible within a decade or so to append large emotional response datasets obtained from social media and filmdatabase metadata to computational content analyses described above. We will then be able to categorise films into meaningful clusters, e.g., genres and subgenres based on relations between themes, plots, film style and emotion profiles. Small scale lab experiments can tell us more about what exactly the mind adds to the image on screen and the sound from cinema loudspeakers remains. Let me single out as the leading issue the question how bottom-up and top-down mechanisms interact in producing the film experience. Footnote 83 Diversification of the set-up of in-depth studies is also necessary following the multitude of conventional set-ups of film viewing on various screens and in on-line or 'live'(?) exhibitions.

And just as in 1916, a select but growing minority of researchers in academic, empirical psychology want to understand why and how it is we perceive and what it is like to enjoy movies. They want an understanding because first they are movie-loving psychologists and second they find film a challenging testing ground for fundamental models of attention, perception, memory, imagination, emotion and aesthetics.

A more detailed discussion of the functions in photoplay viewing can be summarised thus: As regards the perception of film scenes, Münsterberg argued that in the cinema depth is seen without spectator’s taking it for real, that movement is perceived not without the spectator’s mind adding the quality of smooth motion to merely seeing a succession of positions. For example, apparent movement of in fact stationary lines is '… superadded by the action of the mind, to motionless pictures' (1916, p. 29). Attention in the cinema concentrates the mind on details that acquire an unusual vividness and become the focus of our impulses and feelings. Close-ups objectify this weaving 'of the outer world into our minds' (p. 39). Attention is characterised by a series of subsequent shifts in its object. Shifts are provided by scene or action details made salient by spatial mise-en-scène, notably actor expression (movement and gestures), and mobile framing. Memory is used at any moment to remember events presented earlier in the film. Just as attention and perception are an instrument of the imagination, memory enables the fusing of events in our consciousness that are physically apart. Münsterberg’s view of the emotions showed similarities with James’ theory on the subject, as it stressed their embodied character; emotions cannot do without behavioural and physiological expressions. Münsterberg proposed that emotions that film audiences experience are portrayed on screen. The viewer’s imagination transforms what they see into their own felt emotion: The 'horror, pain and the joy' that spectators go through are 'really projected to the screen' (p. 53). In addition, he introduced a distinction between what we would refer to today as emotions based on empathy with characters on the one hand, and on the other emotions responding to the scenes they are in.

Münsterberg’s observation of how film expresses the basic psychological functions has been compellingly argued by Baranowski and Hecht’s ( 2017 ) in their excellent review of Münsterberg’s Photoplay .

Even if what we call today automated responses do have a place in the psychological functions, perception, attention, and memory are according to Münsterberg in the end acts of the mind, and imagination is even more so.

The aesthetic experience is grounded in a Kantian conception emphasising the completeness of the work of art in itself, and an explicit denial of the contemplant’s desires or practical needs in it.

This in turn requires that we 'enter with our own impulses into the will of every element, into the meaning of every line and colour and tone. Only if everything is full of such inner movement can we really enjoy the harmonious cooperation of the parts' (p. 73).

This probably not in the least due to the stability of the experimental and social have been on the agenda of the psychology of film ever since. The functions and mechanisms of the mind that experimental research focuses on have globally remained the same, and the interest in aesthetics has not waned.

Constancies in visual perception are disrupted due to the optical and mechanic qualities of film. Examples in point include reduced depth, absence of colour, object shape and volume distortions due to insufficient information on object size or camera’s distance.

A famous example is the ballet sequence in René Clair’s Entr’Act (1924). Filmed through a glass plate on which the dancers move, they are seen from a most unusual angle, at least compared to the canonical views that theatre audiences have, i.e., from below, and from an as unusual distance, i.e., from nearby. So close indeed that their robes fill the entire frame, and the spectator is struck by their expanding contours in the 2D plane of the screen.

To be sure, his treatment of the perception of movement, dynamics and expression in works of all arts, seem to be modelled after the organisational principles the mind uses in shaping the film experience.

Cutting has often convincingly argued that stroboscopic motion is a better label than apparent motion. His definition is 'a series of discrete static images can sometimes render the impression of motion'(Cutting, 2002 , p. 1179)

Why and how we see motion has been as basic to the study of visual perception as questions of perception of colour, depth, and shape. Helmholtz proposed that what we need to explain is how retinal images that correspond one-to one, i.e., optically with a scene in the world are transformed into mental images, or percepts that we experience. In the case of apparent motion, we need to understand in addition how a succession of retinal images are perceived as one or more objects in motion.

By smooth is meant that no transitions or flicker are seen, and no blurring of superposed images occurs. The problem of apparent motion in film has been formulated in this way by the Dutch perception psychologist and filmmaker Emile van Moerkerken in an unpublished chapter written in 1978 . The issue of why and when flickering instead of smoothly projected images are seen has been technically resolved through trial and error. Cinematic projectors need to present at least 24 frames per second if flicker is to be avoided, and higher frequencies, for instance 72 fps are even better (e.g., Anderson, 1996, pp. 54–59). These frequencies are above the human perception system’s critical fusion frequency, at least for the conventional luminance ranges in cinematic projection.

In the late nineteen sixties the organisation of the cortical cell complexes for visual perception in layered columns were identified by neurophysiologists Hubel and Wiesel ( 1959 ). Cells in Brodman areas 17 and 18 were found sensitive to different aspects of motion (e.g., orientation and spatial vs. temporal resolution), while integration into forerunners of motion perception is assumed to take place in areas V4 and MT.

Luminance and colour identification have been shown to interact with the more motion dedicated complexes in delivering impressions of motion, while the phenomenon of perceiving depth from movement has been very well documented.

For example, form-invariant apparent motion—that seems to require somewhat less elementary integration has been shown attributable to specialised MT cells for slower and faster motion (O’Keefe and Movshon, 1998 ). And as another example, Anstis (1980) discovered a system based on comparison of subsequent locations for apparent horizontal motion of a single dot, and another one for the perception of wave-form motion of an array of dots.

For example, it has been reported that test participants accurately perceive velocity of motion of a grating pattern only when they pay attention to its details (Cavanagh, 1992 ).

As another example, tension in a static work of art is perceived due to the brain’s synthesis of forces from implied movements, such as outward-directed tensions perceived in symmetrical geometric shapes. These can be observed in 'gamma movement', Arnheim, 1974 , p. 438.

The presentation times are short (flashes), say two-hundred milliseconds. The objects differ between the two presentations only in spatial position, we refer to these as A1 for object A in position 1, and A2. Depending on the interval between presentations apparent motion can be seen. With a briefest interval simultaneity of objects A1 and A2 is seen; less brief (appr. 100 Ms) makes us see 'pure motion'; that is 'objectless movement'; with still briefer intervals (appr. 60 Ms) we see 'optimal movement' of the object A1 to A2; and with briefest interval partial movement.

Wertheimer believed that perceived motion patterns reflected a short-circuiting between cells in the brain that were successively stimulated.

For example, among Korte’s laws, proposed in 1915, was a rule stating that the ratio of spatial distance between shapes and the interval between successive presentations was constant for the perception of 'good motion', clearly a Gestalt-like pattern. This coupling of the two features obtained in controlled studies, is surprising until today because purely mechanistic intuition would have it that increases in spatial distance would need 'compensation' by briefer inter-stimulus intervals to preserve smooth apparent motion. A related discovery, reported by Kolers (1972, p. 39 also militates against light-hearted use of an analogy with mechanics: Decreasing the spatial distance between successively presented shapes does not necessarily result in better movement.

First, the physiological account resting on 'prewired' neurocircuitry cannot do without integrative operations at a higher level of mental processing involving integration across separate cortical modules. Even if such operations are prewired, they represent contributions of the mind. Second, as importantly, the impact of visual stimulus features has on the perception of movement, and especially more complex forms, have been shown sensitive to control by the will within certain bounds. Third, figural processes in apparent motion appear to be extremely plastic, defying explanations by stimulus factors, as the example of induced motion illustrates.

As an illustration, even a somewhat forgotten proposal by Van der Waals and Roelofs ( 1930 ) according to Kolers, seems to go. They proposed that in apparent motion, the intervening motion is constructively interspersed in retrospect that is, only after the second presentation of the Koler object. And after Kolers' volume on apprent motion, several proposals have been forwarded on possible mechanisms. For example Kubovy and Gepshtein ( 2007 ) demonstrated in two experiments that spatial and temporal distances act either in trade-off or coupled to one another to provide for smooth apparent motion; the one at low speeds and the other at high speeds. None of the proposals have been accepted as the final solution, also because different definitions of the factors or the criterion for motion have been used.

Michotte (1946) attempted with some success to capture configurations of moving objects that would be perceived as instances of causation , a mentally represented concept. For example, block A is seen to 'push' block B forward if A approaches B (that is standing still) with an appropriate speed, and contact time. Alternatively, B will be perceived to 'depart' if some time in contact has elapsed before B moves away from A. In fact, Michotte’s experimental phenomenology was influenced by Brentano who was a major inspiration to the early Gestalt psychologists as well. Another great contribution by Michotte to the psychology of the film was that he was one of the first to analyse the problem of the apparent reality of cinematic scenes that Münsterberg and Arnheim had signalled. His diagnosis was that we see non-real objects, that is shapes projected on the screen. However, we do perceive—physiologically—real movement of these, and this is a condition presumed to be decisive for perceiving reality. Heider and Simmel are known for their demonstration of the inevitability of event, person and story-based schema-based inferences that viewers of simple animated geometric figures tend to make (Heider and Simmel, 1944).

Note that objects are not part of an optic array, as the latter refers to the metrical organisation of patterns of light.

There are certainly limits to the likeness of the dynamical optical flow offered by film images to real world ones. First, the flow is interrupted by cuts, and second the projected image in the cinema constrains the optic flow in a variety of ways. (Thanks to one the anonymous reviewers).

The discussion of Hochberg and Brooks’ psychology of the film is based on an earlier essay (Tan, 2007 ).

Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996a ) provided wonderful examples of the intricate aesthetics of camera movement when filming a human figure in motion, examples that require frequent analyses of filmed dance, or to film dance oneself, as Brooks has done indeed. Movement may be seen where there is actually none, apparent reversals of direction or apparent stasis may all occur, even in parallel. Hochberg and Brooks ( 1996b ) demonstrated that complex movements need to be ‘parsed’ by viewers into components depending on factors such as fixation point and even viewer intentions. Direct realist explanation of the film awareness would soon stumble on degrees of stimulus complexity too high to capture in optical array invariants; input from other cognitive structure-based mechanisms capable of selecting candidates for 'pick-up' would be necessary.

Hochberg ( 1986 ) stated that in some cases only the most complex cognitive efforts could explain an understanding of shot transitions, that could only be conveyed through literary analysis. Here he was probably referring to cases in artistically highest end productions.

For example, Hayhne (2007) criticised Hochberg’s stipulation that mental schemas used in understanding shot transitions cannot be spatially precise or complete. She quoted evidence of the use of self-produced body movements following a mental map with extreme precision.

According to one such theory (the so-called Event Indexing Model, Magliano, Miller & Zwaan, 2001 ) viewers of film like readers of stories generate embodied cognitive models of (story-) situations. These mental models represent sequences of events, people and their goals, plans and actions, in spatiotemporal settings. The situation model is continuously updated while the film proceeds. Updates follow upon the identification of changes in story-entities (e.g., movement of characters or objects), time, causality and intentionality.

This synthetic response by the viewer can be taken as the actual recognition and categorisation of an event or action. Neuroscience research has identified areas of the brain involved in recognising—and 'simulating' actions such as grasping an object, or exhibiting a facial expression, e.g., Hasson et al. (2004).

As an example study, Garsoffky et al. ( 2009 ) demonstrated that the recognition of events by film viewers improved when framing objects or events across shots adheres to viewpoints that are common in real world perception. Other studies tested the notion that movies adhering to this style present viewers with simplified event views that they can readily integrate in an available event schema (e.g., Schwan, 2013 ).

The cueing of attentional shifts to the target portion of screen B can assume distinct forms, such as through match on action, establishing and shot/ reverse shots, and point shot. The attentional shift has carried the conscious experience across the discontinuity in views. The theory is documented by numerous analyses of scene perception, in which analysed shot contents are overlaid with dynamic gaze maps. The model can explain how violations of continuity principles result in less efficient gaze behaviours. Artistically motivated violations are taken seriously, but dealt with as atypical for the canonical set-up.

Bezdek et al. ( 2015 ) report a study in which participants were shown a film scene at the centre of fixation while checkerboard patterns were flashed in the periphery of vision. The results of fMRI analyses showed that activity of peripheral visual processing areas in the brain was diminished with increasing narrative suspense of the scenes, whereas activity in areas associated with central vision, attention and dynamic visual processing increased.

In one experiment, viewers were presented with a sequence from Moonraker in which James Bond jumps out of a plane and can be expected to fall 'safely' onto a circus tent. This high-level event schema-based cognitive expectation was enhanced in one condition but not in another, through providing a written context before the sequence was shown. It turned out that providing context knowledge led to the critical inference and to less surprise, pointing at the functionality of high-level attention cues. However, gaze behaviour did hardly differ between the high-level cued vs. non-cued viewers. Moreover, effects predicted from a tyranny of film analysis of the sequence—that is where viewers looked and what, were much stronger than the subtle effects of high-level cognitive processes.

The computation of visual salience can easily be extended to the case of film by replacing the input image by a series of frames and the output by an array of saliency maps. Furthermore, low-level features such as colour and orientation need to be integrated over successive images into dynamic ones, e.g., changes in orientation, and into motion features.

See: http://bitsearch.blogspot.nl/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html#!/2013/05/saliency-maps-and-their-computation.html (accessed 31 Jan 2018).

For example, an international group from the universities of Brescia and Teesside has recently shown able to predicts movie affect curves that is, dynamic patterns of emotional responses, from low-level features such as colour, motion and sound, while taking into account the influence of film grammar (e.g., sequences of varying shot-types) and narrative elements (e.g., script or dialogue analysis classifications). The analysis of the grammatical and narrative features can be supported by the computer but are not entirely machine-executably algorithmic. The emotional responses were measured using physiological and self-report measures (Canini et al., 2010 ).

In his earlier widely acclaimed work in general visual perception, Cutting continued the Gibsonian ecological approach to the perception of real world scenes, attempting to find formal extraction and coding principles sustaining the direct pick-up of behaviourally relvant information. See, e.g., Cutting ( 1981 ), in which ecological tenets regarding the perception of events based on invariant structures in the information offer of the visual stimulus. This line of research also included cinematic perception. An example is his study on the perception of rigid shapes when viewers are seated at extreme angles vis-à-vis the centre of projection, e.g., front row side aisle (Cutting, 1987 ).

In the essay Cutting lists the cues in the optical array that sustain the perception of distance in the real world, and then elaborates on how filmmakers manipulate depth cues in order for the audience to perceive scenes exactly the way the narrative requires them to.

Following the convenient overview in Brunick et al. ( 2013 ) they are for duration average shot duration in seconds; for temporal shot structure the distribution of shot durations; for movement the degree of difference between pixels in adjacent frames (zero when frames are identical means no movement); for luminance the degree of black vs white of images; and for colour the distribution of hues and degrees of saturation of frames.

For example, in the analyses just mentioned Cutting et al. established in their Hollywood sample an increase of movement between 1905 and 1935 and could relate this finding to film-analytic accounts of stylistic changes supporting growing emotional impact of movies. As another example, consider the well-documented finding that shot duration tends to decrease across the history of popular film. Salt (2009) reported a linear decrease of average shot length. Cutting and Candan ( 2015 ) could use his data and added nuances to the general linear decrease trend that they replicated. One was that different slopes for shot classes obtained, especially in the post 1940s’ Hollywood films, another that shot scale, in particular increasing use of wide angle shots, contributed considerably to the decrease in shot duration.

The climax works towards the minimum as the narrative tends to progress here presenting focused events without disruption, while its scope is wider and shifting in the set-up and epilogue acts. Consistently, during the climax movement is more frequent while shots also tend to be darker compared to the remaining acts. The set-up and epilogue contrast most conspicuously with the climax, while complication and development exhibit steady in-between values for the low-level feature parameters.

They do not manifest physically, but their indexing is perceptually straightforward. One is time shifts, a structural feature. It decreased over the time of a film, in line with the film-narratological notion that a film’s action thickens towards a deadline. Three other higher-level features were more semantic in nature. Character appearances dropped after the set-up. Action shots were most numerous at the end of the set-up and the beginning of the climax, while conversations levelled down during the climax.

Cutting’s ( 2016 ) interpretative qualifications illuminated the stylistic distinctions among the acts. They are most informative and any summarisation would be detrimental to the value of the analyses. To give just one example For example: 'The development also has several characteristics in contrast to the complication: its shot durations are a bit longer (Study 1), it has more noncut transitions (Study 2), and it is dimmer (Study 4) so that by its end the luminance falls to the psychological and literal “darkest moment” for the protagonist' (Cutting, 2016 , p. 24). I encourage the reader interested in the stylistic comparison of the acts to reading the original article.

An example is an analysis by Cutting et al. ( 2011 ) of 150 historical films were indexed as to movement and shot duration. They observed a decrease of movement with decreasing shot durations, and reasoned that a basic perceptual mechanism could be at the basis of this correlation: people can only follow so much movement in a duration-limited view. The researchers then analysed newer films that far exceeded the maximum movement-to- shot duration ratio, and it was found from the public discourse around the titles that viewers could not cope with the overload stimulation.

Dimensions captured in the instrument include comprehension of the narrative, a sense of being in the story-world, emotional responses to story-world events and characters, and attentional focus on story-world details. The remaining experience concepts refer to experiences of entertainment or story-worlds excluding awareness of a narrative or any other constructions underlying these.

Hinde ( 2017 ) has recently presented evidence showing that self-reported presence is positively related to response latencies in a dual attention task in which participants were required to respond to a distractor signal while watching a movie. This result supports the notion of absorption and loss of awareness of the real world.

Variants of presence stress embodied apparent reality of the portrayed world, and the loss of awareness of mediation. Loss of awareness and apparent reality point to the illusion of being absorbed by the story-world. Presence seems the most immediate experiential outcome of natural or real-world scene perception and event comprehension mechanisms. It was implied in Gibson’s summary of the awareness of film: 'We are onlookers in the situation, …, we are in it and we can adopt point of observation within its space'.

In this respect, the concept of transportation builds on Gerrig’s ( 1993 ) seminal work on the experience of narrative worlds. Transportation requires a 'deictic shift' (Segal, 1995) from the real to the story-world (Segal, 1995 in Bussele and Bilandzic, 2009 ). When the narrative ends the spell is broken and the audience returns into the previously inaccessible real world.

In line with general psychological research on empathy, a distinction has been made between embodied simulation of film character feeling and a cognitively more demanding forms of empathy with characters (e.g., Tan, 2013a , b ). Complex forms of empathy that require TOM cognition presuppose that there is an awareness of the distinction between self and other. The highest degrees of absorption by characters (measured by items such as 'I became the character') seem characterised by a complete fusion of the viewers’ self with the character and are properly referred to as identification (e.g., Cohen, 2001 ). In this case, viewer emotion is identical with character emotion.

For example, cinematic techniques of selective or emphatic framing of character expression can lead to stronger mimicry or embodied simulation on the part of the viewer than observation of a person in the real world would allow (e.g., Coplan, 2006 ; Raz et al., 2013 ).

The less demanding forms are based on automated embodied simulation or mirroring, for instance mimicry. Complex forms involve mentalising, or reasoning supported by general Theory of Mind schemas and inferencing. The most demanding occur when the film’s narration withholds information about a character’s inner life in relation to story-events as in some arthouse films (Tan, 2013a , b ). Mentalizing has like cognitively less demanding forms of empathy been shown to be affected by film style. Rooney and Bálint ( 2018 ) recently demonstrated that close-ups of the face stimulate the use of TOM in the perception of characters.

Identification has been empirically observed and isolated from other forms of absorption by Cohen (2001); Tal-Or and Cohen ( 2010) ; Bálint and Tan (in press).

In an attempt to qualify what it is like to be absorbed in a film, Bálint and Tan (2015) synthesised a summarising dynamic image schema, from a study of film viewers’ reports on their own experience of absorption while watching a film. Image schemas are culturally shared embodied cognitive structures that have been identified by cognitive linguists and are hypothesised to underlie cognition and experience and are more specifically used in metaphorical thinking and use of language. The schema entails the viewer’s self-travelling into the center of the story-world. The self exerts forces to remain inside the story-world, and is taken there in some cases notably by the author. In Bálint and Tan’s study, readers of novels turned out to use the same image schemas to describe their experience as film viewers.

It is noteworthy that Münsterberg considers the activity of the basic functional mechanisms perception, attention and memory as consisting of 'acts', rather than responses as it would become common in mainstream experimental psychology, see, e.g., p. 57. 'Imagination' refers to acts resulting in 'products of the active mind' (p. 75) in particular memories, associations and emotions added to perceptions as 'subjective supplements' (p. 46).

For an overview of current cognitive emotion theories see Oatley and Laird ( 2013 ).

Through procedures such as suggestion and juxtaposition of fictional elements and perspectives, and due to strong coherence of elements, simulations are as engaging as to allow for recipients’ explorations of social situations, involving the self. This results in emotions ranging from the more basic to the social and culturally sophisticated type.

The stages correspond to Oatley’s ( 2013 ) direct, imaginative and self-related modes of appraisal in film-induced emotion.

There is some literature on the affective potential of mainstream film techniques. See for example experiments on camera angle and image composition on emotional appraisal of objects and characters such as weakness, tenseness, dominance or strength reported in Kraft ( 1991 ), and an overview of formal and presentation features of media messages in relation to their emotional effects by Detenber and Lang ( 2011 ).

This capacity has the obvious adaptive advantage of learning proper responses to critical situations before they are met in the actual world. The same point has been made by Currie ( 1995 ); see also Currie and Ravenscroft ( 2002 ). See also Tan ( 2008 ) on pretense play as exercising emotions and adaptive responses in film viewing. My position on the issue of the authenticity of emotion in response to fictional narrative is opposed to Walton (1990) who proposed that make-believe worlds can only induce 'as-if emotions'.

Neuropsychological accounts of film viewer emotions, such as those by Grodal (2009) and Zacks’ ( 2014 ) emphasise suppression of actions such as fight or flight, by prefrontal circuits following appraisals, e.g., of threats or provocations. In my related application of the cognitive theory to film viewing, viewers can experience a tendency to flee as an initial tendency, due to automated mimicry or simulation.

An attempt to measure virtual forms of emotional action readiness in response to several film genres was reported in Tan ( 2013a , b ).

In the end virtual action responses in the cinema should be understood as an example of the situatedness of emotion in general. (See Griffith & Scarantion, 2009 ). The conventional set-up of the cinema positions spectators as witnesses to fictional events and appraisals, experiences, expressions and action readiness take shape according to the cinematic situation.

In the end, viewers know on the basis of their narrative and genre schemas, the film will provide answers to extant questions they have underway.

Needs of mood management and the occurrence of emotions that help to improve moods have been shown to explain preference for entertainment products such as movies (Zilmann, 2003).

Sympathy for mainstream protagonists is probably rather immediately induced by our felt similarity and familiarity with them, and more especially in terms of moral values (Zillmann, 2000 ).

The nature of the events and their outcomes corresponding to ups and downs in the life of a protagonist vary from one genre to another. For example, the action heroine meets with assaults on her life and deals blows to her stalker; the romance protagonist with separation and reunion. See also Zillmann’s theory of the enjoyment of drama.

I have introduced these emotions earlier (Tan, 1996) under the heading of Fictional World emotions or F emotions, because they are responses to events in a fictional world. F emotions include empathetic and non-empathetic emotions. Non-empathetic emotions can either be based on sympathy, for example, when we fear that a bomb will explode to the harm of a protagonist, or not based on sympathy. Awe induced by the sight of a sublime landscape would be an example. F-emotions are defined in opposition to A emotions. The latter category consists of responses to the film as a human-made artefact instead of a fictional world produced in the viewer’s imagination.

The point has been made in Tan and Frijda ( 1997 ) and Tan ( 2009 ), and more recently underscored in psychophysiological research using film by Wassiliwizky et al. ( 2017 ). Schubert et al. ( 2018 ) refer to the emotion as kama muta a socio-relational emotion of feeling closeness when an intensification of communal sharing relations is appraised. In the study just referred to such moments had been analysed in film fragments.

An example is the fear we have when we watch a horror monster in a view not aligned with any character’s, or without a character being in the neighbourhood of the monster.

See, for example, study of interest during character vs. action development oriented films Doicaru (2016, Ch. 2).

See for empirical comparative analyses of absorbed modes of witnessing drama and detached modes of spectatorship in watching nature documentaries Tan ( 2013b ).

Films are segmented (from larger to smaller units) in acts, scenes and events. All subsequent events induce interest. Every scene offers answers or matches to anticipations induced earlier, leading to enjoyment. Enjoyment tends to reinforce interest—as it stimulates intake and rewards past efforts. Every scene, too, induces novel questions and affective anticipations, keeping interest at least alive.

Some researchers of media entertainment refer to such regulatory reappraisals as meta-emotions (Bartsch et al., 2008). Positive gratifications may be derived from such reappraisals and associated emotions. Viewers of sad drama may appreciate their own moral stance that transpires through their experience of a character’s losses and suffering from injustice. Horror lovers may like the emotion because they explicitly seek it, and younger male audiences of extremely violent films have been shown to test, and pride themselves on their coping abilities (Hill, 1997). A related act of emotion regulation is male viewers’ display of protective attitudes towards their female company during horror shows (Zillmann and Weaver, 1997).

In Tan ( 1996 ) I proposed that, in contrast to aversive situations witnessed in real life, popular fiction scenes on separation, isolation, violence, terror and horror and so on are due to their being part of a story always signal that we are in medias res ; the narrative is to be continued, we are curious to know where it is heading, and it is virtually impossible to completely abort expectancies and imaginations of a turn to the positive. Entertaining these is in itself not unpleasant, especially when viewers are open to the possibility that they can learn from the unpleasant events.

Doicaru (2016) reviewed general models of aesthetic appreciation as to their suitability for explaining aesthetic appreciation of film. She reported a validation study of a measurement instrument in which five general factors were identified that may be used to describe dimensions of aesthetic appraisal in film viewing. They were Cognitive stimulation, Negative emotionality, Self-reference and Understanding. A corpus of films from different genres and aesthetic categories (e.g., mainstream, arthouse and experimental were used, and according audiences were involved.

Movies can move us not only in our role of witnesses of events in a fictional world, but also as artefacts made by filmmakers with some formal intention in mind; appreciation of visual beauty etc. are an example. They have the construction of the artefact as their object, and need to be distinguished, as artefact emotions from emotional responses to witnessed events in fictional worlds. They are aesthetic emotions because they involve appraisals of artefact features, such as form, style, use of technology and implied meaning. Untrained audiences can recount their artefact emotions: Professional critics can add elaborations of the appraisals they made while viewing. They have as their object the complex of film form, use of style and technology and intended or unintended meanings. We can further our understanding of appraisals in Artefact emotions using such intuitions available in critical film analyses. They are massively represented in internet user groups like Youtube and Metacritics. Machine learning algorithms are now being developed to extract and categorise emotions from film forums, and differentiate both films and target audiences, see, e.g., Buitinck et al. ( 2015) .

A few example studies on effects of foregrounding procedures in narrative film and their effects on cognitive strategies and aesthetic appreciation can be found in Hakemulder ( 2007 ) and Bálint et al. ( 2016 ).

The concept has developed over the past three decades, see Casetti ( 2015 ). I have freely summarised meanings to fit the purpose of sketching a research agenda for psychologists.

The large project started by Bordwell et al. (1985) on the historical poetics of American mainstream cinema, already have provided psychological research into the mechanisms underlying the film experience with major concepts and reference norms for conventional structuring of film narratives and their stylistic parameters. Among these are continuity, spatiotemporal segmentation and stylistic emphasis.

Interested readers should regularly consult the society’s scholarly journal Projections .

In the role of top-down influences I emphatically include the Münsterbergian acts of imagination on the part of the spectator.

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The Silence of the Lambs

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The 17 Best Movies About Psychology, Ranked

Cinema has long been fascinated with the human mind, offering a wide range of films that delve into its complexities. When discussing the best movies about psychology, this list spans psychological thrillers, dramas, horror, and more. These films captivate audiences by exploring themes of mental illness, psychological manipulation, and the intricate workings of the human psyche.

Take The Silence of the Lambs , for instance. This psychological horror-thriller delves deep into the minds of both a brilliant FBI trainee and a manipulative genius, resulting in a chilling narrative that lingers long after the credits roll. Another classic is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest , a gripping drama that offers a poignant look at the mental health care system and the struggles of those confined within it. Both films offer profound insights into psychology through their unforgettable characters and compelling storylines.

Now it's your turn to weigh in. Which movies involving psychology have left the most significant impact on you? We've compiled a list of these thought-provoking films, and we need your votes to determine which ones truly stand out. Cast your vote to help us highlight the most compelling cinematic explorations of the human mind. Your input will ensure that the best in psychological cinema gets the recognition it deserves.

The Breakdown: Rookie FBI agent Clarice Starling is given probably the worst assignment ever: stopping a heinous serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill. In order to do that, she has to interview an even more heinous serial killer named Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter, who’s also Buffalo Bill’s ex-psychiatrist. This turns into a game of cat-and-mouse in which it’s never quite clear who’s manipulating whom. Clarice does nab Buffalo Bill, but Lecter escapes anyway. 

Why It’s Worth Watching: It’s just the third movie in cinematic history that scored all five of the major Academy Awards, 27 years after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest achieved the same feat. What’s perhaps most impressive is that this is actually the second film adaptation of a Thomas Harris novel about his signature character, after the 1986 Michael Mann entry Manhunter . Silence of the Lambs sidestepped that baggage, elevating the source material to deliver an all-time classic. 

How Does This Mess With Your Head: A great thriller, and a great psychological thriller in particular, keeps the audience in suspense until the final frame. On one level, Silence of the Lambs is an expertly crafted hunt for a serial killer. But the element of an even greater evil in Hannibal Lecter adds an element of danger to such a degree that the audience never feels safe. You never know quite how much Hannibal knows. Did he groom his former patient Jame Gumb to become Buffalo Bill? Was it all a contingency plan to help spring him from prison? The film raised questions that still remain unanswered.

• Actors : Jodie Foster, Anthony Hopkins, Scott Glenn, Ted Levine, Anthony Heald
• Released : 1991
• Directed by : Jonathan Demme

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

• United Artists

The Breakdown: The 1975 drama based on the novel by Ken Kesey follows R.P. McMurphy, a longtime criminal who convinces the state of Oregon to commit him to a mental institution, thinking he’ll have an easier time there than in jail. Soon, he comes to sympathize with the inmates, whom he believes are victims of the system and not insane. But when he tries to help them rebel and pursue happiness, it leads to deadly consequences. 

Why It’s Worth Watching: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was just the second film to win the Academy Awards for best picture , best actor, best actress, best director, and best screenplay. While Jack Nicholson’s star-making performance cemented him as one of the best actors of all time, Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched is one of the most terrifying movie villains of all time . 

How Does This Mess With Your Head: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest asks an age-old question about mental illness: are supposedly mentally ill people really ill, or is it the way society treats them. While it might offer a dated depiction of mental illness by suggesting that it’s just something that can be inflicted on an otherwise healthy person, it still raises questions that are thought-provoking today. On top of that, McMurphy is a complicated character. Does he “help” his fellow inmates because he has their well-being in mind, or are they just weapons in his lifelong war against the system?

• Actors : Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Brad Dourif, William Redfield, Michael Berryman
• Released : 1975
• Directed by : Milos Forman

• Universal Pictures

The Breakdown: In 1996, a virus wipes out most of humanity. In 2035, a convict named James Cole is sent back in time to investigate the origins of the virus, which is believed to be the handiwork of a militant eco-terrorist organization, the Army of the 12 Monkeys. However, everything is not quite as it seems, and the film’s events force Coke to consider whether he might just be insane. In the end, he uncovers a conspiracy of a far higher order, but is powerless to stop it. 

Why It’s Worth Watching: It’s a Terry Gilliam movie , which means thought-provoking surrealism with a hefty dash of humor. It also boasts a winning cast including Bruce Willis, Brad Pitt, Madeleine Stowe, and Christopher Plummer. 12 Monkeys is considered a classic in both the sci-fi and psychological thriller genres, enough to warrant a TV remake on SyFy.

How Does This Mess With Your Head: Here we have a movie that blends two mind-bending subjects, time travel and mental illness. Time travel is already a thorny topic in fiction because it invites all sorts of questions about cause and effect. Adding mental illness to the equation only further complicates things. It’s the kind of movie that needs multiple viewings to be fully appreciate. 

• Actors : Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, Jon Seda
• Released : 1995
• Directed by : Terry Gilliam

The Breakdown: Three teenagers are taken hostage by a man named Kevin, who has 23 different personalities. While Kevin goes about his daily life trying to get treatment for his affliction, the teens attempt to survive by appealing to his different personalities for help. Everything comes to a head when he manifests a cannibalistic 24th personality, The Beast.

Why It’s Worth Watching: It really depends on your love for director M. Night Shyamalan. While this film does include a classic Shyamalanian twist, it’s not nearly as contrived as some of his others. James McAvoy’s performance as Kevin and many of his alter egos certainly merits checking out, too. 

How Does This Mess With Your Head: This film doesn’t quite keep you guessing like others. The entire time, it’s clear who’s the villain and who’s the victim, even if the villain looks and acts differently in nearly every scene. While other films use dissociative identity disorder to subvert reality, this one uses it to present a villain who’s unpredictable.

• Actors : James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson, Jessica Sula
• Released : 2016
• Directed by : M. Night Shyamalan

• Warner Bros. Pictures

The Breakdown: In a world where it’s possible to infiltrate people’s dreams to subconsciously alter people’s minds, Dom Cobb has a problem. He’s a gifted dream cracker, but he’s haunted by the death of his wife and the loss of his children. His latest mission requires him to conduct corporate espionage by tampering with the mind of the heir to a multi-national corporation, but along the way he must overcome his demons. 

Why It’s Worth Watching:  Cristopher Nolan's movies have earned more than $5 billion globally for a reason, and this is widely considered to be his masterpiece. It also features an all-star cast.

How Does This Mess With Your Head: At its core, Inception is a simple heist movie. But the specifics make it one of the most complexly plotted movies of the 21st century. For most of the film, Nolan juggles four different timelines, including waking reality and three levels of consciousness, plus flashbacks and alternate mental realities, too. By the end, it’s unclear whether Cobb returns to the real world or not. 

• Actors : Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe
• Released : 2010
• Directed by : Christopher Nolan

A Beautiful Mind

The Breakdown: A biographical look at the life of John Nash, a mid-20th century American mathematician who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. While high-level mathematical concepts like cryptography are relatively simple for Nash, more mundane situations like dating are not. Eventually, Nash is confronted with the possibility that his high-stakes lifestyle involving Soviet espionage is largely the product of his affliction, and that most of his “colleagues” are figments of his imagination. From then on, Nash’s greatest challenge is overcoming his own hallucinations. 

Why It’s Worth Watching: A Beautiful Mind gives a compelling look at an historical figure who was previously unknown to most audiences, using Nash’s mental illness as a unique angle to explore his story. It also won four Academy Awards, including best director for Ron Howard and best picture.

How Does This Mess With Your Head: A Beautiful Mind utilizes Nash’s condition to present a story that’s far different than most biopics. Just like Nash himself, the audience is left in the dark about the reality of the world around him until well into the story. When Nash’s concept of reality is fundamentally altered, the audience similarly has to question everything they thought they knew.

• Actors : Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg
• Released : 2001
• Directed by : Ron Howard

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Psychology Spot

All About Psychology

30 Unmissable psychological movies

Psychological movies are a window that opens the Seventh Art to mental disorders or maladaptive states that unbalance us. Unfortunately, many fail to escape the stereotypes and cliches that turn characters into caricatures.

However, when there is a good research work at the base, psychological movies can leave a deep mark, bringing us closer to a different reality that is worth knowing, deepening and understanding. If we add to this a good performance, we have all the necessary letters so that these works become authentic cult movies.

1. Instinct (1999)

With Anthony Hopkins and Cuba Gooding, Jr. sharing the starring roles, it could not help but generate great expectations and the truth is that this movie has been able to fulfill them completely. Cuba Gooding, Jr. is a young and promising psychiatrist who tries to delve into the secrets of the mind of an anthropologist who has been accused of killing and wounding alleged park rangers. However, what could be a routine examination in a prison, becomes a trip to the darkest zone of the society, where our desire for power and control are questioned. A film that does not leave anyone indifferent, especially for the questions it generates.

2. A Beautiful Mind (2001)

He was preceded by the homonymous novel by Sylvia Nasar, who had been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and this time the movie was no less. In fact, it won the Oscar for Best Movie with three more. Russell Crowe plays John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize in Economics suffering from schizophrenia. The movie is an exciting journey towards the mysteries of this disease, it lets us glimpse the darkest stages but it is also an ode to hope, since in the end it tries to deprive schizophrenia of the negative halo with which our society has covered it.

3. K-Pax (2001)

There are movies that I never get tired of seeing and this is one of them, perhaps because all of us who have been so close to mental illness have asked ourselves on more than one occasion who has “reality” in his hand. Precisely, that is the theme of the movie: Kevin Spacey, who plays a patient apparently afflicted with some kind of psychosis, says he comes from another planet and at some point he will leave Earth. Jeff Bridges, the psychiatrist, tries to make contact with reality but while he treats him, inside the psychiatric hospital, his convictions begin to falter.

4. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

With Jack Nicholson as starring, backed by an excellent Danny DeVito and an impeccable Louise Fletcher, it is not strange that this movie has become the second to obtain the five main prizes of the Academy. His pace is a bit slow at first but then he catches us with a crescendo of emotions. Almost the entire film takes place in a psychiatric hospital, where they keep Jack Nicholson to assess whether he really suffers from a mental illness or is faking it, since he has been accused of rape. With this story, sympathetic and heartbreaking at the same time, we are immersed in the conflicts of a psychiatric institution. Was Jack Nicholson a free spirit who succumbed to the pressure of inflexible rules or did he really suffer from a psychiatric disorder?

5. The Black Swan (2010)

Starring Natalie Portman (who won the Oscar for her performance), Mila Kunis and Vincent Cassel, it is one of those movie you hate or love, there are no middle terms, as in all Darren Aronofsky movies. Exhausted by the pressure of her career as a dancer and the competition of Mila Kunis, Natalie Portman begins to see how her physical and mental forces are diminishing while her darker side begins to emerge until she suffers a real psychotic outbreak.

6. The Experiment (2001)

This German movie is based on Zimbardo’s famous prison experiment in the early 1970s. It is a great film where you can appreciate with absolute precision the changes that are happening inside people: the prisoners and the guardians. The relationship established between one and the other encourages us to reflect on social roles, norms and the very nature of the human being.

7. Good Will Hunting (1997)

This movie comes with an unbeatable presentation: 9 nominations to the Oscars and, if that were not enough, among its protagonists we find Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Robin Williams. Matt Damon is a bright but low-class young man who wastes his talent by working as a janitor at a university (MIT). One day he solves a complex mathematical problem and a teacher of the school takes it under his tutelage. However, when the young man faces the possibility of going to jail, they practically force him to see Robin Williams, a very peculiar psychiatrist who manages to find the best way to reach the young person and help him resolve his conflicts. The funny thing is that also the psychiatrist isn’t free of ghosts and in this unusual therapeutic relationship, they begin to emerge.

8. Girl, Interrupted (1999)

This movie has a good cast of stars, among which are Winona Ryder, Whoopi Goldberg, Brittany Murphy and Angelina Jolie, who won an Oscar for best supporting actress. In the film you can see various psychiatric disorders, from sociopathy to bulimia, not forgetting severe depression and borderline personality disorder. However, the most interesting thing is that the movie was based on the memoirs of Susanna Kaysen, who was a patient in a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, which is precisely the time in which the movie takes place.

9. Shutter Island (2010)

Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, it is one of those movies that you hate or love but to know it, you will have to reach the end. In the film Leonardo DiCaprio arrives on an island where a psychiatric center is located to investigate a supposed murder but to the same extent that the plot advances, everything gets complicated and the memories of the past come to the mind of the policeman to remind him of a murder that he committed himself. However, DiCaprio refuses to accept his share of responsibility and constantly removes what he considers to be only disturbing dreams. At a certain point, the movie becomes predictable but do not abandon it because the last scene makes all the time invested in it worthwhile.

10. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

I do not like violent movies but if I’m going to talk about psychological movies and forget this title I commit a serious mistake. In fact, I myself succumbed to the appeal of its main actors: Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins, the latter is a clever psychiatrist who is imprisoned, to which Jodie Foster appeals asking for help to catch a serial killer. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that it was the third film to reach the five main Academy awards, so it is always worth spending a few hours on it.

11. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

Inspired by the novel “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” written by Jean Dominique Bauby, this movie that won 4 Oscar nominations is one of those stories that leave no one indifferent when asking ourselves many questions about life. The protagonist is the writer himself, who was the former editor of Elle magazine, who as a result of an accident is completely paralyzed, unable to eat, talk, or breathe without assistance. He could only move one eye, which became his window of communication with the rest of the people, and with which, letter by letter, he dictated this book.

12. The Aviator (2004)

Directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, this movie recreates the life of Howard Hughes, pioneer of aviation. It focuses on a particularly dark and prolific period of his career, when he piloted the prototypes of airplanes that he designed and at the same time produced films in Hollywood. This work, which won 5 Oscars, takes us by the hand to the hell in which Hughes went, who suffered an obsessive-compulsive disorder that led him to completely isolate himself from the world.

13. Silver Lining Playbook (2012)

Starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, tells the story of a young man who returns home with his parents after eight months locked in a psychiatric hospital for assaulting his wife’s lover. With a diagnosed bipolar disorder, his main goal is to recover his ex-wife demonstrating that he has overcome everything and has a positive attitude. The movie, which won an Oscar award, allows us to glimpse the difficulties and emotional conflicts of all its characters, not only the protagonist and, although the end is quite predictable, its message is not less important: each cloud has a crack where it lets in light, which is what its original title in English means: Silver Linings.

14. The Machinist (2004)

This psychological thriller, starring an almost unrecognizable Christian Bale due to its extreme thinness, is as disturbing as interesting. The story centers on a mechanic who works as a factory worker but suffers from insomnia for a year, which affects his physical and mental health. Little by little, this inability to rest, which in the end is discovered to what is due, is taking its toll, triggering a series of psychotic symptoms that gives a vertiginous rhythm to the film. The story is a psychological cocktail in which flashbacks of post-traumatic stress are mixed with paranoia caused by lack of sleep, all framed in a dissociative personality disorder.

15. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Considered by many to be the “psychological movie par excellence”, this work by Stanley Kubrick is based on the homonymous novel. It is not suitable for all tastes, but its staging and how to approach the issues is still so shocking when it was released as now. Set in a dystopian society marked by an escalation of youth violence, it addresses numerous psychological issues, from the antisocial personality disorder to the behavioral techniques (aversion therapy) that were actually used in psychiatry to eliminate sadistic impulses. The problem is that these techniques do not eliminate the causes but only repress the effects.

16. Like Crazy (2016)

Beatrice, embodied by Valeria Bruni, is a talkative countess who is convinced of belonging to the intimate circles of world political leaders. In a psychiatric institution, where she is patient, she meets Donatella, played by Micaela Ramazzotti, a tattooed, vulnerable and introverted young woman with whom she apparently has no points in common. However, the lives of both women intertwine as they embark on a journey to the pursuit of happiness. With many crazy moments, happy and full of energy it hides the deep melancholy, heartbreaking sadness and existential emptiness of both women. The interesting thing about this multi-award winning psychological movie is that it allows us to approach mental problems from a more positive perspective, without hiding the traumas and the responsibility of society and of everyone with those people that the system has regurgitated.

17. Hombre mirando al sudeste (Man Facing Southeast (1986)

K-pax is a remake of this extraordinary psychological movie from Argentine. The drama takes place in a mental sanatorium in Buenos Aires, where one of the protagonists, Ramtés, claims to have been sent from another planet to analyze human stupidity. The psychiatrist diagnoses him as paranoid but little by little he begins to doubt his diagnosis and the efficacy of asylums. His reflexive dialogues, together with the interesting empathy shown by Ramtés with the other patients, turn this work by Eliseo Subiela into a starting point to question many things about our existence and society. Can we call “crazy” someone who says that “nature only allows very slow development. It favors more easily a change of species than a change of consciousness”?

18. Requiem for a Dream (2000)

This psychological movie is inspired by Hubert Selby Jr’s novel of 1978 and becomes a journey, sometimes suffocating and sometimes delirious, by the decline of four characters sunk in solitude and obsessed with their dreams that end up trapped in addiction. On the one hand, we find Sara Goldfarb, played by Ellen Burstyn, an addict to television, food and pills to lose weight. It is the mother of Harry, played by Jared Leto, who ends up sunk in his addiction to cocaine, with his girlfriend and his best friend. That life of dreams, failures, obsessions and addictions can find a strange harmony with our own goals and disappointments, becoming a bitter criticism of the values that our society sometimes transmits.

19. We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)

This psychological movie is the adaptation to the cinema of the homonymous novel by Lionel Shriver. It tells the story of a mother played by Tilda Swinton who never connects with her son, who seems to suffer from an antisocial personality disorder. It is a heartbreaking and dramatic film that puts us face to face with many of our preconceived ideas about motherhood and the mother-child relationship. The protagonist does what she can, but it is not enough. To what extent should a mother strive when her love is not reciprocated? How far can an unloved child go? Without maudlin resources, but by stroke of action, this movie is a portrait of the deterioration of the mind and relationships, becoming a psychological blow to our belief that there is no innate evil, with an unexpected end.

20. Her (2013)

With an Oscar for the best original script, we can understand why this award when we see this disturbing, but not very fanciful psychological movie. Set in the near future, its protagonist, Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, is a lonely man who works writing letters for people who cannot write them. After finishing a relationship, he decides to try a new and advanced operating system that adapts to each user becoming his assistant. What begins as a trasactional relationship, ends in love, a love that isolates. At first nobody understands Theodore but then the software is extended and many other people begin to maintain a special relationship with that virtual assistant. The film, sensitive and nostalgic at times, allows us to put ourselves in the skin of the character, but also makes us question whether that is the solution we want for our loneliness. The loneliness and incomprehension that has been established with technology must be “solved” at the stroke of more technology?

21. American Beauty (1999)

This movie, by American director Sam Mendez, shows us how we often engage in a struggle with ourselves and others to find a place in society that gives meaning to our lives. It encourages us to reflect on how we can become victims of our expectations and slaves to social goals, all through the lens of its protagonist, Lester Burnham, played by Kevin Spacey. This man in middle adulthood is mired in an existential crisis, he feels trapped in his life not finding how to achieve the goals he was supposed to achieve. In a way, the movie teaches us that it is we who have the power to start and end the situations that overwhelm us. And it encourages us to reflect on that desire to fit into a society at all costs, a desire that can turn against us.

22. Someone, somewhere (2019)

This French drama directed by Cédric Klapisch and starring François Civil, Ana Girardot and Eye Haïdara is one of those intimate psychological movies with which many young people or even adults can feel deeply identified. Its protagonists live in Paris, surrounded by people, but at the same time extremely alone. Victims of a hyperconnected world, they experience the onslaught of loneliness and liquid relationships that end up being superficial. The young man soon develops depression, largely aggravated by a feeling of guilt that drags from his past. However, they both manage to make their way in that urban jungle and find the company they need so much.

23. Memento (2000)

“You lie to yourself to be happy. . . There is nothing wrong with that, we all do it. Who cares if there are some details that you would rather not remember?” Says Teddy, one of the characters in this movie directed by Christopher Nolan that has become a classic of psychological cinema. The story centers on Leonard, a man who suffers a brain trauma after a stroke that causes him anterograde amnesia, so he cannot store new memories and forget what he was doing after a few minutes. The peculiar narrative, at the blow of analepsis and prolepsis, with black and white scenes, can generate the same confusion experienced by its protagonist, being aware that we are always missing something to understand what is happening. And it makes us question who we would be and what our life would be like if we did not have the common thread of memory.

24. I am Sam (2001)

This excellent psychological movie tells the story of a man with a mental disability played by an excellent Sean Penn. The problem begins at age 7, when Lucy, the daughter, begins to overcome the father’s mental capacity and the State questions his capacity to educate his daughter. Then he must face a legal battle to maintain custody of his daughter, with the help of a lawyer, played by Michelle Pfeiffer. It is, therefore, a movie that touches our most sensitive fibers, which tells us about the will power and motivation that help a person to break all limits. And it also tells us about the power of affective bonds in early childhood education. And that sometimes, the heart is worth more than the brain.

25. Who you think I am (2019)

“With age, I lose less time trying to please people”, acknowledged Juliette Binoche, the protagonist of this intimate drama with which many people can feel identified. Abandoned by her husband and in the midst of an existential crisis due to social pressures to stay beautiful, she creates a fake Facebook profile simulating being a young dancer. Through this profile, she tries to recover lost love, illusion and her physicality. The situation, however, soon becomes uncontrollable, generating anxieties and fears. Meanwhile, Binoche goes to a psychotherapist who helps her understand why she denies her age and rejects the passage of time on her body.

26. The specials (2019)

With a great Vincent Cassel and a cast no less exceptional, this film tells the difficult reality of autistic children and adolescents. In charge of two non-profit organizations, the protagonists train young people to be caregivers of those cases that no one wants to deal with since the current social system assumes a supervisory and moralizing role, but washes its hands, ignoring its responsibilities. . The work is about the drama represented by the most severe and less peaceful autism, a very harsh universe that it manages to approach with great realism, from empathy and even with a pinch of hilarity to introduce ourselves to truly extraordinary people.

27. Hillbilly Elegy (2020)

Everyday moments and rural environments are combined with drug and alcohol addiction, spiced up with emotional manipulations in a family drama in which the interpretive duel of a masterful Glenn Close and a no less superb Amy Adams stands out. Gabriel Basso, the young protagonist, is torn between moving on with a life that is projected to be successful or paying attention to family problems that drag him into the past. The archetypal characters may detract a bit from the film’s brilliance, but if you look closely you will see that they are full of subtle nuances that prevent speaking in terms of “good” or “bad.” A film that shows the two faces of life and the repercussions of the decisions we make.

28. The Farewell (2019)

Lying is wrong. But is the same true for white lies? The young protagonist, played by a revealing Awkwafina, returns to China from the United States to see for the last time her grandmother, diagnosed with terminal cancer. However, her family decides to hide her diagnosis from her and get together to celebrate with her what is left of her life. Moving away from sentimentality and easy tears to create intimate spaces that are often varnished with hints of hilarity, it is a story as personal as it is universal that continually juxtaposes the individual and the collective, the truth and the lie, the eastern and western vision. Because, at the end of the day, as the grandmother indicates: “Life does not consist only in what you do, but in how you do it.”

29. Marriage Story (2019)

Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver embody this film about a broken marriage trying to get through a divorce process while maintaining two separate lives between California and New York. Children, of course, are an additional problem that strains the relationship to give life to a film as real as it is heartbreaking in which each character is stripping emotionally while discovering with amazement and a certain dread that new person he is becoming when the other puts him against the ropes. An intense film that demonstrates the painful consequences on a personal and creative level of the fracture of love.

30. Nomadland (2020)

A wonderful Frances McDormand plays a woman who has lost him after the economic collapse that affected rural Nevada where she lived. She then takes her caravan and heads to the Western United States to begin living as a nomad. Along the way, she meets characters who make us reflect on life and freedom, on the transcendent in the apparently inconsequential. A beautiful and terrible film at the same time, full of subtleties and a piercing melancholy in which happiness often springs from a deep pain so that we wonder how we are organizing our lives and to what extent we can really be free.

Do you want to see more psychological movies? These are other interesting titles:

-Movies about depression

– Movies about anxiety

– Psychological thriller movies

Tan, E. (2018) A psychology of the film.  Palgrave Communications ; 4(1): 82.

Hosseini, F. et. Al. (2016) Effectiveness of group film therapy on happiness and quality of life among elderly adults of Kahrizak nursing home.  Journal of Health Literacy ; 1 (2): 109-117.

Noah, U. (2005) Cinema is good for you: the effects of cinema attendance on self reported anxiety or depression and ‘happiness’.  ISER Working Paper ; 14.

Jennifer Delgado

I am a psychologist and I spent several years writing articles for scientific journals specialized in Health and Psychology. I want to help you create great experiences. Learn more about me .

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18 Must-See Films For Psychology Students

Whether you're considering or enrolled in an on-campus or online psychology program, check out this list of must-see movies for all psychology students.

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A pioneer of French cinema, filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard said, "Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."

Film as art is certainly no exception when it comes to capturing our minds and imaginations. Film provides a powerful medium for exploring what it means to be human, offering us a glimpse into human nature at its best, its worst and everywhere in between.

Perhaps that's why there is no shortage of films that explore the gamut of psychological topics – making film a popular tool for teaching psychology.

• The paranoia exhibited by Humphrey Bogart's Captain Queeg who unravels under stress in "The Caine Mutiny."
• The chilling descent into madness displayed by Jack Nicholson in "The Shining."
• The effect of one woman's obsession on a man and his family in "Fatal Attraction."
• The moral dilemmas faced by the survivors of a torpedoed ship drifting at sea in Alfred Hitchcock's "Lifeboat."

While there are hundreds of films that could be included on a list of movies that deal with psychology, here are a handful recommended by Saint Leo psychology faculty – all 'must sees' for students in online psychology degree programs .

1. "12 Angry Men"

Drama (1957) Topics: Social, moral development Actors: Henry Fonda, John Fiedler Plot: A diverse group of 12 jurors deliberates the fate of an 18-year-old Latino accused of murdering his father. As a lone dissenting juror tries to convince the others that the case is not as open-and-shut as it appears, individual prejudices and preconceptions about the trial emerge. Recommended by: Dr. Lara Ault Why recommended: The movie has tremendous lessons and value in social psychology. It addresses prejudice, conformity, aggression, group interaction, leadership, persuasion, and other basic areas of social psychology and the study of normal human behavior.

2. "28 Days"

Drama/romance (2000) Topics: Substance abuse disorders/alcoholism Actors: Sandra Bullock, Viggo Mortensen, Dominic West Plot: Sandra Bullock plays a newspaper columnist who chooses to enter a rehabilitation center for alcoholism in lieu of jail time for stealing a limousine at her sister's wedding and crashing it. Initially in denial that she is an alcoholic and resistant to treatment, with the help of fellow patients, she eventually begins to re-examine her life and comes to terms with her alcoholism and addiction to prescription medications. Recommended by: Dr. Glenn Lowery Why recommended: This movie models good counseling skills and promotes optimism, while dealing with serious substance abuse issues.

3. "A Beautiful Mind"

Drama (2001) Topics: Abnormal psychology, psychotic disorders/schizophrenia Actors: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly Plot: Based on the life of mathematical genius and Nobel Laureate John Forbes Nash, who suffers from severe mental illness, this film won four Academy Awards including Best Picture. Recommended by: Dr. Antonio Laverghetta Why recommended: The film sheds light on the life and suffering of a person living with schizophrenia. Psychology students will notice that Nash exhibits many of the symptoms used to diagnose schizophrenia and can follow the increasing intensity of these symptoms and the effect on him and those around him. The film also shows the difficult task of managing the disorder and the importance of social support.

4. "The Blind Side"

Biographical/sport (2009) Topics: Social psychology, including social influence, family relations Actors: Quinton Aaron, Sandra Bullock, Tim McGraw, Kathy Bates Plot: "The Blind Side" is the true story of Michael Oher, a homeless African-American boy who is adopted by a wealthy white family, the Tuohys. Michael realizes his full potential, succeeding in school and becoming a first-round pick in the 2009 NFL draft. Recommended by: Dr. Helen Oderinde Why recommended: This film does a good job of highlighting some of the difficulties and misunderstandings that take place when people of different cultures attempt to bridge cultural and racial differences and connect on an intimate level. The film also shows how mutually beneficial this engagement can be: the Tuohys open the door to educational and financial opportunity for Michael and he, in turn, opens their minds.

5. "Driving Miss Daisy"

Comedy/drama (1989) Topics: Social psychology, developmental psychology/aging, Alzheimer's disease Actors: Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman, Dan Akroyd Plot: The movie begins in 1948 when, at the insistence of her son who decides his mother must stop driving, Miss Daisy Werthan, a wealthy Jewish Southern woman, hires an African-American chauffeur, Hoke Colburn. The story of their friendship unfolds over the following 25 years as they overcome their differences and discomforts and develop a loving friendship. Recommended by: Dr. Antonio Laverghetta Why recommended: In addition to addressing the degenerative nature of Alzheimer's disease, this film explores some of the big questions of interest in the field of social psychology: how prejudice develops and how it can be overcome.

6. "Enough"

Drama/thriller (2002) Topics: Social psychology, domestic violence Actors: Jessica Jennifer Lopez, Billy Campbell, Tessa Allen Plot: Based on the Anna Quindlen novel, "Black and Blue," the film is about a working-class waitress named Slim who thinks she has married the man of her dreams. After the birth of their first child, he becomes controlling and abusive. Slim escapes from him several times, moving to different parts of the country with her daughter, but her husband tracks her down. She decides to prepare herself to fight back by learning Krav Maga self-defense techniques. Recommended by: Dr. Tammy Zacchilli Why recommended: Portraying a physical and psychological battle between the two main characters, this movie addresses the challenges of dealing with and escaping from an abusive relationship.

7. "Good Will Hunting"

Drama (1997) Topics: Social and developmental psychology, treatment, giftedness Actors: Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Robin Williams, Minnie Driver Plot: Will Hunting is a young, headstrong janitor at MIT with exceptional mathematical abilities. Abused as a child, he has numerous run-ins with the law and does not realize his full potential. With the help of a psychology professor, he finally receives the counseling he needs that will enable him to find his identity and change his life. Recommended by: Dr. Glenn Lowery Why recommended: "Good Will Hunting." serves as a good teachable opportunity. This movie depicts a difficult therapeutic relationship between an ambivalent client and a somewhat unorthodox counselor.

8. "The Hurricane"

Biographical/sport (1991) Topics: Social psychology including prejudice, discrimination, violence, civil rights Actors: Denzel Washington, Vicellous Reon Shannon, Deborah Kara Unger Plot: This film is based on the life of Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a top-ranked, African-American boxer who, in 1966, is expected to become a world champion when he is wrongly imprisoned for a triple murder. His appeals are rejected and his case seems hopeless until a teenage boy and his foster family find new evidence that eventually leads to his release two decades later. Recommended by: Dr. Bob Jacobs Why recommended: "The Hurricane" highlights our ability to transcend our circumstances through internal change.

9. "Identity"

Thriller/mystery (2003) Topics: Psychotic disorders, forensic psychology Actors: John Cusack, Ray Liotta, Amanda Peet Plot: A group of strangers from different walks of life are forced to find shelter during a torrential rainstorm at an out-of-the-way Nevada desert motel. One-by-one, they are killed off. Meanwhile, in a related storyline, a psychiatrist tries to prove the innocence of a man accused of murder. Recommended by: Dr. Lara Ault Why recommended: "Identity" deals with a unique and controversial disorder (it's a spoiler if I name it). It plays on some misconceptions about the disorder, but has a radical therapy suggestion that is intriguing. It is also an exciting murder mystery.

10. "Memento"

Crime thriller (2000) Topics: Neuropsychology, memory loss/amnesia Actors: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano Plot: Leonard Shelby is an ex-insurance investigator who sustains a head injury when trying to prevent his wife's murder and now suffers from amnesia. He learns how to cope with his condition using notes and tattoos as he tries to find the murderer and avenge her death. Recommended by: Dr. Lara Ault Why recommended: "Memento" deals with a person with short-term memory loss trying to solve a mystery. It is accurate, in many ways, regarding what life might be like for someone who cannot remember for more than a few minutes or seconds at a time. It is fascinating in a cognitive sense, as well as moving and emotionally engaging (and exciting).

11. "The Notebook"

Romance (2004) Topics: Clinical and social psychology, cultural differences, Alzheimer's disease Actors: Ryan Gosling, Rachel McAdams, Gena Rowlands, James Garner Plot: A poor young man, Noah Calhoun, falls in love with a young heiress, Allie Hamilton, during the summer of 1940. When Allie's mother finds out, she bans her from seeing Noah and the family leaves their summer home on Seabrook Island and returns to Charleston. World War II intervenes and Allie and Noah go on with their lives but are reunited years later. Recommended by: Dr. Tammy Zacchilli Why recommended: I show clips of this movie in my close relationships class because you can examine how love and relationships change over time. It is also relevant to developmental psychology because one of the characters has Alzheimer's disease.

12. "On Golden Pond"

Drama/comedy (1981) Topics: Neuropsychology/dementia, marital/family dynamics Actors: Katherine Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda Plot: This Academy Award winner for Best Actor and Best Actress tells the story of elderly couple, Norman and Ethel Thayer, who return to their summer cottage while dealing with Norman's failing memory, onset of senility and strained relationship with his daughter. Recommended by: Dr. Mark Benander Why recommended: This movie is full of great explorations of so many fundamental aspects of human nature, including family relationships, aging, death and dying, personal growth, and forgiveness. We are also treated to ways in which elements of nature such as a beautiful woodland lake, a treacherous cove, a dive into crisp clear water, and a family of loons can illuminate the powerful psychological dynamics of being human.

13. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

Drama (1975) Topics: Personality/mood disorders, forensic psychology, treatment Actors: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, William Redfield Plot: Randle McMurphy has a criminal past. To escape his most current prison sentence, he pleads insanity so that he can be sent to a mental institution where he thinks he can serve his sentence more comfortably than in jail. Upon admittance, he rallies the other patients into rebellion against the oppressive Nurse Ratched. Recommended by : Dr. Kevin Kieffer Why recommended: This Academy Award-winning classic is a must-see film for psychology students. It provides a disturbing look into mental hospitals in the 1960s, including electroshock therapy as a form of treatment and a dysfunctional form of group psychotherapy.

14. "Ordinary People"

Drama (1980) Topics: Family dynamics, stress and coping, mood disorders, therapy Actors: Mary Tyler Moore, Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland, Judd Hirsch Plot: When his older brother dies unexpectedly, guilt and grief push Conrad Jarrett to attempt suicide. After spending six months in a mental hospital, he returns home, sees a psychiatrist, and tries to return to normal. His parents each react differently to the trauma; his father attempts to deal with his grief, while his mother remains in denial, angry and depressed. Recommended by: Dr. Kevin Kieffer Why recommended: This film sheds realistic light on how one family deals with trauma and the resulting breakdown of the family unit. It offers a positive, affirming portrayal of a therapist and the value of therapy in helping Conrad and his father heal.

15. "Rain Man"

Comedy/drama (1988) Topics: Neuropsychology/autism, marital/family dynamics Actors: Dustin Hoffmann, Tom Cruise, Valeria Golino Plot: "Rain Man" is the story of a hustler, Charlie Babbit, and his brother, Raymond, an autistic savant unknown to Charlie who is living in an institution. When the brothers' father dies and leaves his fortune in trust to Raymond, Charlie sets out on a scheme to gain custody of Raymond and control of the money during a classic cross-country road trip. Recommended by: Dr. Antonio Laverghetta Why recommended: This film shed light on autism at time when there was little public awareness of the syndrome. Raymond exhibits many of the classic behaviors of a high-functioning autistic. As Charlie begins to understand Raymond more, he learns how to manage the stress associated with being his caregiver and becomes a better person.

16. "Regarding Henry"

Drama (1991) Topics: Neuropsychology, retrograde amnesia, marital/family dynamics Actors: Harrison Ford, Annette Benning, Michael Haley Plot: Henry is a hard-driven lawyer who is shot in the head during a robbery and suffers brain damage. He emerges from a coma with retrograde amnesia. As he struggles to recover his speech and mobility and regain his memory, he experiences a shift in values and builds a new life for his family and himself. Recommended by: Dr. Antonio Laverghetta Why recommended: While real-life cases of retrograde amnesia are actually quite rare, films tend to depict it as fairly common occurrence and, therefore, often promote inaccuracies. Despite that fact, this movie does a good job showing how retrograde amnesia can have a significant impact on individuals and their families – sometimes for good or ill.

17. "Reign Over Me"

Family drama (2007) Topics: Post-traumatic stress disorder Actors: Adam Sandler, Don Cheadle, Jada Pinkett Smith Plot: The grief that Charlie Fineman experiences after losing his family in the September 11 attack on New York City causes him to quit his job and isolate himself. After a chance encounter, he rekindles his friendship with his old college roommate, Alan Johnson, who helps him to face his past and rebuild his life. Recommended by: Dr. Mark Benander Why recommended: "Rein Over Me" is an entertaining movie, replete with laughs and more sober, thought-provoking scenes, but it also demonstrates some of the ways in which PTSD can impact the life of the affected individual as well as everyone in his or her life.

18. "Save The Last Dance"

Musical romance (2001) Topics: Social psychology, interracial relationships, peer pressure, violence Actors: Julia Stiles, Sean Patrick Thomas, Kerry Washington Plot: Sara, a white girl who has lived in the suburbs, is forced to relocate to Chicago's inner city. With the move comes a new school with a predominately African-American student body, and Sara's new boyfriend is a black teen, Derek, with whom she shares a love for dance. Recommended by: Dr. Helen Oderinde Why recommended: "Save the Last Dance is centered on a teenage, interracial romance and the couple's relationship with others. They continually meet with social and cultural conflict over their relationship and have to work hard to overcome prejudice and rise above cultural and social pressures.

What other films would you add to this list?

Other posts you may be interested in reading:

14 Blogs For Students In Online Psychology Degree Programs

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Is An Online Psychology Degree For You?

Image Credit: Razoom Game on Shutterstock.com

Mary Beth Erskine See more from this author

Cover Story

Reel to real: psychology goes to the movies.

One of the first films ever made, Arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat , was first shown in France in 1896. The silent, black-and-white, minute-long picture, produced by Louis Lumière, showed a train rushing toward the foreground. As legend has it, when the train started chugging, the audience leapt from their seats and fled the theater.

Apocryphal or not, the era of film had begun, and this new medium’s impact on behavior seemed ripe for research. Some 20 years after Lumière’s film, a Harvard psychologist named Hugo Munsterberg challenged researchers to figure out the depth of, and reason for, cinema’s influence: “For the first time the psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind,” Munsterberg wrote in The Photoplay: A Psychological Study , considered by many to be the first important behavioral look at film.

But though the research gauntlet had been thrown down, what followed is what one would expect when looking for artistry in a Pauly Shore flick: nothing. Or, at least, very little, says Stuart Fischoff, founder of the Journal of Media Psychology , who in 2003 retired from the psychology department at California State University, Los Angeles. Between 1916, when Munsterberg wrote The Photoplay , and the 1950s, perhaps the most influential psychological research on cinema was L. L. Thurstone’s 1928 Payne Fund report — a study whose purpose was to indict, not investigate, the role of film on behavior, Fischoff says. In fact, for much of the 20th century, the psychological study of film was considered “lightweight stuff,” says Dolf Zillmann, University of Alabama, one of the field’s pioneers. Film study was approached with a Freudian mindset, and few empirical studies took place. But in the past decade or so, such research has experienced a resurgence — the rare sequel that outperforms the original. “There’s really a new psychology of film in the making,” says Zillmann. Film study from a psychological perspective now takes place in campuses around the country, combining interdisciplinary approaches from several areas, with an increasing focus on the neuroscience of viewer response.

Cinematic research also deals with the effectiveness of product placement, the therapeutic role of movies, even the impact that inaccurate portrayals of psychologists can have on the public’s attitude toward the profession.

“It’s incredibly more sophisticated,” says Fischoff of film study. “We’re looking at the different dimensions of film experience, at the cognitive component of film, as the human mind mediates what comes out in terms of behavior.”

As psychological science has developed, particularly in the cognitive realm, the study of film has progressed beyond a purely psychoanalytical pursuit, says Ira Konigsberg, a Professor Emeritus of Film and Video Studies at the University of Michigan. And it will continue to grow as technology advances — both in terms of creating films and studying them.

“We are in an amazing age of technology, in which the image itself plays a paramount part in shaping the way we think,” says Konigsberg, who is editing a new journal in the field, Projections , which will publish its first issue this summer. That issue will reflect the full spectrum of interdisciplinary science and cinema: Cognitive psychologist Patrick Hogan will write on the way the mind processes a movie; Norman Holland will discuss the relationship between neuroscience and film; Torben Grodal will touch on the silver screen’s emotional impact.

“Film [was] the art form of the 20th century, and maintains a significant hold on our imagination and culture,” Konigsberg says. “It offers immense opportunity to understand individual and social psychology.”

Under Siege Zillmann still remembers walking into the living room and finding his son, then six years old, distressed by a brutal fist fight in the film Gunsmoke . “He swung his head to me and said, ‘Is this real?’ ” Zillmann recalls. He explained to his son that the fighters were pretending — that their job was to make the brawl appear, but not be, vicious — until the boy felt relieved.

Zillmann has long studied why films arouse certain types of behavioral responses. Decades worth of literature, including a 2003 Psychological Science in the Public Interest report, have argued that viewing violent media increases both short- and long-term aggression and violence. But the jury remains out on the impact of violent media, Zillman says, despite arguments for its widespread role in aggressive behavior. Violent media can create aggression, Zillmann says, but it affects certain types of people differently.

“We have committed mistakes by thinking that everybody will be affected [in an equal fashion]” by violent films, he says. “I’ve been an advocate of stratifying the public. You can’t believe all people are equal in the way in which they respond to media violence .”

In general, women and sensitive men do not react to violent pictures. Hostile or physically aggressive men, on the other hand, are two subsets of this stratification that do react strongly. To further test the impact of such movies on people with these traits, Zillmann recently collected data on 120 male subjects. Some had scored high on behavioral tests measuring hostility or physical aggression, some had scored low.

Zillmann and his coauthor, James B. Weaver II, played an eight-minute film clip for each subject. Some subjects watched an innocuous scene from Driving Miss Daisy , others watched a violent scene from Falling Down . Afterward, the subjects took part in a cooperation task: They each had to teach a research confederate to assemble red and green blocks in a certain pattern. (To the film buff, this experiment evokes a scene from The Royal Tenenbaums , in which Bill Murray’s psychologist character asks the same of his colorblind patient, to hilarious ends.)

The subjects communicated with these learners via video. As a teaching motivator, the subjects had access to a button that, they were told, would apply a painful amount of pressure to the learner’s arm. A phony monitor showed how many volts of pressure were being applied, from zero to 10.

In fact, the learner was not actually there at all; he had been tape-recorded to finally solve the puzzle with 20 seconds to go, maximizing the potential for teacher frustration — as well as the number of chances to hurt the learner.

Highly hostile subjects behaved more aggressively than low-hostility subjects regardless of which film they watched, Zillmann and Weaver report in an upcoming Journal of Research in Personality . But only the subjects who scored high on physical aggression behaved more aggressively after watching the violent clip; those who scored low did not. So, the type of person who is typically high in physical aggressiveness might be particularly susceptible to behavioral changes after watching a violent film.

In addition to a viewer’s personality, the type of violence shown on-screen makes a behavioral difference, Zillmann argues. Old West films are considered minimally violent by today’s standards. And horror films are usually perceived as more funny than aggressive (in fact, they can even prompt romance under the “snuggle theory,” when a couple pretends to be scared).

It’s the gratuitous but realistic films that have the greatest affect on aggressive behavior, those of Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, and, more recently, Jet Li. And with the line between reality and fiction becoming blurrier — with “based on a true story” used to describe many a matinee and ordinary people producing real-time films on devices like camcorders and cell phones — the violence has a potentially stronger effect.

“You can discount [a film] and initiate getting rid of a strong emotion by discounting reality,” Zillmann says. “But if it’s based on reality, you cannot discount it.” The importance of being able to discount reality has become clearer with research by neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of Columbia University. LeDoux has found that violent images elicit an immediate response in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional hub, before the information being processed reaches the cognitive center. The more realistic a film, says Zillmann, the harder it is for this cognitive center to reason with the amygdala’s natural response.

“If you can’t discount [reality], you’re aroused longer,” Zillmann says. “This time discrepancy is important in new film research….This is the new psychology; it’s neuropsychology, in a way.”

The Game The mind games played by violent movies can at least be rationalized as part of a film’s greater aesthetic value (or, in the case of Van Damme and Seagal, as necessary plot progression). But other, perhaps equally powerful, head games are being played behind the scenes by movie advertisers.

Such games began in 1982, when Reese’s Pieces made its commercial debut during the film ET . Since that time, product placement in movies has become far more pervasive. Sometimes, as in Lethal Weapon II , entire scenes are written around the chance to grab ad dollars from a vendor (in that case, Subway restaurants). But modern audiences are savvy enough to spot a blatant marketing ploy; it’s the subtler references — the ones, like Reese’s Pieces, that are embedded in the plot — that stand a chance of having a behavioral impact.

When people are exposed to ads during movies, “they don’t have a chance to put up sensors, their shields, it gets through,” says Fischoff. “It’s not coming in the same door as advertisers typically have to come through — it’s the front door, and people are less armed than they would be in a commercial.”

Still, evidence has shown that people don’t simply rush out and purchase whatever product appears in a film. In a recent test of the effectiveness of subliminal product placement, psychologist Johan Karremans of Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands showed some 60 subjects a screen that showed slides of random letters. Half of the subjects occasionally saw a brief blip displaying “Lipton Ice.” Half the subjects saw a blip with a nonsense word. None of the subjects realized that “Lipton Ice” or the nonsense word had ever appeared on the screen.

Flashing “Lipton Ice” did increase a subject’s likelihood of choosing that drink over a different drink, but only if that subject had been thirsty to begin with, Karremans and his colleagues report in the November Journal of Experimental Social Psychology .

This research reflects other social-cognitive findings by psychologists like APS Fellows and Charter Members John Bargh and Bob Zajonc, Karremans says. But the effectiveness of such subliminal advertising in real-life scenarios is debatable.

“These stimuli should be goal-relevant,” Karremans says. “Subliminally presenting an ad [for Apple computers] would probably not affect a person to buy a Macintosh if the person does not even want to buy a computer.”

Good Will (Toward Psychologists) Hunting Early in the film Good Will Hunting , the character Will, played by Matt Damon, visits psychotherapist Sean Maguire, played by Robin Williams. Will notices a painting on Sean’s wall of a solitary man at sea struggling to row his boat amid a tempest. It turns out that Sean painted the picture. To Will, the picture suggests something haunting in Sean’s past. “Maybe you married the wrong woman,” Will says. Sean, whose wife we’ll later learn died after a long bout with cancer, thrusts Will against the wall by the throat and threatens to “end” him should such a comment be repeated.

To APS Charter Member John V. Flowers, Chapman University, Williams’ portrayal of a mental health professional is extremely damaging to the public’s understanding of psychological therapy. Flowers has written a historical reference book on films depicting psychologists dating back to 1899. Since that time, less than a quarter of some thousand films featuring psychologists portray them in a positive light, he says. The remainder of the films can’t be taken seriously, he thought; otherwise, “the profession would be clobbered.”So Flowers began one of the only empirical studies to investigate which types of portrayals cause the most harm to psychology’s reputation.

Flowers split all negative portrayals into three categories: evil or manipulative, such as the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ; goofy, as in What About Bob ; and flawed or unethical, like Sean Maguire. Flowers measured subjects’ skin conductance, respiration, and heart rate as they viewed clips of one of these three films. After a single viewing, subjects respond greatly to evil portrayals. Each time the same clip is repeated, however, this response softens. But flawed portrayals elicit a strong response even after five viewings, says Flowers, who has tested more than 100 subjects for each type of portrayal. “We get more response from flawed than evil,” he says, “and it does not die out.”

Such depictions of psychologists might have a negative influence on therapy, says Lindsay M. Orchowski, who is working on her doctoral degree at Ohio University’s psychology department. Orchowski and her colleagues reviewed the literature of psychologist portrayal in the October 2006 Professional Psychology: Research and Practice . They concluded that, in the emotional sea of viewer perception, psychologists are lonely boat-rowers struggling against the elements.

“The general public is not well socialized to know what psychotherapy’s like,” Orchowski says, adding that many students she helps counsel still walk in and wonder where the couch is. “The amount [of psychologists in films] is increasing, and we want to make sure those portrayals out there are valid.”

But while some films might hinder psychological therapy, Birgit Wolz, a clinical practitioner in Oakland, has harnessed the power of film to help counsel her clients. Wolz’ method, called cinema therapy, uses movies to familiarize patients with emotional problems they have a hard time identifying in themselves but can spot more easily in film characters. The method has yet to receive adequate empirical testing, admits Wolz, but, when used as an adjunct, it can enhance traditional therapeutic methods. “There’s a lot of talk about mirror neurons,” says Wolz. “The whole idea is that we experience things internally, subjectively, if we experience them for real. But the emotional response can be exactly the same in real life as in reel life.”

Zillmann, who says he has not seen convincing data of cinema therapy, takes a different approach to capturing the psychological benefits of film. Instead of trying to cure psychological illnesses with movies, he would rather simply change a person’s mood. Such mood-management studies have shown that movies can help a person escape from a bad mood, he says. This work might not help a person suffering from serious mental or emotional conditions, but it does get back to the core of the power of film.

“If you can change people’s mood by film exposure in a desirable direction, then you can say this is the therapeutic effect, but you don’t talk about healing illnesses,” he says.

“You talk about making people feel better. And that’s what entertainment is for.”

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Books to Check Out: November 2015

To submit a new book, email  [email protected] . Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both by Adam Galinsky and Maurice Schweitzer; Crown Business, September 29, 2015. Memory and Movies: What Films

Countering ‘Neuromyths’ in the Movies

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Movies May Rev Up Teens’ Reckless Behavior Behind the Wheel

Research has long shown that children’s behavior can be influenced by what they see in movies, TV, and video games. In light of this, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) considers factors such as

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The Psychology of Film: How Movies Affect Our Emotions and Perceptions

Cinema, with its mesmerizing visuals and compelling narratives, has the power to transcend mere entertainment and delve into the intricate realm of human psychology. The way we respond to films, both emotionally and cognitively, offers a fascinating exploration into the psychology of film—how movies become more than just a sequence of scenes but a journey that profoundly influences our emotions and perceptions.

Emotional Impact of Movies: Stirring the Soul One of the most potent aspects of film psychology lies in the emotional impact movies have on viewers. Whether it’s the heart-wrenching drama that brings tears to our eyes or the exhilarating adventure that quickens our pulse, films have an unparalleled ability to stir a wide spectrum of emotions. This emotional resonance is a testament to the storytelling prowess of filmmakers and their capacity to create empathetic connections with the audience.

Cinematic Influence on Perception: Shaping Perspectives Movies don’t merely evoke emotions; they also shape our perceptions of the world. From cultural insights to societal norms, films act as a lens through which we view and interpret reality. The cinematic influence on perception extends beyond mere entertainment, contributing to the formation of beliefs, attitudes, and even the way we understand complex social issues.

Psychology of Storytelling: Tapping into Universal Narratives At the heart of film psychology is the psychology of storytelling. Narratives in films tap into universal themes and archetypes that resonate with the collective human experience. Whether it’s the hero’s journey or the exploration of love and loss, these storytelling elements engage our minds on a deep psychological level, triggering emotional responses that connect us to the shared narratives of humanity.

Film and Mood Regulation: Escapism and Catharsis Movies serve as a powerful tool for mood regulation. The act of watching a film allows viewers to escape from the demands of daily life, immersing themselves in alternate realities. From the cathartic release of tension in a comedy to the introspective contemplation induced by a thought-provoking drama, films provide a unique avenue for regulating and expressing emotions.

Cognitive Responses to Films: Engaging the Mind The psychological impact of films extends beyond emotions to cognitive responses. The visual and auditory stimulation in movies engages various cognitive processes, including attention, memory, and problem-solving. The intricate narratives and complex characters challenge the mind, fostering intellectual engagement that goes beyond passive observation.

Psychological Effects of Movie Genres: Crafting Experiences Different movie genres elicit distinct psychological effects. Horror films tap into our primal fears, triggering adrenaline and the fight-or-flight response. Romantic movies evoke feelings of love and connection, while action films elicit excitement and suspense. The choice of genre becomes a deliberate tool for filmmakers to craft specific psychological experiences for their audience.

Cinematic Empathy: Understanding Through Film Characters Cinematic empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of film characters, is a central aspect of film psychology. Viewers form emotional connections with characters, experiencing their joys and sorrows. This empathetic engagement not only enhances the viewing experience but also contributes to the development of emotional intelligence and empathy in real-life relationships.

Film and Memory Formation: The Art of Retention Movies have a unique capacity to enhance memory formation. The combination of visuals, dialogue, and music creates a multisensory experience that aids in the retention of information. Iconic scenes, memorable quotes, and the emotional impact of films become etched into our memories, shaping our cultural references and personal recollections.

Viewer Perception in Cinema: Active Participation In the psychology of film, viewers are not passive recipients but active participants in the cinematic experience. The choices made by directors, the visual aesthetics, and the narrative structures invite viewers to interpret and engage with the content actively. This participatory nature deepens the psychological connection between the audience and the film.

In conclusion, the psychology of film is a captivating exploration into the intricate ways movies influence our emotions, perceptions, and cognitive responses. From the emotional resonance of storytelling to the shaping of cultural perspectives, cinema is a potent force that goes beyond entertainment, leaving an indelible mark on the psyche of those who embark on its cinematic journeys. As we continue to be enthralled by the magic of the silver screen, the psychology of film remains a dynamic and evolving field, offering endless possibilities for understanding the complex interplay between storytelling, emotions, and the human mind.

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• Psychology /

Must Watch Movies on Psychology

• Updated on  
• May 3, 2023

We are in an astounding time of innovation, where everything around us has an influence in molding how we think. If we ponder upon such influential elements of lives, no doubt, movies would top this list. As movies have become an inseparable part of lives, they have now started to cater to a powerful impact on one’s psychological abilities. The cinema has delivered a plethora of classic artworks which have brilliantly showcased the intricate working of the mind, the flux in human behaviour, various types of human personalities along with their disorders and whatnot! If you are in for an exciting dose of such masterpieces, here we have devised our list of best movies on psychology.

This Blog Includes:

20 must watch movies on psychology, top 10 hollywood movies on psychology, top 10 movies on psychology bollywood, 10 most popular netflix movies on psychology, a dangerous method (2011), the tree of life (2011), girl, interrupted (1999), shutter island, fractured (2019), a beautiful mind, the blind side.

There are some brilliant movies made over the years on human mind and psychology. Here are some of the best must watch movies on psychology till now:

• A Dangerous Method
• The Tree of Life
• Girl, Interrupted
• Insomnia 
• All I See is You
• 12 Angry Men
• Driving Miss Daisy
• The Notebook
• Ordinary People
• Good Will Hunting
• The Hurricane
• Karthik Calling Karthik
• Table No. 21
• Raman Raghav 2.0
• Haseen Dillruba
• The Platform
• The woman in the window

David Cronenberg’s film A Dangerous Method recounts the narrative of the connection between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender) and a lady named Sabina (Keira Knightley) who impacted them two. It is a beautiful movie depicting the eternal wishes and nature of humans and how to deal with it. No amount of guilt can take back the impact it creates in the viewer’s mind.

The reputable American cinematographer, Terrence Malick, shot an image contacting both mental and exotic sides of the human presence through one of the best movies on psychology. The movie starts with how the American families used to live in the 20th century and portrays the challenging relationship of a boy Jack O’Brien with his father, that ultimately leads on to existential crisis as he struggles to make sense of his childhood. The movie is a roller coaster of emotions, thus, it may make you shed some tears. 

Must Read: Top 10 Business Movies of All Time

In 1967, after a meeting with a therapist she’d never observed, Susanna Kaysen was determined to have Borderline Personality Disorder-a. She was suffering from side effects, hence, her parents sent her to a prestigious New England mental medical clinic where she went through life-changing experiences with adolescent young ladies. There, Susanna loses herself in an Oz-like underworld of tempting and upset young ladies. Named amongst one of the best movies on psychology, it reveals the fact that the human mind delicacy. 

Shutter Island is a classic American piece of work in which Martin Scorsese has depicted the amazing story of a murderess. The U.S. Marshall, named Teddy enters a mental asylum which is based in a remote area called windswept island to find the whereabouts of a woman who had disappeared from a cell. The spectacular psychological thriller, slowly unravels the misdeeds that take place at the asylum. 

A notable mention in the list of best movies on psychologies, Fractured stars Sam Worthington as a dad attempting to gain proficiency with reality. Fractured opens with how Ray and Peri, a couple with their daughter, rush to a nearby hospital on a highway  for some immediate treatment. The lead, Ray, is astonished because his family, bafflingly vanishes away while he thinks his little girl is getting treatment at a medical clinic. Ray’s desperation and affection for the family, makes him investigate what happened to his wife and daughter.

Here are some Educational Movies that every student must watch!

Directed by the famous Christopher Nolan, Insomnia is a well-presented story of a criminologist who is sent to Alaska when a high schooler teenager is murdered. As he explores the youngster’s case, the primary suspect of the case perplexes him in a through a psychological game of cat-and-mouse. As the detective goes on with the investigation, he slowly unravels how vulnerable he has become to the life-threats. 

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Directed by Ron Howard is a story of John Nash Jr who is part of Princeton University in USA. He struggles to mark his name in the field of Mathematics. Then, finally makes a breakthrough discovery which will get him a Nobel Prize. The story takes a turn and Nash becomes a paranoid person and from the help from her lady love his is able to gain back his mental health.

The Blindside featuring Sandra Bullock is the story of a traumatized boy that turns into everyone’s favorite American footballer. The movie has also won an oscar. The movie is based on a true story. The boy is adopted by an American family that helps him provide a loving home, tutor, and all necessities. With family support, the boy becomes NFL player.

Released in the year 2019, joker left a lasting impact on everyone. It is the story of how a little boy becomes the Joker of Gotham city. Mentally troubled comedian Arthur Fleck (Joker Character) is mistreated by society and turns him towards the criminal world.

A Dangerous Method The Tree of Life Girl, Interrupted Shutter Island Fractured

12 Angry Men 28 Days A Beautiful Mind The Blind Side Driving Miss Daisy

Karthik Calling Karthik Table No. 21 Fan Phobia Raman Raghav 2.0

Thus, we hope that through this blog we have given you a worthy list of movies on Psychology to catch up this weekend. If you are intrigued by this amazing field of study, you must pursue a course in Psychology to know about a bunch of exciting details about the human mind and behaviour. Reach out to our experts at Leverage Edu and they will assist you in selecting the best course in the field and an ideal university for it.

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Wow.. wonderful list ! 👏 Have watched 50-60% from them… Thanks a lot for suggesting more movies 😀

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On the Psychology of Horror Movies

Horror provides an imaginative context in which people can play with fear..

Posted October 13, 2021 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• What Is Fear?
• Take our Generalized Anxiety Disorder Test
• Find a therapist to combat fear and anxiety
• Many people derive pleasure from frightening entertainment.
• Horror movies invite viewers to immerse themselves in threat scenarios.
• When we play with fear, we may learn lessons about our own responses to danger.

Horror remains one of the most popular and profitable film genres. Movies about possessed dolls, murderous maniacs, slobbering monsters, bloodthirsty vampires, and rotting zombies draw enormous audiences. The recent remake of the classic horror movie Candyman has grossed more than $ 56 million in domestic box office sales. That’s more than 6 million tickets sold in the US, at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is still making life difficult for the creative industries.

On the face of it, this is peculiar. Horror movies are, as the name suggests, designed to evoke negative emotions in viewers— fear , dread, anxiety , horror, and disgust. Why would anybody in their right mind seek out such movies? Indeed, are those folks who seek out those movies in their right mind?

On closer inspection, it is not that paradoxical. People who enjoy horror movies—and that’s more than half of us (Clasen, Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, & Johnson, 2020)—do not just expect to feel fear, dread, anxiety, horror, and disgust when they seek out horror movies. They expect pleasure as well. Indeed, they derive pleasure from those negative emotions. If they expected only to be terrified out of their minds by horror movies, we’d have a real paradox on our hands. The question then is, how can people derive pleasure from frightening entertainment?

My colleagues and I have established a research lab, the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, to investigate this interesting phenomenon. We have done empirical studies on guests in a commercial haunted attraction to understand how they regulate their own fear as they are being chased by killer clowns and flesh-hungry zombies (Clasen et al., 2019), we have investigated the different types of horror fans and their motives for seeking out horror (Scrivner et al., in prep.), and we have delved into the relationship between fear and enjoyment in recreational fear (Andersen et al., 2021), to name just a few recent studies.

We think that horror provides an imaginative context in which people can play with fear. Horror movies invite viewers to immerse themselves in threat scenarios. As viewers, we are made to feel with and for the characters who face terrifying danger, and we respond powerfully to depictions of scary monsters and horrors from beyond the grave because those horrors stimulate the fear system with which evolution has equipped us (Öhman & Mineka, 2001). And because the fear system evolved to respond selectively to ancestrally relevant threats, the threats depicted in horror movies tend to reflect dangers that have haunted our species for thousands or even millions of years (Clasen, 2012).

Consider the slithering serpents, enormous spiders, and reptilian monsters that populate horror. They don’t reflect modern dangers, but rather those threats that kept our distant ancestors up at night. Even less plausible horror monsters, such as zombies, make sense once we consider the construction of the evolved fear system. There may not have been zombies chasing our ancestors in prehistory, but that monster is equipped with traits that reliably trigger our fear system, such as cues of predation and contagion. Zombies want to eat us and infect us. That’s a potent cocktail.

Horror movies immerse us in fictional worlds that are full of ancestrally resonant danger, and most of us enjoy this imaginative engagement with threat scenarios. It’s not that different from children finding great pleasure in chase play, which is basically a ritualized enactment of predator-prey interactions (Steen & Owens, 2001). Presumably, we evolved to find pleasure in threat simulation because of the learning potential of such simulation. When we play with fear, we may learn important lessons about the dangers of the world as well as our own responses to danger. We learn what it feels like to be afraid, and we get to practice and hone fear-regulation strategies. We may even become more resilient in the process.

In a recent study, led by the behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivner , we investigated whether horror movie fans were more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 lockdowns than non-fans. We found that yes, people who watch many horror movies did indeed report less psychological distress (Scrivner et al., 2021). We think that this is because horror movies provide a context in which people can practice emotional regulation —that people may get better at managing their own fear and anxiety through engaging with recreational fear.

It is not that weird, then, that most people enjoy scary movies. Conversely, those people who enjoy scary movies are not weird. They are just giving in to a natural impulse to immerse themselves in threat scenarios, an impulse that may very well be adaptive.

Andersen, M. M., Schjoedt, U., Price, H., Rosas, F. E., Scrivner, C., & Clasen, M. (2020). Playing with fear: A field study in recreational horror. Psychological Science , 31 (12), 1497-1510. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0956797620972116

Clasen, M. (2012). Monsters evolve: A biocultural approach to horror stories. Review of General Psychology, 16 (2), 222-229. https://doi.org/10.1037%2Fa0027918

Clasen, M., Andersen, M., & Schjoedt, U. (2019). Adrenaline junkies and white-knucklers: A quantitative study of fear management in haunted house visitors. Poetics , 73, 61-71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2019.01.002

Clasen, M., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Johnson, J. A. (2020). Horror, personality, and threat simulation: A survey on the psychology of scary media. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences , 14 (3), 213. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/ebs0000152

Öhman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fears, phobias, and preparedness: Toward an evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological review, 108(3), 483. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.108.3.483

Scrivner, C., Andersen, M. M., & Clasen, M. (in prep.). The psychological benefits of scary play in three types of horror fans. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/sdxe6

Scrivner, C., Johnson, J. A., Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, J., & Clasen, M. (2021). Pandemic practice: Horror fans and morbidly curious individuals are more psychologically resilient during the COVID-19 pandemic. Personality and individual differences , 168, 110397. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2020.110397

Steen, F., & Owens, S. (2001). Evolution's pedagogy: An adaptationist model of pretense and entertainment. J ournal of Cognition and Culture , 1 (4), 289-321.

Mathias Clasen, Ph.D., is an associate professor in literature and media at Aarhus University, director of the Recreational Fear Lab, and the author of Why Horror Seduces.

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REVIEW article

(why) do you like scary movies a review of the empirical research on psychological responses to horror films.

• Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, School of Psychotherapy and Psychology, Regent’s University London, London, United Kingdom

Why do we watch and like horror films? Despite a century of horror film making and entertainment, little research has examined the human motivation to watch fictional horror and how horror film influences individuals’ behavioral, cognitive, and emotional responses. This review provides the first synthesis of the empirical literature on the psychology of horror film using multi-disciplinary research from psychology, psychotherapy, communication studies, development studies, clinical psychology, and media studies. The paper considers the motivations for people’s decision to watch horror, why people enjoy horror, how individual differences influence responses to, and preference for, horror film, how exposure to horror film changes behavior, how horror film is designed to achieve its effects, why we fear and why we fear specific classes of stimuli, and how liking for horror develops during childhood and adolescence. The literature suggests that (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror film but that specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s responses than are others; (2) there is a positive relationship between sensation-seeking and horror enjoyment/preference, but this relationship is not consistent; (3) men and boys prefer to watch, enjoy, and seek our horror more than do women and girls; (4) women are more prone to disgust sensitivity or anxiety than are men, and this may mediate the sex difference in the enjoyment of horror; (5) younger children are afraid of symbolic stimuli, whereas older children become afraid of concrete or realistic stimuli; and (6) in terms of coping with horror, physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; priming with information about the feared object reduces fear and increases children’s enjoyment of frightening television and film. A number of limitations in the literature is identified, including the multifarious range of horror stimuli used in studies, disparities in methods, small sample sizes, and a lack of research on cross-cultural differences and similarities. Ideas for future research are explored.

Horror: An Introduction

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” ( Hume, 1907 ).

Why do people watch, and enjoy watching, horror films, and why is this an important or useful question to ask? The primary aims of the horror film are to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, to mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown ( Cherry, 2009 ; Newman, 2011 ). It is the emphasis on these characteristics that tend to distinguish horror from the related genre of thriller or psychological thriller ( Hanich, 2011 ). Thrillers are designed to create suspense and terror, but the creation of these feelings is dependent not on the presence of mutilation, gore, or the supernatural but via more human devices. These boundaries, however, can be fuzzy. If these features are utilized in thrillers, they are not the principal focus of the film but are incidental to it (an example would be the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, which is bloody and brutal but is contained within a film, which has a non-horror theme). Together with Westerns, science fiction, comedy, musicals, documentaries, and other film genres, which are characterized by particular tropes, styles, themes, characters, and visual leitmotifs, horror sets itself apart from other film types via its distinctive characteristics.

Although commercially successful, the cinematic reputation of horror film has been less than stellar. It has been frequently regarded (if it is regarded at all) as the runt of the cinema family and held in lower esteem than other film categories ( Stone, 2016 ). Etchison (2011) observed that “The horror film occupies in popular culture roughly comparable to that of horror literature. That is to say, it is generally ignored, sometimes acknowledged with bemused tolerance, and viewed with alarm when it irritates authority - rather like a child too spirited to follow the rules that rendition has deemed acceptable” (p. ix), a view that is echoed elsewhere. For example, Tudor (1997) noted that “a taste of horror is a taste for something seemingly abnormal and is therefore deemed to require special attention” (p. 446). Part of the reason for the disdain, apart from the broad and base nature of the content, may be the relative cheapness of horror film: these are often much less expensive to create than are other genre films such as westerns, comedies, or science fiction. The first horror film can probably be dated to 1855/1856. The Lumiere Brothers’ L’arrive d’un train en gare de la Ciotat depicts the arrival of a train into a station, the appearance of which, if anecdotal although possibly apocryphal accounts are to be believed, resulted in the audience becoming consumed with a fear that the train would emerge from the screen, such was the novelty of such a depiction at the time.

In terms of industry regard, the reputation of horror has not been high. The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts, which awards the Oscars, has nominated only six horror/supernatural films for Best Picture, and only one has won the Award ( The Silence of The Lambs in 1992, which also won the award for Best Actress, Actor, and Director). Other horror films to have been nominated include The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The 6th Sense (1999), Black Swan (2010), and Get Out (2017). The latter also nominated for best comedy/musical at the Golden Globes and was winner of the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Industry recognition for horror film has tended to be reserved for technical achievements; hence, the Oscars awarded for best art direction and cinematography for Phantom Of The Opera (1943), best score for The Omen (1976), best visual effects for Alien (1979), and best-make up for An American Werewolf In London (1981) and The Fly (1986). The number of actors to have won an Oscar nomination for horror roles is low – Frederic March ( Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , 1931), Ruth Gordon ( Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), Kathy Bates ( Misery , 1990), Natalie Portman ( Black Swan , 2010), and Hopkins are exceptions.

Despite the relative lack of formal industry recognition and professional respect, horror thrives. In 2017, the second cinema adaptation of the Stephen King novel IT (2017) generated $700.4 m in global ticket sales, making this the most financially successful horror film of all time based on recorded box office sales (its production budget was $35 m). The success led to a sequel released in 2019 ( IT: Chapter 2 ), which has achieved global ticket sales of $185 m in its first week of release. In 1989, two horror films had grossed over $38 m ( The Fly II and The Abyss , earning $38.9 and $89.8 m, respectively). In 2017, this number was 15, with IT leading and occupying 13th place in box office revenue. The Mummy occupied 23rd position, Resident Evil: Final Chapter the 30th position, Annabelle: Creation the 32rd, and Get Out the 37th ($255 m). Nine horror films earned more than $100 m in 2017. These numbers illustrate how successful and popular the horror film has become and that viewers’ appetite for it is rapacious.

This commercial enthusiasm exists against a backdrop of considerable fan enthusiasm for the genre, as evidenced by the number of major, significant genre-specific international film festivals which exist. These include the UK’s three Frightfest events, the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival in Catalonia, Toronto’s After Dark Film Festival, Screamfest and Fantasticfest in the USA, the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, Australia’s A Night of Horror International Film Festival, Amsterdam’s Imagine Festival, Argentina’s Rojo Sangre, Italy’s Ravena Nightmare Film Festival, Wales’s Abertoir, and several others. A number of print magazines devoted to horror is available (such as Rue Morgue, Diabolique, Scream , and The Dark Side ) as are various horror websites, online film streaming services (such as Shudder and Screambox ), and specialist satellite/Freeview TV channels such as The Horror Channel and SyFy . The TV company AMC airs and produces original horror content (and created Shudder ), and an Asian-based pay-TV horror channel is available called Thrill . Given the popularity of horror film, a useful question to explore is why people are attracted to this genre of film, given its distinctive nature, and why people are attracted to horror in the first instance, a question addressed in this review.

Historically, horror has formed a significant part of “Western” literary tradition since the Babylonian Gilgamesh and the English Beowulf . The Gothic tradition, a period that covers 1,760–1,820 features fiction in which the omphalos is their archaic themes, haunted castles, stylized period settings, a supernatural element in the story telling, suspense, and chaos ( Punter, 2014 ). Examples include Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto , Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian and Lewis’ The Monk, among others. Although modern horror clearly has its roots and traditions in Gothic horror (and castles, spirits, and ghosts are well-documented tropes of horror films), very little modern horror film has been directly inspired by, nor has adapted, these works. Victorian literature has exerted a much greater and direct influence, as evidenced by the re-imaginings and remakes of films based on literary characters from this period, such as Dracula, Frankenstein (doctor and creation), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Moreau, Dorian Gray, the monsters and protagonists in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the trolls of Nordic literature. These figures have been interpreted and re-interpreted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in different fictionalized forms – in theater, drama, radio, television, short stories, novels, and, especially, film.

Given the longevity of horror as a genre and its history in cinema, what is it that draws people to this particular genre and how does the genre create the psychological effects that it does? The study of individuals’ response to horror can be illuminating for several reasons. It may help us understand why people are attracted to a very commercially successful genre of film making but one which is seen as very distinctive and highly specialized. It may also help us to explain why some material that is perceived as being unpleasant and disgusting is appealing to some people more than it is to others. The study of horror film may also help us understand how emotions are generated and processed and may help us understand elements of fear (and the attraction of fear).

The current paper sets out to review the literature regarding the appeal of horror and why and how horror cinema exerts the effects that it does. Specifically, it will consider whether there are personality types or other individual differences associated with preference for, and enjoyment of, horror films; whether sex differences exist in the preference for, and enjoyment of, horror film; how fear of horror film develops and how coping strategies are recruited to manage the fear elicited by horror; the psychological and emotional consequences of watching horror and whether watching horror is associated with any adverse, short-term, or long-term psychological consequences; the behavioral responses reliably elicited by exposure to horror film; and the use of auditory stimulation to manipulate our response to horror. A number of texts exists that have discussed and addressed various aspects of horror and horror film, including the cinematic portrayal of the “mad scientist” ( Tudor, 1989 ; Frayling, 2013 ), the esthetics of horror film ( Sipos, 2010 ), the philosophy of horror ( Carroll, 2003 ), the process of horror fiction writing ( King, 2010 ), the use of sound and music in horror ( Hayward, 2009 ), and the marketing of horror films ( Hantke, 2004 ), among others. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to assimilate the psychology and related literature in a comprehensive review of our understanding of the enjoyment of horror film, the motivation to watch horror film and the effects of watching horror film. This review was based on keyword searches made via Google Scholar and PsycInfo between 2018 and August 2019 and included combinations of the words and terms “horror,” “terror,” “film,” “movie,” “cinema,” “fear,” “thriller,” “slasher,” “fright,” “gore,” “anxiety,” “the unknown,” “the uncanny,” “Gothic,” “blood,” “guts,” “scream/screaming,” “shudder,” shivering,” “trauma,” and “disgust/disgusting.” Material was also sourced from the reference sections of the papers obtained and of books where the topic was horror. The review begins with a definition of horror.

What is “Horror”?

The word “horror” derives from the Greek phryke (meaning “shudder”) and describes the physical manifestations of shivering, shuddering, and piloerection. In the fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus , the chorus says after the protagonist blinds himself: “Alas, poor man, I cannot ever look at you … such is the shiver (phryke) you cause in me” ( Cairns, 2015 ). An exact and precise modern definition of horror, however, is difficult to determine. Horror has been defined as a “spontaneous response to shocking visual stimulus” (Ceirus, 2015) and as “a compound of terror and revulsion” ( Kawin, 2012 ). In Kawin’s interpretation, “imagined horror provides entry to the made-up world where fears are heightened but can be mastered … it accesses a core of fears we may share as humans, such as the fear of being attacked in the dark … it provides a way to conceptualize, give shape to and deal with the evil and frightening.” Horror, Stone (2016) argues, “confronts us with the disgusting and the fascinating simultaneously,” two aspects of horror returned to later. Horror, according to Marriott (2012) , is “the madwoman in the attic.”

One view of horror considers it to be of two types: horror, which is genuine and is designed to make us afraid because it is advantageous to our survival (e.g., fear arising from attack and being motivated to fight or flee), and “art horror,” which describes the imagined horror found in horror films ( Carroll, 1987 ). Carroll also argues that “horror novels, stories, films, plays and so on are marked by the presence of monsters of either a supernatural or sci-fi origin” (p. 52). In Carroll’s definition, it is the presence of a monster, which defines the essence of a horror film, as monsters do not exist within our conventional realm of understanding or reason; they defy science; they should not exist. Carroll views films that are typically classed as horror (e.g., Psycho ) to be of a different type (tales of terror) because “though eerie and scary, [they] achieve their hair-raising effect by explaining extreme psychological phenomena that are all too human.” This definition, of course, would exclude a significant number of obviously horrific horror films such as The Silence of the Lambs , Henry – Portrait of A Serial Killer , the Saw and Hostel franchises and other exemplars of the “torture porn” horror sub-genre and the cannibal films of the 1970s (e.g., Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox ). The view has also been challenged ( Gaut, 1993 ). “Slasher” movies, for example, are clearly horror films but do not necessarily contain monsters as described by Carroll (although some, such as Freddie Kruger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers, possess supernatural elements, and Freddie Kruger is an oneiric fiction). Also, Chewbacca and The Force defy the conventions of science, but Star Wars would not be classed a horror film.

Horror invariably includes an element of evil, channeled via a human, a creature, or a supernatural force, which has the power to change events causing disruption and instability and which must be challenged and defeated ( Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, 2016 ). If this force is not human or supernatural (ghostly, spectral), it is natural – plants, monkeys, ants, leeches, sharks, birds, dogs, bats, rats, bees, fish, earthworms, alligators, spiders, snakes, cockroaches, and dinosaurs have all been employed to create chaos and instability in horror films. Freud (1919/2003) referred to horror as the uncanny (a peculiar translation of “unheimlich, meaning “unhomely”): “the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” Horror films also invariably present a Manichean view of the world, where good battles evil (as is literally the case in films such as Dracula, The Exorcist, and The Omen ). There is a driving motivation to overcome “a pure and unmotivated desire to inflict suffering” ( Clasen, 2014 ). But horror film, despite the features that the genre shares, is not a unitary cinematic phenomenon and distinct sub-genres or branches exist which are characterized by similar features or styles of film making and storytelling. Often, these are post hoc classifications of films, which seem to share core features, and the classification can seem like an exercise in pattern recognition. There are films, which do not easily lend themselves to these classifications (and some may straddle boundaries). However, the most common and typical sub genres include gothic, supernatural/occult/parananormal, psychological horror, monster movies, slasher films, body horror/horror typified by extreme gore, exploitation cinema ( Cherry, 2009 ), and found-footage, which have a very specific technical film-making approach and its own identifiable tropes bequeathed from such films as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) but more demonstrably from The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Horror film is the only fictional genre, which is specifically created to elicit fear consistently and deliberately rather than sporadically or incidentally. Behaviorally, horror film can create shivering, closing of the eyes, startle, shielding of the eyes, trembling, paralysis, piloerection, withdrawal, heaving, and screaming ( Harris et al., 2000 ). It can produce changes in psychophysiology, specifically increasing heart rate and galvanic skin response (see below). Mentally, it can create anxiety, fear, empathy, and thoughts of disgust ( Cantor, 2004 ). One of the earliest empirical studies to examine the effect of watching horror or suspenseful cinema on behavior asked participants to watch three programs, which varied in suspense (high and low) and in outcome – where the film had a resolved ending or an unresolved ending ( Zillmann et al., 1975 ). The suspenseful programs with the resolved endings were better appreciated than were those with unresolved endings. However, similar – but smaller – results were also found for the unresolved endings (i.e., appreciation levels were high if the program was suspenseful). Cantor (2004) asked students to write about their experiences of horror films and analyzed 3 years’ worth of the students’ papers (530 in total). Approximately 46% of the sample reported experiencing sleep disturbances after the event and 75% reported having experienced anxiety. The four most frequently cited causes of frightening experiences were the films, Poltergeist (5.5%), Jaws (4.3%), Blair Witch Project (4.2%), and Scream (3.2%). There were some film-specific anxieties – respondents would express fear of swimming in lakes and oceans, uneasiness around clowns and televisions, and avoidance of camping and woods.

Behavioral change has also been examined experimentally. Hagenaars et al. (2014) , for example, asked 50 participants to watch neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant film clips while “standing on a stabilometric platform.” This device measures a person’s motoric behavior as participants engage in some exercise or task. They found that when participants watched unpleasant films, the participants would freeze, show reduced body sway, and heart rate deceleration. The reduced body sway was found early on in the viewing of the unpleasant material (1–2 s after stimulus onset) suggesting that the behavioral effects of watching horror are immediate. The study is one of the few, methodologically well-controlled studies of behavioral response to films designed to elicit strong emotions (pleasant or unpleasant) and demonstrated empirically how exposure to certain types of film affects physical behavior and, in this specific example, how certain types of film inhibit motor behavior.

People’s enjoyment of horror can also be affected by priming. Cantor et al. (1984) found that providing adults with information about the types of events they were about to see in four horror films increased the degree of fright and upset that the participants experienced. Neuendorf and Sparks (1988) extended Cantor et al.’s study by presenting 121 attendees of two horror films ( The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead ) at a US cinema with three levels of warning – the low warning involved the transmission of basic information such as the film’s name, the release date, and its R rating; the moderate warning involved all of the low information plus a description of the film’s content; the high warning included both of these plus a statement about a graphic scene in the film (e.g., a paraplegic being sawn in half by a saw-wielding maniac). If individuals reported being previously afraid of the specific types of content mentioned by the experimenters, these “cues” significantly predicted overall fear when prior experience of the film and anxiety was controlled for (fear was measured via questionnaire rather than behaviorally). There was no significant correlation between a trait known as sensation seeking (see below) and liking and enjoyment of either film. There was a correlation between prior experience and enjoyment for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre suggesting that viewers repeated their viewing because they enjoyed it the first time. Viewers’ anxiety level predicted the fright generated by Night of the Living Dead , as did fear cues. The greater the experienced anxiety and the fear cues, the greater the experienced fright. The availability of spoilers – the reveal of key scenes and plot points in a work of fiction in advance of viewing – appears to have little effect on the positive enjoyment of horror film or the experience of suspense ( Johnson et al., 2019 ).

Our behavioral reaction to horror tends to be consistent, although there is not much research that has explicitly investigated this response. The next section considers some of the reasons why people watch horror film and considers some of the dominant theories and models in interdisciplinary research that have been proposed to explain our enjoyment of horror film. It considers first some of the most salient ways in which horror film sets out to frighten viewers including sound.

Sound in Horror

In addition to the visual and verbal (dialogue) impact of horror, perhaps one of the most significant elements of horror film is auditory. To this end, some authors have argued that “horror is primarily a sound-based medium” ( Kawin, 2012 ): The creaking door, the scream, the shriek of an owl, the hiss of a cat, the squelching of a head as it meets a sledgehammer, the ringing of a phone, the bang of a falling object, and the crack of a branch in an otherwise quiet forest at night are all auditory devices deigned to make viewers and listeners afraid and to create suspense.

One of the most successful, and the most common, auditory tropes in horror is the use of a loud sound after a prolonged period of silence – the so-called “jump scare.” Often the sound is unconnected with what is on screen, but a loud noise might accompany a reveal, such as a face (an example from the genre would be a character opening a mirrored bathroom cupboard door, then closing to discover the reflection of another person standing behind them, with accompanying loud noise or musical note). A distinction is sometimes made between diegetic sound (which the characters can hear) and non-diegetic sounds (which is external to the characters, such as incidental music). Famous examples of the latter are the stabbing and screeching sound of Bernard Herrmann’s violins during the shower scene in Psycho, John Williams’s double bass that precedes the appearance of the shark in Jaws, John Carpenter’s “stings” and soundtrack in Halloween, and the foreboding chorus in The Omen. Carpenter has noted that when his film was screened without a soundtrack to a film executive “she wasn’t scared at all. I then became determined to ‘save it with music’” ( Hayward, 2009 ). The high strings and low bass of Psycho were influences on Carpenter and Dan Wyman’s score and its 4/5 signature leitmotif, as was the use of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells from the opening of The Exorcist.

Some examples of diegetic sounds in horror film include the bangs and creaks caused by entities that are invisible to the actors on screen; one horror film that relies less on gore and blood and more on the potency of audition to increase suspense is The Blair Witch Project with its use of nocturnal wails, screams, and creaking branches. The use of sound to amplify horror can be identified in many early horror films – Ruben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), for example, which includes the first use of the sound of a human heartbeat in film, is familiar for the creation of the “Mamoulian sound stew” of noise, and sound used to generate suspense and excitement in the film.

The second most common auditory influence in horror cinema is the use of music and soundtrack. Research suggests that different styles of music can affect the emotional perception of what is seen in film, regardless of the content ( Bullerjahn and Guldenring, 1994 ), and this accompaniment allows us to interpret what we see in the context of this music ( Gorbman, 1987 ). In horror film, music even has its own trope or leitmotif – the tritone or diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) otherwise known as the Devil’s tritone ( Lerner, 2010 ) and can be heard in Beetlejuice, Hocus Pocus (1993), and The ‘Burbs (1989).

Some types of music are designed to be unpleasant, be perceived negatively, and to create tension, and there are many examples of this design in horror film, as discussed earlier. Discordant music has been associated with activity in different brain regions to those found when listening to harmonic or pleasant music; these regions include the right parahippocampal gyrus and precuneus and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex ( Blood et al., 1999 ) and may suggest that these regions are involved in mediating our auditory response to some aspects of horror film. Frightening music has been associated with changes in monoamine receptor activity in the caudate nucleus and right amygdala (decreases) and in the neocortex (increases) in 10 men ( Zhang et al., 2012 ). This study did not include a comparison film clip, however, so the conclusion that can be drawn from it is limited.

The most well-used auditory (and visual) device in horror film is the startle reflex (SR), and this tends to be provoked by the jump scare referred to earlier – the sound of a bump, a sudden burst of noise, some dialogue, or music ( Baird, 2000 ). The first known example of a startle effect in horror film is seen and heard in The Cat People (1942) when the sound of a bus door opening occurs just when the viewer is expecting an attack, but the film cuts to this noise and the shot of the door opening. A more recent example can be found in Fatal Attraction where a child’s scream and the whistling of the kettle in the reveal of the boiled rabbit overlap. In the same film, Glenn Close’s character’s resurrection in the bath provides another example of the jump scare that employs an auditory device.

Under laboratory conditions, a startle reflex (SR) is produced by delivering 50 ms of 95 db of white noise at unpredictable intervals, while eyeblink is measured. The stimulation is not always auditory and can be visual or tactile. The acoustic startle reflex describes an in involuntary eyeblink, measured at the orbicularis oculi muscle via EMG, in response to this noise. The startle reflex can be potentiated when individuals anticipate danger ( Grillon et al., 1993a , b ; Bublatzky et al., 2013 ; Bradley et al., 2018 ) and when pleasant stimuli signal threat ( via conditioning) ( Bradley et al., 2005 ). This is called affective modulation of the startle reflex, and the startle potentiation is thought to reflect a person’s emotional reactivity to threat. When people watch fear-related or violent films, the blink magnitude (SR) is larger than when people watch films with sexual content ( Jansen and Frijda, 1994 ), neutral content ( Koukounas and McCabe, 2001 ), or sad content ( Kreibig et al., 2011 ). The startle reflex is also greater when people watch unpleasant slides – and smallest when people watch pleasant slides ( Vrana et al., 1988 ) – and when people listen to unpleasant music ( Roy et al., 2009 ). Roy et al.’s study, however, includes a very small sample of 16 participants.

The SR is higher when people recall fear-related sentences than when recalling neutral sentences ( Vrana and Lang, 1990 ) and is higher when people are exposed to negative stimuli than positive or neutral stimuli ( Cook et al., 1991 ), and this is referred to fear-potentiated startle ( Grillon et al., 1993a , b ). Women’s SR tends to be higher than men’s when stimuli are disgusting ( Yartz and Hawk, 2002 ). Fear, however, is the stimulus that creates the greatest SR ( Bradley et al., 1999 ) and people with specific phobias show potentiated SR when phobia-related stimuli are viewed. Some studies find that a SR does not occur to some types of negative stimuli such as mutilation or surgery ( Stanley and Knight, 2004 ). The startle effect is a highly replicable behavioral phenomenon and can be reduced with the administration on anxiolytics and when lesions are made to the amygdala ( Hitchcock and Davis, 1986 ; Angrilli et al., 1996 ; Davis, 2006 ). It would be instructive to study whether those high and low in empathy or sensation seeking (see below) and whether individuals who like horror film and those who dislike horror film would generate different SRs.

Why do People Watch Horror?

Suspense and resolution of suspense are two important components of horror and our response to horror film. Suspense refers to the build up to threat, the tension created prior to the manifestation of threat, and the resolution/elimination of threat. It has been defined as “acute, fearful apprehension about deplorable events that threatens liked protagonists” and “an experience of uncertainty whose hedonic properties can vary from noxious to pleasant” ( Zillmann, 1996 , p. 108). The tension created during the feeling of suspense can arise from events, which signify conflict, dissonance, and instability ( Lehne and Koelsch, 2015 ). One theory of horror enjoyment, Zillmann’s (1980 , 1996) excitation transfer theory, argues that we derive our enjoyment of horror film from this feeling of suspense (this theory might also explain the enjoyment of non-horror film, which involves the invocation of suspense). When a threat is resolved, our negative affect converts to euphoria and suspense ends. The vital aspect of the theory is that enjoyment is derived from the degree of negative affect built up during exposure to the horror film and from the positive affect/reaction that results from the resolution of the threat. If the resolution does not occur, then residual negative affect will lead to increased dysphoria. If there is no suspense but a complete certainty about what will happen, suspense is replaced by dread ( Oliver, 1993a , b ). Very few studies have tested the theory, although limited reviews provide some support for the model ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Zillmann et al. (1975) showed children animated cartoons that varied in suspense and measured participants’ facial expressions, physiological arousal, and cognitive responses. They found that liking of the film increased as suspense increased. Liking was especially great when the threat was overcome, but the relationship between fear and liking was not examined in the study.

Individuals high in empathy will express more negative affect regardless of a successful resolution to the threat in the film ( Zillmann et al., 1986 ; Hoffner and Cantor, 1991 ; Sparks, 1991 ). Zillmann’s model has some difficulty accounting for the motivation to watch and for the enjoyment derived from horror films in which the sympathetic characters are (1) dispatched and (2) where the story does not end happily ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). There is also evidence that enjoyment of horror may not be affected by the availability of resolution and that unresolved horror is perceived as just as enjoyable as resolved horror ( Hoffner and Cantor, 1991 ).

An alternative model to Zillmann’s suggests that enjoyment is associated with the presence of destruction, excitement, and unpredictability in films ( Sparks, 1986a , b ; Tamborini et al., 1987 ; Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ). This model, the uses and gratification theory of film consumption ( Katz et al., 1973 ; Palmgreen, 1984 ), argues that the enjoyment and seeking out of material are determined by their specific need for stimulation and the satisfaction they derive following the achievement of gratification. Some research suggests that certain personality types and individuals who are high or low on some psychological traits may seek out horror or violent material for gratification but that the material itself may not always provide this satisfaction (see the Individual Differences section below). Sensation seeking, verbal aggression, and argumentativeness, for example, have been found to be positively correlated with enjoyment of horror and violent films, but these are not consistent predictors of liking for horror/violent material ( Greene and Krcmar, 2005 ).

Zillmann (1980) has argued that a positive outcome for the protagonist and a poor one for the antagonist are the key predictors of satisfaction with a film. If neither occurs but a threat is removed, this would also lead to a satisfactory experience, but the experience would be diluted. A positive outcome is, however, necessary for the “cognitive switch from dysphoria to euphoria” (p. 148). There is no consistent evidence to support this view and the success of films where the threat is still very much present in some way at the end of a horror film (e.g., The Exorcist, The Omen, Friday the 13th, and so on) and even in thrillers such as Basic Instinct and Presumed Innocent, suggests that this explanation may not account fully for why we watch and enjoy horror.

It has been proposed that arousal itself might be self-rewarding – the act of watching horror provides us with a thrill regardless of the resolution and we like and enjoy the film for this reason ( Tamborini, 1991 ). The pleasurable experience of arousal motivates us to continue watching in order to sustain that level of arousal, as Berlyne (1967) suggests. Sparks and Spirek (1988) , for example, found a positive correlation between skin conductance (a physiological measure of emotional arousal) and self-reported arousal in people who watched a clip of A Nightmare On Elm Street , suggesting that the arousal we report also correlates at the physiological level, although whether the psychophysiological changes determine the arousal or the cognitive and emotional arousals (the interpretation of the material) determine the psychophysiological changes is an argument, which dates back to James.

Individual Differences in Response to Horror

Carroll (2003) asked, “How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?” Some research has attempted to answer this question by studying the type of individual who enjoys and likes horror. Some of the personality traits and cognitive/affective traits that have been implicated in horror preference and/or enjoyment of horror include sensation seeking, empathy, theory of mind, need for affect, the dark tetrad, and personality. Other individual differences include age and sex (considered later). Unless a person expresses an interest and liking of horror, the response to graphic violence tends not to be positive. Weaver and Wilson (2009) , for example, assigned 400 people to one of three groups who watched either clips from five television programs showing graphic violence, clips with the violence sanitized, or clips with the violence removed. The non-violent programs were regarded as more enjoyable than the violent versions, a finding which is consistent with earlier research indicating that removing the violent content from a film does not reduce the film’s enjoyment ( Sparks et al., 2005 ). A meta-analysis of the enjoyment of media violence (not horror film specifically) found that greater selective exposure to violence (i.e., choosing to watch violent media) leads to a reduction in the enjoyment of its content ( Weaver, 2011 ). The implication of this finding appears to be that even though individuals may seek out exposure to violent media, they do not often enjoy what they find. In addition, participants may vary according to the degree of material they are routinely exposed to. When graduate nursing students and psychology students were shown videos of graphic medical procedures, for example, the nurses expressed less disgust and fear but more sadness ( Vlahou et al., 2011 ). Both groups, however, showed evidence of psychophysiological arousal (measured via Galvanic Skin Response) in response to watching the procedures.

Sensation Seeking

The most widely studied trait in the research on horror is sensation seeking. According to Zuckerman (1994) , sensation seeking is the “seeking of varied, novel, complex and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal and financial risks for the sake of such experiences” (p. 27). It peaks in the teenage years and declines thereafter ( Zuckerman, 1988 ). Zuckerman’s measure of sensation seeking describes four related but different factors: (1) thrill and adventure seeking; (2) experience seeking; (3) disinhibition; and (4) boredom susceptibility. In the original conception of the model ( Zuckerman, 1979 ), individuals thought to be high sensation seekers would experience much more positive emotion when highly aroused and stimulated and would seek negative stimulation to maximize their arousal because this stimulation was intense. A negative stimulus (such as a horror film) might, therefore, be interpreted by a person high in sensation seeking as being very positive; but a person low in sensation-seeking would find the stimulus unpleasant. High sensation-seeking individuals would also be less vulnerable to the experience of threat in these films ( Franken et al., 1992 ).

All four factors of the sensation-seeking scale have been found to predict enjoyment of horror film to some extent, but some factors are better predictors than others. For example, disinhibition was found by Edwards (1984) to be the strongest predictor, followed by experience seeking, thrill and adventure seeking, and boredom susceptibility. Edwards reported a positive correlation between high sensation seeking (in general) and interest in horror film. Tamborini and Stiff (1987) found a positive correlation between liking for horror and a combination of the sensation-seeking factors. Zuckerman and Litle (1986) found that frequency of horror film attendance correlated with disinhibition, thrill and adventure seeking, and boredom susceptibility, but in men only. The sex difference in this study highlights an important constraint on the model, and that is, individual differences (such as sex) may interact with sensation-seeking type to predict viewing, preference for, or enjoyment of horror film (see below). Cantor and Sparks (1984) found that sensation seeking was positively correlated with the enjoyment of frightening films in men and women. However, components of sensation seeking predicted enjoyment differently – thrill and adventure seeking were the best predictor for men, whereas disinhibition was the best predictor for women.

Other studies have reported no positive correlation between sensation seeking and liking and enjoyment for horror films ( Neuendorf and Sparks, 1988 ). Aluja-Fabregat (2000) found that disinhibition and psychopathy – a personality trait which describes a charming, remorseless, callous, and manipulative personality type – correlated with curiosity about morbid events in 470 eighth graders in Catalan. Sensation seeking correlated with consumption of violent films and consumption was associated with psychopathy, specifically in boys.

In a study of the enjoyment of fear experiences in video gaming, Lynch and Martins (2015) found that in their sample of 269 18–24-year-old players, men reported more enjoyment of violent video games and played more games and played more often. Sensation seeking and enjoyment were positively correlated, with high sensation seekers reporting less frequent fear (although p = 0.05) and low empathizers enjoying the violent games more. Low empathizers also played more but did not play more frequently. Resident Evil was the most commonly played game, and the game’s inclusion of zombies and surprises was cited as a cause of fear and fright. Agency in such games, however, appears to be important to the experience of the medium. When players were either asked to watch or to play a horror computer game (Konami’s “ PT ”), players showed increased heart rate and galvanic skin response (emotional arousal) compared to participants who watched ( Madsen, 2016 ). There were no differences between the two groups in self-reported fear.

While sensation seeking might be strongly associated with enjoyment of horror, it may not be the strongest predictor of attendance at horror films. Tamborini and Stiff’s (1987) study of 155 people (78 men; average age 21 years) attending a horror film in a US Midwestern city reported that men and younger participants scored the highest on the sensation-seeking scale, but that men and women attended for different reasons: men attended because they sought sensation and to experience the destructive nature of the horror while women attended because of they wanted to experience a just ending. More important than sensation seeking appeared to be participants’ expectations of the film: The greatest predictor of film attendance was not sensation seeking but a desire to experience a satisfying resolution (especially by women) and to see destruction (men).

Also of note is that there is evidence that sensation seeking is related to the startle potentiation described earlier. Lissek and Powers (2003) found that people low in sensation seeking (as measured via the thrill and adventure-seeking subscale) produced the typical startle potentiation during the viewing of threatening (vs. neutral) images but that those high in sensation seeking showed equal levels of startle to neutral and threatening images. One explanation for this finding is that high levels of sensation seeking are related to low levels of reactivity to threatening images. Because high sensation seeking involves a degree of sensory overload, less stimulation is required for a startle potentiation to occur and those scoring high in sensation seeking show less fear startle potentiation.

The literature on sensation seeking, therefore, suggests that this trait and specific components of it, especially disinhibition, may predict enjoyment of horror film, but this prediction does not apply to men and women consistently (a conclusion considered in more detail in the section on sex differences below). The literature also highlights a limitation in this – and other areas – of the horror research literature in that samples are often heterogeneous, the film selections are heterogeneous, and sample sizes tend to be small. These limitations are returned to at the end of the review.

Empathy is a multidimensional concept whose components have been defined in different ways but which in general are reflected in two types: a cognitive component (e.g., perspective taking) and an affective/emotional component (sympathy and concern for others and sharing of negative affect). One model suggests that empathy comprises a wandering imagination (a tendency to fantasize and daydream about fictional situations), fictional involvement (transposition of oneself into a story), humanistic mentation (a sensitivity to the emotional welfare of others), and emotional contagion (a susceptibility to be influenced by the emotions around oneself) ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ). Zillmann has proposed a three-factor model of empathy in which emotional behavior arises from the interaction of between these dispositional (a “response-guiding” mechanisms, which result in motor reactions to a stimulus), excitatory (“response-energizing” mechanism, which enables immediate arousal), and experiential (the conscious experience of the first two). Davis (1983) , who originally developed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, argued that empathy was not a unitary or binary concept but was best considered as a set of constructs, which involve our reactions to others but are distinct from each other. These constructs included perspective taking, a fantasy scale (which measures the degree to which a person transposes themselves into the feelings or actions of fictional characters), empathetic concern (which measures the degree of sympathy felt for others), and personal distress (a description of unease or distress experienced in interpersonal relationships).

There is evidence that each component can predict enjoyment of horror film, with low empathy consistently associated with greater enjoyment. In one study ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ), 95 young people in same-sex pairs watched clips from two 1-h documentaries or two full length horror films ( A Nightmare on Elm Street and Boogens ). The study found that tendency to daydream and fantasize predicted the ability to sense the feelings and actions of the films’ characters. Those scoring high on the wandering item, fictional involvement, humanistic mentation, and contagion scales described above found graphic horror less appealing. Those scoring low in empathy preferred graphic horror. People low in fearfulness also prefer graphic horror ( Mundorf et al., 1989 ). Hall and Bracken’s (2011) study of 199 undergraduates found that fantasy empathy (but no other type) predicted narrative transportation (immersion in a text/film or “getting lost” in a story) and was associated with increased enjoyment of the film, although not necessarily horror film exclusively.

In a variant of this procedure, Tamborini et al. (1993) asked participants to watch a pleasant (a comedy) or an unpleasant ( Videodrome ) film, with a confederate. To evoke empathy, after the film, the confederate said they were distressed because they thought they were going to be thrown out of school and asked “what am I going to do?” If there was no reply, the confederate left. If they received a reply, the responses would be rejected. Those participants scoring high in fictional involvement and empathetic concern provided more comfort and more social support. Those who watched the horror film, however, provided less support than did those who watched the comedy. While providing a potentially useful contribution to the study of how people respond to horror and the effect of this on our interaction with others – the greater the empathy, the greater the responsiveness to others’ distress – the sample size is small ( N = 21).

Empathy has also been associated with less enjoyment of suffering displayed in frightening films but with more enjoyment of danger, of excitement, and of happy endings ( Hoffner, 2009 ). People high in enduring negative affect have been found to experience more distress and less enjoyment of suffering. Those who had prior exposure to frightening films enjoyed danger more and enjoyed happy endings less.

Classifying participants according to the degree of empathy and sensation seeking has not been the only approach that has been taken to determining the types of people who watch and enjoy/prefer horror. Johnston (1995) , for example, notes that not all audiences respond to horror in the same way, as this section has demonstrated and has typologized viewers and their motivations to watch into three types: (1) resolved-ending types; (2) thrill watchers; and (3) gore watchers. Resolved-ending types enjoy film with a satisfying, definite closure; thrill watchers enjoy being frightened and empathize with the principal characters; gore watchers watch because they enjoy the destructiveness in film. The typology is based on some of the research reviewed here. A prediction that can be made from this typology is that thrill watchers will have higher levels of empathy and adventure seeking, whereas gore watchers will be low in empathy and fearfulness but will be high in adventure seeking and will seek out high arousal ( King and Hourani, 2007 ). Research suggests that gore watchers are curious about the ways people are killed, are vindictive (they require satisfaction that characters receive their just desserts), and are attracted to blood and guts (gore) in film ( King and Hourani, 2007 ). Gore watchers are more likely to be men, to identify with the killer in films and are less likely to identify with the victim.

King and Hourani identified types of watchers from 229 individuals and showed them four horror films. Half the sample saw the films with a traditional ending (in which the evil antagonist is destroyed) or with teaser endings (in which the evil antagonist is revived/resurrected). The traditional ending was more entertaining than was the teaser ending, but it was especially enjoyable and entertaining for high gore and thrill watchers than low gore and thrill watchers. Traditional endings were less distressing and more frightening for high than low gore watchers and were regarded as being more frightening by high thrill watchers. High thrill watchers found the teaser ending version of the film to be less scary than did low thrill watchers. High gore watchers regarded the teaser to be more predictable than did low thrill watchers. The traditional ending was considered to be less predictable by high gore watchers than by high thrill watchers and by high thrill watchers than by low thrill watchers. Very little research exists on this typology, however.

Although individual studies indicate a relationship between empathy and horror enjoyment, a meta-analysis of studies investigating the enjoyment of mediated fright and violence has found that empathetic concern and personal distress were negatively correlated with enjoyment, but correlations for personal distress were not consistent ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). The authors note that the inconsistencies may be attributable to differences in the content of the film employed in these studies, and this is a problematic issue common to the field: There are no consistently chosen materials in either nature, content, length, age, or narrative. What is noteworthy, however, is that Hoffner and Levine’s review found that the strongest effects (reported in two studies) were for studies, which included horror films, and those films depicted torture ( Johnston, 1995 ) or brutal horror with no positive resolution ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ). When these studies were removed, the correlation between empathy and enjoyment became non-significant. The authors note that the other four films measured participants’ enjoyment of horror film as a genre (rather than their enjoyment of specific horror films or acts of graphic violence), and this methodological limitation in the literature is returned to the conclusion of this paper.

Need for Affect

A different form of individual difference – need for affect – may also mediate horror film preference and enjoyment, but the literature is limited. Need for affect ( Maio and Esses, 2001 ) is based on the assumption that we are motivated to seek interesting or positive experiences and avoid unpleasant ones. Need for Affect (NfA) is measured via a questionnaire, which comprises two subscales: the tendency to approach and the tendency to withdraw. People who prefer sad films experience more enjoyment when watching sad films, for example, because they regard viewing sad films as an enjoyable and a gratifying experience; their need for affect is satisfied by watching sad films ( Oliver, 1993a , b ; Oliver et al., 2000 ; Maio and Esses, 2001 ). Few studies have explored the relationship between NfA and horror film viewing. One study asked 119 attendees (mean age = 23 years) at a German cinema how likely they would be to watch United 93 or the 2006 horror film remake, The Omen ( Bartsch et al., 2010 ). Participants with higher NfA approach scores experienced more intense emotions and experienced more negative emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust. United 93 evoked more negative emotions than did The Omen . Higher NfA withdraw scores were associated with a more negative evaluation of emotions. Controlling for personality did not affect these results significantly. While NfA is little studied in horror, one possible research question that could be explored is whether preference for film genres correlates with NfA; no study to date has systematically examined this relationship.

Other Personality Traits

Other personality traits thought to be implicated in horror film preference or enjoyment include the Big Five, the Dark Tetrad, and repressive coping style. Dark personality traits are those which express some abnormal, sinister, and unpleasant aspect of behavior. Four such traits are Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy (described earlier), and Sadism. Machiavellianism (the enjoyment of power and the manipulation of power) has been found to correlate with enjoyment of horror, and the correlations between these two variables are stronger than the correlation between Machiavellianism and sensation seeking ( Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ). High psychopathy scores have been associated with preference for graphically violent horror movies ( Weaver, 1991 ), and individuals scoring high in callousness and who habitually express little or no emotion show reduced facial expressions of sadness and disgust when watching violent films ( Fanti et al., 2017 ).

A repressive coping style is characterized by the repression of negative affect caused by stressors ( Weinberger, 1990 ; Sparks et al., 1999 ). Sparks et al. investigated repressive coping style and enjoyment of horror film stimuli in 59 individuals. Based on a median split, 30 repressors and 29 non-repressors were identified and were asked to view a 25-min extract from When A Stranger Calls (in which a babysitter receives frightening phone calls and discovers that the calls have been coming from inside the house she is in). Women in general expressed greater negative affect than did men, as expected (see section below), but the repressors in general showed greater physiological arousal during the film than did non-repressors. An interesting pattern emerged across the course of exposure. Physiological arousal was similar for both groups at the beginning of the first two sections of the movie and then diverged in the final three sections as the suspense increased. No explicit analysis was provided of the psychometric response to the film (how much it was liked, how frightening it was, and so on). The study suggests that those who repress negative affect may nonetheless show high levels of physiological arousal during exposure to frightening films. What is less clear in this study is the relationship between this phenomenon and enjoyment of the film. It is also based on a very low sample of participants, and little subsequent research has focused on this particular personality trait/style.

Despite being the most commonly accepted model of personality, the Big Five has been the focus of very little published research in the context of horror film enjoyment and consumption. The Big Five proposes that personality is comprised of five core traits along which individuals differ. These traits are Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness. One study employing a version of the Big Five found that a trait described as Intellect/Imagination (defined as a proclivity to engage in imaginative activity) was the strongest predictor of horror media consumption ( Clasen et al., 2019 ). There was a small but statistically significant and positive correlation between extraversion and frequency of horror media use, using horror media with others, enjoying horror media with others and being more scared with others. Agreeableness was positively correlated with being easily scared by horror media, using horror media with others, enjoying horror media with others, and negatively correlated with being more scared with others. People high in conscientiousness were less scared after using horror media, and people high in emotional stability were found to be less easily scared than those low in emotional stability, a finding which was also reported by Reynaud et al. (2012) , who found that psychophysiological arousal was greater in participants who were high in neuroticism when they watched a film designed to elicit fear. The number of participants in Reynaud et al.’s study, however, was small.

The finding regarding agreeableness contrasts with research on violent video game playing where people lower in agreeableness have been found to be more frequent violent video games players; individuals who score high in extraversion and openness and low in neuroticism have also been found to be more frequent users ( Chory and Goodboy, 2011 ). Low agreeableness is a significant predictor of enjoyment of the horror film genre but not exclusively – it is also a significant predictor of enjoyment of parody, animation, neo-noir, and cult genres across different media including books, television, and film ( Cantador et al., 2013 ). While the findings of Chory and Goodboy (2011) are informative, they are limited in terms of the measurement of response to horror film specifically because the stimuli used were not specifically horror film. A similar limitation can be found in Clasen et al.’s (2019) large Mechanical Turk study of 1,070 participants which asked participants for their responses to and perceptions of horror media generally, not horror film specifically. The study also administered a variant of the Big Five personality inventory and a variant of the sensation-seeking scale (Hoyle et al.’s (2002, Brief Sensation Seeking Scale) not normally administered in research examining the relationship between personality and horror film. Although research on violent video games might help understand some of the correlates between use frequency and personality trait, it should be acknowledged that violent video games are qualitatively different stimuli to films. Films are a passive experience – viewers are unable to influence the action they see on screen – whereas gaming is specifically an active experience where the player engages with what they see and are expected to do so as this is the principal motivation for gaming. Horror films and horror games are not equivalent stimuli, although they share many characteristics and elements of content.

In conclusion, the literature studying the relationship between personality and horror film consumption has been limited in number and scope. Two studies have reported a correlation between low agreeableness and preference/enjoyment of horror media, and one has not. It is noteworthy that in one of the studies reporting an association, agreeableness was the only trait to be significantly associated with horror media use. This aspect of personality may be worth exploring further.

Sex Differences

The most consistent individual difference predicting individuals’ response to horror film is biological sex: men and boys enjoy frightening and violent visual material more than do women and girls ( Zuckerman and Litle, 1986 ; Harris et al., 2000 ; Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Correlations between intensity of “scary media” or horror and the enjoyment of horror in men are consistently positive ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Men enjoy horror media more than do women, are less scared by horror media, use horror media more, and show a greater preference for frightening horror media ( Clasen et al., 2019 ). One of the earliest experimental studies of sex differences investigated the role of social comparison in individuals’ response to horror. Zillmann et al. (1986) asked 36 men and 36 female undergraduates to watch horror films ( Nightmares , Nightmare on Elm Street ) in the presence of a same-age, opposite-sex companion who either expressed control, indifference, or distress during the film. Men enjoyed the horror more and found it less boring and more satisfying and frightening than did women. Men expressed more distress if the female companion expressed distress (but engaged more with them than with a masterful woman) and less if the female companion was masterful. Zillmann et al. also manipulated initial appeal of the companion (high and low). Women enjoyed the films more in the company of a man with high appeal, but women’s appeal had little effect on men’s responses. Women engaged more with masterful than with distressed men. Cutting violence from films can increase enjoyability and decrease arousal in women (but has no effect on men): women regard these films to be generally more disturbing than do men ( Berry et al., 1999 ).

Male undergraduates experience less distress and anxiety than do women when watching horror film ( Sparks, 1991 ), and women find film clips depicting sadness and fear more unpleasant and distressing; they also show greater arousal to fear clips than to clips depicting compassion ( Davydov et al., 2013 ; Maffei et al., 2015 ). The findings reflect a more general sex difference in that women, in general, report greater fear and anxiety than do men. Women have been found to express more fears, more severe fears, and greater fear of repulsive but harmless animals ( Tucker and Bond, 1997 ), a finding that applies cross-culturally ( Arrindell et al., 2004 ). Anxiety disorders are more commonly reported by women than men ( McLean and Anderson, 2009 ), and women appear to be more susceptible to variety of anxiety-related disorders such as panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, and agoraphobia ( Kessler et al., 1994 ). The exception to this pattern is fear of bodily injury, social stimuli, noise, or enclosed spaces, where no consistent sex differences have been reported ( McLean and Anderson, 2009 ). Disgust sensitivity – the degree to which individuals find stimuli repulsive – also tends to be higher in women, and this phenomenon might provide an explanation for the sex difference in the fear of animals – and horror film ( Connolly et al., 2008 ). This is considered in more detail below. Women and girls, for example, are less likely to enjoy violent media when blood and gore portrayed are described as extreme, rather than mild or moderate ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ).

The sex difference is not only reported in the horror genre but also across a number of cinematic genres. One study of 150 undergraduates in Germany ( Wühr et al., 2017 ) asked participants to indicate which types of films they believed that men and women would generally prefer. In a second study, participants were asked to indicate the films they themselves preferred. In the first study, men were regarded as preferring action, adventure, erotic, fantasy, historical, horror, sci-fi, thriller, war, and western films, whereas women preferred animation, comedy, drama, heimat, and romantic films. Both sexes liked crime and mystery equally. In the second study, women expressed a preference for drama and romance, and men preferred action, adventure, erotic, fantasy, horror, mystery, sci-fi, war, and Western films. Animation, comedy, crime heist, history, and thrillers were liked by both sexes.

Enjoyment and liking of the degree of explicit (graphic) horror also appear to show sex differences. Men tend to prefer very graphic horror material more than do women ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Men also report watching more violent television and attend more horror films. One explanation for this finding has been proposed by gender socialization theory ( Zaslow and Hayes, 1986 ), whereby boys and men are socialized to not be afraid and to not make expressive shows of fear, whereas girls are not constrained by such expectations and can “express their sensitivity by being appropriately disturbed” ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Such an explanation is probably locked in a prison of its own time in the sense that it is unclear whether such attitudes still exist now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Sex differences have been reported in the context of other behaviors such as the identification with a film’s character. Tamborini et al. (1987) asked 44 male and 50 female undergraduates to rank their preference for two different versions of 13 films (12 of which were fictional). In one version, the victim of graphic violence was male; in the other, the victim was female. One theory of horror enjoyment discussed earlier (the uses and gratification perspective; Rubin, 1994 ) argues that our reasons for watching horror and the benefit and gratification we derive from it will determine whether we identify with a victim or an aggressor ( Johnston, 1995 ). Viewers who identify with a female victim are usually more likely to experience distress ( Zillmann and Cantor, 1977 ) and are not satisfied by happy endings ( Tannenbaum and Gaer, 1965 ). Oliver’s (1993a , b) study of 96 16-year-old high school students found that there was a correlation between gore watchers and enjoyment of retribution (liking to see victims get what they deserve). Participants’ high punitive sexual attitudes have been found to be positively correlated with higher ratings of enjoyment; men prefer horror films in which the female rather than the male is the victim, but there is no significant association between enjoyment and the films’ portrayal of victimization of sexual characters, of women, or of women expressing their sexuality.

Tamborini et al. (1987) found that participants’ recent and past viewing of horror film strongly predicted enjoyment of graphic horror in general. However, the responses to men and women as victims in the film interacted with other viewing preferences. For example, men’s enjoyment of pornography was correlated with preference for graphic horror, which depicted female victimization but not male victimization. Preference for graphic horror correlated with disinhibition, moderately for boredom susceptibility and experience seeking, and not at all for thrill/adventure seeking. Sensation seeking in general did not predict preference for graphic horror. Women regarded the films with female victims to be higher in violent content than films featuring male victims; the opposite pattern was found in men. Boredom susceptibility was a good predictor of preference for graphic horror in men. No one factor was a strong predictor of graphic horror preference in women when the victim was male. Deceit and boredom susceptibility predicted graphic horror preference when the victim was female. Physiological arousal (measured via GSR) has also been correlated with enjoyment of horror after men finish watching a film ( Sparks, 1991 ).

A retrospective study of 233 psychology students (125 men) asked participants to recall details of a date they had been on as a teenager/young adult during which they watched a frightening film ( Harris et al., 2000 ). The participants reported that the films most commonly seen were Scream, Scream 2 , I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer . Men were younger when they watched the film (16.7 vs. 17.6 years), and the study found some notable and significant sex differences: Thirty-one percent of women reported looking away from the screen, whereas only 7% of men did. About 61% of women reported feeling anxious, whereas 44% of men did; 34% women reported that it had increased their imagination (men – 1%); 19% of women said they feared sleeping alone afterward (men – 8%); 67% of women said their heartbeat were faster (men – 53%); 56% of women said they became very jumpy (men – 31%); 41% of women were amused and entertained (men – 59%); 55% of women held onto their date (men – 21%); 32% of women screamed (men – 6%); and 26% of women felt disgusted (men – 10%). Men gave more positive reactions than did women, and women gave more negative reactions than did men, and women reported more sleep disturbances than did men. About 80% of women reported being somewhat or very afraid (men – 46%), and 18% reported not being afraid or being a little afraid (men – 51%). This study also measured empathy and found a positive correlation between overall empathy scale scores and negative reactions but not between negative reactions and any one specific subscale. There were some associations between negative reactions and empathetic responses. Low empathetic concern, for example, predicted sleep disturbance. Higher boredom susceptibility was associated with fewer negative reactions and with increased liking but not with sleep disturbance. Women who scored high on empathy were more likely to be scared at the time of the study (i.e., they were more likely to express fear as adults) than were low-scoring women or men generally.

In a similar study, Hoekstra et al. (1999) asked 202 introductory psychology students to describe their reactions (especially fear reactions) when they recalled the frightening movies they watched as children. The mean age at watching was 10.8 years, a similar finding to Cantor (2004) . Female participants as adults liked slasher films less than did male participants as adults – of the 14 categories included, this was the least liked by women. The most liked genre by women was romantic comedy; by men, action and adventure. Men reported choosing to watch horror more often than did women. Both sexes noted fear-related changes after watching films as children but not during the film, with women reporting more negative reactions during the watching of the films when they were girls. The earlier their exposure to horror films as children, the greater was the sleeping disturbance they experienced afterward. The behavioral measures indicated the typical sex differences reported earlier: more girls than men hid their eyes (64 vs. 26%), held someone (35 vs. 6%), and were jumpy (65 vs. 45%).

In terms of the enjoyment of specific content, one study asked participants to rate a 10-min horror film in which the sex of the victim and sexual content was manipulated ( Oliver, 1994 ). The context of this study concerned the types of victim and protagonist in slasher films. An earlier content analysis of 10 slasher films found that a third of sex scenes concluded with the death of a character ( Weaver, 1991 ). Women, however, are not more likely to be killed. In an analysis of 56 slasher films, Cowan and O’Brien (1990) found that men and women were equally likely to be killed off. Women were more likely to be survivors, a cliche that has its own term in horror film: the Final Girl. More screen time is devoted to the deaths of women than men, however, and non-surviving women are more likely to be promiscuous, wear revealing clothes, appear nude, use sexual language, and undress and engage in sex when they are killed. Non-surviving men appear to be identified only by their use of sexual language. Oliver (1994) found that sexual portrayals of victims were associated with increased viewer enjoyment, especially in men. These films were also regarded as more frightening.

As discussed earlier, one possible explanation for women’s reaction to horror may be their disgust sensitivity. Women in general report greater disgust sensitivity than do men. Disgust is a protective response to a direct threat to survival, such as contamination, lesions, sores, or disease ( Krusemark and Li, 2011 ). People high in disgust sensitivity show higher levels of disgust toward low, moderate, and severe facial disfigurement ( Shanmugarajah et al., 2012 ). Individuals with anxiety disorders are more prone to be disgusted, especially those who are anxious about contagion ( Olatunji et al., 2017a , b ). People who are exposed to disease primes are more likely to judge themselves to be less extravert and open to experience ( Mortensen et al., 2010 ), and people distance themselves from contagion or symptoms of contagion ( Neuberg et al., 2011 ). Women’s disgust thresholds for imagining incest, reacting to images of insects, seeing open sores, feces or dirty clothing, and statements about death and sex are significantly lower than those for men, and women are less likely to work in environments in which pathogen exposure is likely ( Al-Shawaf et al., 2018 ). Women’s sexual disgust and pathogen disgust are higher than that for men, but their moral disgust appears to be no difference. This elevated sense of disgust sensitivity in women may partly explain why they enjoy horror film less than do men.

The literature on sex differences in response to, and preference for, horror film provides the most consistent finding in the field that men and boys prefer and enjoy horror film more than do girls and women. One possible explanation for this, besides differences in empathy, may lie in differences in higher-order traits such as anxiety proneness and disgust sensitivity. This possibility, and the evidence for it, is discussed in a later section.

Horror Films and Mental Health

While a typical person’s response to horror film is fear and anxiety, some studies have suggested that exposure to horror films can lead to abnormal stress or distress reactions requiring psychological or psychiatric intervention, a condition called cinematic neurosis ( Ballon and Leszcz, 2007 ). The rarity of these case studies and the details they present – Ballon and Leszcz found only seven such case studies – suggests that the individuals’ behavior arise because of causes unrelated to the horror film and that the horror film was a catalyst for provoking an underlying and pre-existing pathology that would have been provoked by any, other relevant stimuli. The pattern of behavior has echoes in Freud’s (1919/1971) account of seventeenth century “demonological neurosis,” whereby depression or psychosis arose from experiencing the death of a father and individuals made a pact with the Devil to relieve their distress.

According to Johnson (1980) , at least a quarter of horror film viewers had experienced “stress-type” reactions, although this is likely to be within the confines of the normal stress reaction that horror is specifically designed to evoke. Many of the studies reported are case studies, lacking in control participants and largely anecdotal. In a typical example, Horowitz and Wilner (1976) observed that after the release of The Exorcist in 1973, individuals lost “control over thought and emotions,” experiencing “denial and numbing … extremes of anxiety, tension and impaired relationships.” The Exorcist is the source of a number of abnormal behaviors reported by individuals responding extremely to horror film.

Bozzuto (1975) described four adults who developed abnormal stress behavior within a day of watching the film; participants reported insomnia, excitability, hyperactivity, irritability, and decreased appetite. The symptoms dissipated after seven sessions of psychotherapy. Mathai (1983) reported the case of a distressed 12-year-old boy who felt that when somebody touched him, they would go right through him and that when sitting on a chair, he would fall through it. Prior to presentation, he had watched The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with two of his siblings. Waking from his sleep, he saw “an awful face with bulging veins staring at him.” Hamilton (1978) reported the case of a young woman who had seen The Exorcist and presented with “acute unremitting anxiety and a pervasive fear of being alone especially at night” and refused to go to work. She felt that the “Devil was in a young girl” and “she dreamt of the Devil with a penis in his mouth” (p. 569).

Five of the cases identified by Ballon and Leszcz (2007) cited The Exorcist as the cause of their distress. The other two were Jaws and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers . Robinson and Barnett (1975) reported the case of a 17-year-old girl who had watched Jaws and experienced anxiety and sleep disturbances consequently. She was found the next day jerking her limbs, screaming about sharks. Turley and Derdeyn (1990) reported the case of a 13-year-old boy who became “addicted” to horror films, particularly A Nightmare On Elm Street . One study found that two 10-year-old boys experienced anxiety for up to 8 weeks after watching the TV program Ghostwatch ( Simons and Silveira, 1994 ). Symptoms included fear of ghosts and of the dark, refusal to go upstairs alone, nightmares, sleeping with the light on, and panic attacks. Ballon and Leszcz (2007) reported the case of a 22-year-old unemployed woman with three children who were at 23 weeks’ gestation but felt possessed and had flashbacks of watching The Exorcist . According to the authors, all of the cases of “cinematic neurosis” they reviewed involved individuals who had experienced a recent loss (or potential loss) of a family member about whom they were ambivalent. Individuals also held strong religious or cultural ideals, and their behavior included recalling imagery from the films they had seen. The films also appeared to have some personal meaning to the individuals.

Sparks (1989a , b) found that around half of the women and the quarter of the men surveyed in his study reported enduring fright after watching horror. Women appeared to be particularly affected ( Sparks et al., 1993 ) with around half of the women subsequently avoiding such films, 68% perceiving specific rooms as anxiety provoking (compared with 10% of men), and 43% reporting nervousness. Harrison and Cantor (1999) found that 90% of their sample of 136 young people (average age – 20.6 years) had experienced a film that was so frightening that the experience had lasted beyond the viewing of the film. More than 50% of the sample reported sleep disturbances and eating problems.

The rarity of such extreme emotion distress requiring psychiatric intervention suggests that horror film, while designed to evoke fear and panic, has no significant long-term consequences than can impair an individual’s mental, social, and occupational function and that those individuals who do report this impairment in functioning have other characteristics or have undergone other experiences, which may underlie the condition they report. While there is no evidence that exposure to horror films has adverse or sustained effects on mental health in individuals with no pre-existing mental health issue, there is evidence that watching horror films can lead to self-reported short-term anxiety and disturbed sleep.

Development of Fear and Horror Liking/Avoidance

Children express fear to horror, just as adults do, and they also express enjoyment of horror and graphic violence, just as some adults do, and some have argued that this interest peaks at adolescence ( Twitchell, 1989 ). The form of the stimulus children fear appears to change as they develop, with unfamiliar or threatening versions of concrete objects the source of anxiety in infancy and imaginary and symbolic stimuli the source of fear in the pre-school years. Fear stimuli become more concrete and realistic when children are at school age ( Hyson, 1979 ). Bauer (1976) found that drawings of imaginary feared objects decreased with age (from kindergarten to age 11 or 12), whereas depictions of realistic injury increased. Fright reactions occur to violence, injury, or physical danger ( Cantor and Wilson, 1988 ).

Early Childhood

An early study of children’s preferences for scary movies found that 24% of 43 7–8-year olds and 13% of 46 11–12-year olds reported having nightmares, and younger girls reported more fears than did younger boys ( Palmer et al., 1983 ). Younger boys liked scary films more than did younger girls. About 40% of the younger children liked scary programs; 65% of the older children did. Seven percent of older children and 28% of younger children disliked scary films; 68% of younger children said they avoided scary TV shows, whereas 11% of the older group did. Cantor and Reilly (1982) found that 11–12-year olds reported avoiding frightening TV and films more than did 15–16-year olds, and Cantor et al. (2010) found that the most common content causing fear in 219 8.5-year olds was the supernatural (imaginary/fictional monsters) with someone being hurt the next most common. Having a television in the bedroom was the best predictor of fright severity, and the average age of exposure to stimuli was 6.6 years; 67% were able to provide the name of the show. Seventy-one percent could not stop thinking about the experience; 52% worried about it; 36% reported shaking; 59% did not want to sleep alone; and 56% had nightmares. When another sample ( N = 164) was asked why they watched, 40% said it was because they wanted to and 40% because someone else was watching. A study of 314 7–12-year-old Dutch children’s response to TV-induced fright found that interpersonal violence was the most fear-inducing content and fantasy the least; the films, which caused the greatest fear, had been intended for adult audiences – Gremlins, IT, Commissaris Rex, and The X Files ( Valkenburg et al., 2000 ). Girls experienced more fear than did boys but fear in both sexes declined with age. Girls physically intervened and used social support and escape more than did boys. Cognitive reassurance was the most common coping strategy, and social support was the least common.

How children cope with horror has been the subject of some research on child development and horror because of the potentially harmful psychological consequences of exposure to frightening stimuli. Cantor and Wilson’s (1988) review of the effect of horror stimuli on children’s behavior concluded that two methods of coping were generally employed. Non-cognitive strategies were those which did not involve the processing of verbal information and which might involve desensitization (the gradual exposure to the fear stimulus); cognitive strategies were those whereby children were encouraged to think about the source of their fear as a means of coping with the stimulus. There is evidence that desensitization is successful ( Wilson and Cantor, 1987 ). For example, children (5–7 and 8–9 year olds) who had been gradually introduced to a videotape of snakes showed less fear when watching the snake pit scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark . A similar effect was found in a study of 5–7- and 8–11-year olds in which participants played with a rubber tarantula and later saw a scene from Kingdom Of The Spiders ( Wilson, 1987 ), and in a group of kindergarteners and 5–6-, 7–8-, and 6–9-year-old children who were exposed to photographs of worms and then saw a frightening film featuring worms. The children who had been previously exposed to the creatures enjoyed the film more than did those not exposed; exposure to live worms reduced the fear evoked by the film in boys ( Weiss et al., 1993 ). Cantor et al. (1988) found that 3–5-, 6–7-, and 9–10-year-old children’s fear of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk could be reduced if children saw a TV program, which showed the making of the TV series, and how the make-up of Lou Ferrigno (the actor who played the Hulk) was applied. Children of different ages become afraid at different stages of the TV program and the Hulk’s transformation ( Sparks and Cantor, 1986 ): 3–5-year olds became more frightened after the transformation, whereas 9–11-year olds became more frightened before the transformation. Cantor et al.’s finding is also anecdotally illustrated in the preface to Englund (2009) . Here, Wes Craven (the director of A Nightmare On Elm Street ) describes filming Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger in Elm Street) explaining that he was the actor who played a character so that the video could be sent to a distressed child who found Krueger very frightening.

Younger children (4- and 5-year olds) appear to benefit from adopting more physical strategies such as holding on to a blanket/toy or eating/drinking ( Wilson et al., 1987 ). The reasons for the success of this strategy might be the provision of relief from anxiety and the provision of tactile contact in linguistically developing children or by the occupation of working memory, which reduces the cognitive resources available to think about and process fear stimuli. Proximity to a parent is perceived as being the most successful fear-reduction coping strategy in young children ( Wilson et al., 1987 ). Very young children (under 2 years) experience less fear through covering their eyes; in 3–5-year olds, this behavior increases fear ( Wilson, 1989 ).

Cognitive strategies, such as talking about films and programs with parents or other adults, have been found to be effective ( Cantor and Wilson, 1988 ). By far, the most common type of cognitive strategy employed by parents is reassuring children that the stimulus children are afraid of does not exist ( Cantor and Hoffner, 1990 ), although this is likely to be successful in older children but not in younger children (4–5 years; Cantor and Wilson, 1984 ). Explaining that the source of fear is not likely to be harmful is also successful in older (8–9 year old) children ( Wilson and Cantor, 1987 ). Wilson and Cantor’s study, which involved informing children that most snakes were not poisonous and telling them about the behavior of snakes, found that these instructions increased fear in 5–7-year olds. Verbal explanations may be ineffective in younger children who are less likely to discuss horror materials with their parents. Cantor et al. (1986) found that none of their 3–7-year-old children discussed a film with parents, but 43% of 8–12-year olds and 50% of 13–18-year olds did. However, verbal priming prior to seeing the film can sometimes increase the child’s emotional response to what they (see Cantor et al., 1984 ). If children are informed that a film has a happy ending, they report less fear ( Hoffner and Cantor, 1990 ; Hoffner, 1997 ). Introducing probability information about events prior to watching a film such as telling children the likelihood of an event occurring appears to have no effect on 5–9-year olds’ emotional response ( Cantor and Hoffner, 1990 ). If children rehearse verbal information (e.g., “this tarantula cannot hurt people; they are not poisonous”), older and younger children respond less emotionally to a film about tarantulas ( Wilson, 1987 ). Children also regard the spiders as less dangerous after being given these instructions.

Two physical means of coping with frightening stimuli studied in children are blunting (avoiding threat or transforming a threat by distraction; looking away, for example) and monitoring (being action oriented and attending to the threat). Sparks and Spirek (1988) found that high blunters and low monitors were less physiologically aroused by horror films than were high monitors and low blunters suggesting that underlying physiology might predict or predispose individuals to react in a given emotional way to frightening stimuli; Sparks (1989a , b) also found that low monitors were less negative about horror when given information about the film but this information had no effect on blunters. A study of 228 14–15- and 15–16-year olds examined the role of blunting and monitoring on coping with scary films ( Hoffner, 1995 ). Hoffner investigated empathetic concern (EC, other-oriented) and personal distress (PD, feelings of anxiety/discomfort in response to suffering) by examining four coping methods – interpersonal comfort (IC), distraction (D), momentary avoidance (MA), and unreality. Davis and Kraus (1997) had previously reported that high empathetic concern was associated with less loneliness and unsociability; high personal distress was associated with shyness, poor interpersonal functioning, and social anxiety. Empathetic concern was found to encourage altruism, whereas personal distress prompted people to reduce their own emotion expression ( Batson, 1987 ).

Hoffner found a series of interesting results. A belief that something was unreal was the most common coping strategy, followed by interpersonal comfort and momentary avoidance; these were used more than was distraction. About 50% of the sample considered unreality and momentary avoidance to be effective; 26% considered distraction to be effective. The study found that boys preferred scary films more than did girls, a finding consistent with the literature, that girls reported more empathetic concern and personal distress, that personal distress correlated with empathy and with monitoring and blunting, that these correlated negatively with liking for scary films, that blunting predicted use of distraction and unreality, that monitoring was more widely used and was more effective, that monitoring and blunting were associated with increased interpersonal comfort, that girls were more likely to use momentary avoidance and interpersonal comfort and consider them more effective, that people who reported using one strategy were more likely to use all four, that empathy, but not personal distress, was associated with greater use of reality, IC and personal distress were associated with increased use of distraction, and that higher empathy scores were associated with greater use of Unreality. People who liked horror were less likely to use distraction, unreality, and momentary avoidance as coping strategies, which suggest that coping is related to the dislike of horror – it is something that must be done to mitigate the effects of something that is disliked. If people thought the coping strategies worked, they enjoyed the films more.

Hoffner also noted that participants who reported finding scary films and television to be violent were likely to use all four coping mechanisms; those who found the material to be realistic were more likely to report using distraction, unreality, and interpersonal comfort as coping mechanisms. Material featuring blood and gore was more likely to lead to the use of momentary avoidance. Girls reported using momentary avoidance and interpersonal comfort more than did boys and considered these to be more effective strategies than did boys.

Adolescence

As children enter adolescence, their reasons for seeking out horror develop and change – they will watch to be thrilled, to rebel (because parents have prohibited them), or to enjoy gore because they are interested in how people die ( Oliver, 1993a , b ). One study of 220 13–16-year-old boys and girls examined their motivation for watching slasher movies ( Johnston, 1995 ). Reasons for watching included gore watching, thrill watching, an increased feeling of independence bravery, and problem avoidance. Thrill watching and independence were positively related to positive affect; positive views of slashers were associated with high gore and thrill watching and gore watching predicted preference for graphic violence. Boys were more likely to watch graphic horror because they were motivated to seek out gore, and they were also more likely to identify with the killer than were girls; girls were more likely to identify with the victim. A larger survey of 6,522 10–14-year-old US adolescents in 2003 found similar sex differences: watching violent films was associated with being male, older, non-white, having less educated parents, and having poor school achievement ( Worth et al., 2008 ); teenage boys in another study who were regarded as aggressive and excitable found violent cartoons to be as funny or thrilling ( Aluja-Fabregat and Torrubia-Beltri, 1998 ). Both boys and girls who found violent cartoons funny and thrilling also scored higher on neuroticism, psychoticism, and sensation seeking.

Aging and Horror Enjoyment

The majority of the research on the development of horror preference and response to horror film has recruited children and adolescents as participants. There is very little research on how horror film and horror media in general are perceived as individual’s age and approach caducity, a paucity that is also reflected in humor research. There is some, but not much, research on how older people respond to horror, and this suggests that the preference for horror declines with age ( Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ; Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Clasen et al. (2019) , for example, found a negative correlation between age and enjoyment of horror media and horror use suggesting that both decline as we age. As Clasen et al. concede, however, their sample was clustered around the 35-year age. The average age of those who agreed that they strongly liked horror media was slightly lower than those who disagreed (33.5 vs. 36.5 years). They also note that since sensation seeking also declines with age, this might explain the reduction in enjoyment and seeking out of horror with increasing age post adolescence.

The literature from developmental research mirrors the findings from that in the adult sex differences research in that boys prefer, and seek out, horrifying/scary material more than do girls. Children tend to express greater fear to different types of stimuli and content depending on the age of the child. There are also differences between boys and girls (and between age groups) in the types of coping strategies they adopt during and after watching frightening television and film material. Cognitive strategies, in particular, have been found to be effective with talking about film content and explaining that “monsters” do not exist or that the characters can actually cause no harm being the most effective.

What Causes Fear?

One of the principal purposes of horror film is to induce fear. The nature of fear and its etiology has a long history in psychology, and various models have been proposed, which have attempted to explain why we become afraid and to what types of stimulus. One model, for example, has proposed that we have evolved a “fear module,” a theoretical construct, which comprises a number of domain-specific programs and which is “preferentially activated … by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective” ( Öhman and Mineka, 2001 ). Fear, it is argued, motivates us to escape and escape very quickly from potential threat and threats to survival ( Mineka and Öhman, 2002 ). The module has four features: it is selective, it is automatic (when encountering fear-relevant stimuli, it responds without mediation), it is encapsulated (i.e., it relies on proven strategies to deal with threat), and it is underpinned by specific neural behavior ( Öhman and Mineka, 2001 ). It is considered to be an adaptive mechanism for allowing us to avoid physical danger rapidly ( Schaller and Neuberg, 2012 ). In the context of horror film, this is, of course, counter-intuitive as horror film viewers who enjoy horror may not wish to escape the horror and deliberately and proactively approach and seek it, and those that do not enjoy horror and who may serendipitously watch horror engage in other withdrawal behaviors such as shutting the eyes or holding on to a companion (they may also leave a cinema or turn off a screen). What occurs during horror film viewing is the willing acceptance that the film will induce fear and that a contract is reached between the medium’s manufacturer and the viewer that this is what is to be expected. The questions that then arise are whether there are specific stimuli or situations, which horror films deploy or recruit which are more likely to induce a fear response and, if so, what are these stimuli and why do they have this effect.

Mineka and Ohman’s conceptualization draws on the (controversial) notion that there are some stimuli to which we are evolutionarily predisposed to fear – that evolution has rendered us more afraid of some objects and situations – and there are stimuli to which we have become socially or cognitively conditioned to fear (e.g., examinations, being in objectively non-threatening social groups). The latter stimuli pose no immediate and real physical threat to survival (i.e., they are not fatal), but the former may potentially present this threat by endangering or causing death, may generate threat, and, therefore, make us more alert to our environment, and these stimuli and situations were experienced by “pre-technological” humans ( Seligman, 1971 ). These stimuli and situations were those which once posed threats to our ancestors and that we, therefore, developed an evolutionary disposition to avoid or to respond with fear, a form of selective association. Guns, for example, are not fatal unless used, and our exposure to them is limited; guns are not phobic stimuli and seeing photographs of guns – or seeing guns – does not elicit significant fear, and not the degree of fear that stimuli to which we are evolutionarily predisposed to fear evoke. A person pointing a gun at us, however, with the intention to fire or with the threat of the intention to fire is clearly a direct threat but not one that is evolutionarily created.

One of most common phobias is arachnophobia, and spiders have been a staple of horror films since the 1950s, although only 0.1–0.3% of spider species are venomous ( Gerdes et al., 2009 ) and conditioned fear to spiders is very difficult to extinguish ( Davey, 1994 ). Individuals are faster at detecting images of spiders and snakes among innocuous stimuli than they are innocuous stimuli placed in an array of threatening stimuli ( Öhman et al., 2001 ). This predisposition facilitates vigilance (occasionally, over-vigilance and we see threat in ambiguous situations) to sources of threat or danger with greater attention paid to some stimuli ( Clasen, 2014 ; March et al., 2017 ). It is a self-protection and survival-enabling mechanism motivating us to confront (and, therefore, remove the potential source of threat) or flee (thereby, removing us from the context in which a threat could result in endangerment).

Fear is related to expressions of disgust, and the literature on phobia suggests that the strength of fear for phobic objects is closely related to disgust sensitivity but not trait anxiety ( Davey, 1994 ) such that people who express abnormal fear of an object also show high degrees of sensitivity to disgusting stimuli but are not dispositionally, highly anxious. A specific phobia, which appears to be qualitatively and quantitatively different from others and is relevant in the context of horror film, is the fear of blood or blood-injection-injury phobia ( Wani et al., 2014 ; Brinkmann et al., 2017 ). This accounts for 3–4% of phobias and is characterized by fear of blood withdrawal, medical intervention, and seeing others’ blood ( Brinkmann et al., 2017 ). Vasovagal syncope (fainting due to low blood pressure and heart rate caused by exposure to a stimulus) is seen in 75% of phobic individuals – there is a short increase followed by a decrease in heart rate. Individuals experience fear, anxiety, and disgust and avoid or decline medical treatment because of the strength of their phobic reaction ( Wani et al., 2014 ). This extreme experience may explain why some people feel squeamish at the sight of blood in horror: blood is unique as a stimulus, which evokes a strong fear or disgust reaction.

Neuropsychology and Horror Film

Fear is the most widely studied emotion in science because it can be easily conditioned, studied, and observed in non-human organisms. There is a substantial literature, which has attempted to explain fear conditioning and learning through reference to its underlying neuropsychology, and much of this work has been conducted on non-human species ( LeDoux and Hofmann, 2018 ). In humans, much of our understanding of the neurology of fear has derived from neuroimaging research and studies of brain injury. One of the brain regions involved in fear recognition and experience is the amygdala ( Martin, 2008 ; March et al., 2017 ), and a considerable literature exists examining the role of this structure in the conditioning and maintenance of fear.

No study has specifically examined the effect of exposure to horror film on brain activation, although hundreds of studies have examined the effect of exposure of fear-related stimuli, including films designed to induce fear, on brain activation measured via MEG, PET, fMRI, and EEG. Many studies have examined the consequence of brain injury on the fear response, and one study is especially relevant to horror film as it examined the effect of bilateral amygdala injury on responses to fear-related stimuli in a film-related context ( Feinstein et al., 2011 ).

In this study, a 44-year-old woman with normal IQ and language showed impaired fear conditioning, impaired recognition of fear in faces, and impaired social-related fear. Feinstein et al. attempted to induce fear by taking her to the pet shop where there were snakes and spiders, walking her through a haunted house, and having her watch horror films. Although she verbally indicated avoidance of the spiders she physically approached them and asked 15 times if she could touch one; at the haunted house (a visitor attraction), she volunteered to lead a group of visitors, did not hesitate in walking around, and was not scared by the monsters (she scared the actors). None of the 10 horror film clips elicited fear (other film clips designed to elicit other emotions successfully elicited those emotions) and she asked for the name of one so that she could rent it. She recognized that most people would be scared by them. This is only comprehensive study of the effect of region-relevant brain injury on the perception of horror films and horror-related stimuli in a single-case study, and while single case studies need to be interpreted cautiously, the study does provide the opening for other studies to confirm the role of these structures in horror appreciation. One possible extension of this study would be to examine whether amygdala reactivity is associated with enjoyment of horror film (those with highly reactive amygdalae may fear or enjoy horror more than those with less reactive amygdalae) or whether the amygdala becomes increasingly active with greater stimulation, and the intensity of the experience correlates with the increase in activity while watching.

Conclusions

The current review sought to determine why people watch horror film and how exposure to horror film affects behavior. Based on the literature from various disciplines, the following conclusions can be reached: (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror; (2) specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s responses than are others, but these dimensions are inconsistently predictive; (3) empathetic concern and personal distress are negatively correlated with enjoyment of horror involving torture; (4) there is a positive relationship between sensation seeking and horror enjoyment/preference, but this relationship is not consistent and may depend on the component of sensation seeking; (5) men and boys prefer to watch – and enjoy and seek out – horror more than do women and girls; (6) women and girls report experiencing more fear and anxiety generally than do men and express greater anxiety and fear when watching horror than do boys and men; (7) this sex difference may be attributable to women’s typical higher disgust sensitivity and anxiety proneness (both of which are inter-related); (8) women report more empathetic concern than do men, and this may be another explanatory mechanism; (9) no study to date has systematically explored disgust sensitivity as a mediator in horror enjoyment and preference, but the evidence would suggest that the former will predict the latter; (10) older children are more afraid of concrete objects/stimuli when very young but of symbolic stimuli when younger; (11) individuals tend to prefer horror less as they age, but there is little literature on this topic; (12) children use various coping strategies to overcome horror film-related fear and the success of these depends on the age of the child; (13) physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; (14) priming with information about the feared object helps reduce fear and increase enjoyment when children watch a film featuring the feared stimulus; (15) the startle reflex is amplified in the presence of threatening stimuli; and (16) little is understood about the role of neuropsychology in the response to horror film generally although the understanding of the structures and regions of the brain implicated in fear and fear conditioning is well documented; the amygdala is likely to be involved in the reaction to (and enjoyment of) horror.

Limitations and Future Directions

The conclusions in the previous paragraph are based on a very limited set of data. The studies from which such data have been drawn have varied in sample size, methodology, and materials, and these are three clearly identifiable and major limitations in this field. Hoffner and Levine (2005) have highlighted similar limitations in their meta-analysis. The type and selection of stimuli used in behavioral studies of horror film and researchers’ definition of what constitutes a “horror” or “graphic” horror film has led to a literature, which renders making generalizations about horror’s effects difficult, the summary above notwithstanding. Studies have used a variety – although a very restricted variety – of horror films over 30 years of research, and the films share little in common apart from being classed as horror film. The Silence of the Lambs, Cannibal Holocaust, The Babadook, Saw, The Blair Witch Project, Psycho, Dracula , and The Devil Rides Out are all horror films, but each has distinctive mechanisms of evoking fear and disgust based on story, film making, plot, characters, sound, performance, visual effects, credibility, and use of music. No one study can fully take into account our response to horror because not all horror films are the same ( Oliver, 1993a , b ), and this limitation needs to be more clearly recognized and addressed in future work.

Hoffner and Levine (2005) have concluded that the nature of the media content in these studies can explain the failure to find homogeneity in the correlations between enjoyment of horror media and empathic concern in their meta-analysis. As noted earlier, when correlations were found for empathy and horror enjoyment, the most consistent correlations found were in those studies in which victimization formed the dominant aspect of the horror stimuli. When these studies were removed, the correlations for the remaining studies fell to almost zero. These studies measured participants’ responses to the enjoyment of horror film as a genre (or response to a drama with a likeable victim), rather than their responses to specific horror films or their experience of watching specific horror films. Hoffner and Levine’s analysis identifies at least two limitations in the field noted here: the heterogeneity of the material used as stimuli in experiments, and the nature of the question asked in these studies (for example, whether the question is: do you enjoy this specific film/film clip? or Do you enjoy this genre of film?). The former limitation can be easily resolved via empirical research. Studies, for example, might examine the role of the nature of the character, the narrative drive of a film (point of view), the esthetics of the film, a film’s use of music, the number acts of violence, and the types of acts of graphic violence and the perpetrator of the violence, the characteristics of the perpetrator, and the victim (their attractiveness, age and sex, for example), a film’s use of color and the use of specific tropes and techniques (such as found-footage and types of horror film). This is not to say that some of these elements have not been studied – this review and others have described studies in which they have – but there has been little research which has examined these elements systematically and methodically, and some elements have not been explored at all.

The issue of self-report – and self-report based on very small samples – is another possible limitation in that authors rely on individuals’ subjective reports based on their impressions and perceptions, and these reports are based on responses to standard questionnaires or questionnaires developed by the authors. This is an issue for any research, which aims to determine how people think and feel and is currently the most effective way of measuring people’s responses. It is possible to study non-verbal measures (such as movement, EEG, brain activation, GSR, and so on), but these are indirect, correlational measures of what an individual might be thinking or feeling. Motor behavior, however, may be a very informative indicator of response to horror, as some of the studies reviewed here suggest.

Given the current accessibility of film and media generally via smartphones, as well as internet-ready TVs and, of course, computers, one topic of research that has been little studied is whether the medium affects the perception and enjoyment of horror films. Filmmakers may bemoan the viewing of material on a smartphone that was designed for a screen that is 1,000 times larger, but it would be instructive to examine whether screen size affects people’s esthetic, emotional, and cognitive response to horror. Screen size and its effect on the enjoyment of displayed material have been relatively well-studied (see, for example, Grabe et al., 1999 ; Lombard et al., 2000 ; Rigby et al., 2016 ). In the context of horror, however, it is hypothesizable that increased screen size leads to increased visibility and that this would result in a stronger fright reaction because more of the horror can be seen and seen more clearly. It is also possible that the augmentation of the screen would also augment the sound (an auditory-sound illusion) so that bigger screens might affect our perception of horror because of this visual illusion.

There is also scope for further research on coping with the effects of watching horror film and of mitigating the fright if the experience is considered too intense or too unmanageable. Of course, individuals could choose not to watch or could chose to watch selectively if they are in front of the screen. But there may be more imaginative strategies that might be adopted such as the introduction of non-visual, non-verbal, and non-auditory stimuli (e.g., scent). It is possible that the presence of a pleasant scent might alleviate some of the fright generated by horror film if such alleviation is required (either because it distracts or because it creates or elevates positive mood). There is some evidence that this might be possible ( Martin, 2013 ), and this is a question that merits pursuit. Wes Craven’s film, The Last House On The Left , utilized a similar, if non-olfactory distraction technique in the tagline for the film, which was “Keep repeating, it’s only a film…it’s only a film…”

The majority of the studies reviewed here has included mono-cultural samples, and the current review was unable to uncover any cross-cultural research on horror enjoyment or preference. An understanding of the cultural influences on film preference (especially horror) and the individual differences that may underpin them warrants investigation given that certain genres of horror appear to be more popular and appear more often, in specific cultures: Different cultures place different emphases on certain types of content and Japanese horror with its emphasis on ghosts, the supernatural is an obvious example ( Balmain, 2008 ; McRoy, 2008 ). Others have argued that the European horror film is distinct from other types of horror film and has a specific “esthetic” ( Allmer et al., 2012 ). There is a considerable literature on the difference between collectivistic and individualistic cultures with research suggesting that the psychological responses of individuals from each type of cultural background are different ( Matsumoto et al., 2008 ; Alotaibi et al., 2017 ; Gendron, 2017 ). In the field of horror film perception, experience, and enjoyment, it could be hypothesized that individuals from collectivistic cultures might respond differently to horror (and victims in horror) than do individuals from individualistic cultures – specifically individuals from collectivistic cultures may express greater fear compared to those from individualistic cultures – and this is an hypothesis that can be easily tested.

With interest and appreciation in horror increasing, the scope for undertaking research into horror film has never been more timely. There is still much to discover and still much to understand. Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. The research would suggest that the weight of evidence is on the side of one of horror’s innovators. Without psychology, Dario Argento once said, the horror film does not exist.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Charlie Allbright, Phil Hughes, and four reviewers, especially reviewer 2, for their detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Edward Lionheart for planting the seed for this review.

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Keywords: horror, terror, fear, film, cinema

Citation: Martin GN (2019) (Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films. Front. Psychol . 10:2298. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02298

Received: 07 February 2019; Accepted: 25 September 2019; Published: 18 October 2019.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2019 Martin. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: G. Neil Martin, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Introducing new graduate student elizabeth eberlin.

August 12, 2024 - Shelly DeJong

Name : Elizabeth Eberlin (she/her) 

Hometown : Coast to coast! I was born in Las Vegas, NV; moved to San Fransisco, CA; did 1st – 9th grade in St. Louis, MO; and then completed high school in Saratoga Springs, NY! 

Education : I started my undergraduate education studying computer science (CS) with hopes to pursue video game development. During the middle of my sophomore year, I realized that what I liked about CS was logical reasoning and problem-solving, not so much the act of software development! I had always been interested in the puzzle that is the mind, of how electrical pulses can create our rich waking experience, so I pivoted to studying psychology with an interest in mathematics and art, and never looked back! 

Tell us about your background/experience.  

I’ve had my heart set on a PhD in Clinical Science since undertaking a study of psychology – I knew I wanted to research, teach, and practice therapy and that was one such degree that would let me do it all with style! However, my path to get here has been winding, and almost never happened had I not realized my qualms with computer science. After completing my bachelor’s degree, I didn’t work in a scientific field at all. I had been working part time in a retail store connected to a tea factory - my love of tea was too strong to turn down an offer to manage the factory itself! This was an amazing experience albeit one where I had to learn a lot on my own due to having minimal supervision or training…in hindsight, there was a reason a 22-year-old without a business degree was being offered such a role (the company was a mess)!  

I was still involved in my undergraduate lab as a post-bac research assistant, but my mentor Dr. Katherine Dixon-Gordon encouraged me to seek out experience with the population I hoped to work with in both clinical and research settings – schizophrenia spectrum populations. This curiosity was inspired by life and untimely death of my uncle who had a long battle with schizoaffective disorder. I was able to join Drs. Daphne Holt and Nicole DeTore as a research intern in the Mass General Hospital Psychosis Clinical & Research Program, and I loved every second of it! Alongside this internship, I moved to Boston in the middle of the pandemic and began working at McLean Hospital’s Schizophrenia & Bipolar Disorders Inpatient Unit where I was able to witness the myriad ways psychosis can manifest, as well as appreciate and be inspired by the remarkable resilience among those who experience psychosis and their ability to find humor in the darkest of times.  

From there, I went on to complete a research-focused master’s degree under the supervision of Dr. Kim Mueser where I got involved in vocational rehabilitation as a teaching assistant for adult recovery education courses. This experience paired wonderfully with my time working inpatient as I was able to see individuals both work to get well in the hospital and work to stay well out in the community. Adding to this was my subsequent job working as a research coordinator for Drs. Holt and DeTore, where I was given the guidance and support to refine my research interests within the realm of severe mental illness, and (crucially) with applying for doctoral programs this past Fall! 

Why grad school?!   

Because I’m an eternal student who has an innate passion for learning! I realized early on in college that a PhD is what I was after, with wanting to walk both worlds of clinical practice and conducting research. My hope is to bridge these two such that they inform each other – research questions inspired by clinical settings, and therapeutic approaches inspired by research. I put this passion to the test in a variety of ways and instead of burning out, I was only evermore inspired to gain the robust and rigorous training offered through a Clinical Science program, and I am so thrilled to join MSU to do so!! 

What do I hope to research while I’m here ?  

I am incredibly interested in the process of delusional belief formation with respect to aberrant salience of perceptual stimuli, so I am very excited to work under the supervision of Dr. Katy Thakkar! I would like to explore how perceptual experiences and cognitive processes combine to weave such a compelling and convincing distortion of reality. Further, I’d like to understand what can be gleaned from this line of study to tangibly improve the response to psychosis-informed therapies and foster resilience for those with severe mental illness. 

What do I love about clinical science?   

Gosh, what’s not to love?! Ha, just kidding. I love that Clinical Science as a field is uniquely situated to both provide novel contributions to the world of science and to the world of therapeutic practice. Without Clinical Science, evidence-based therapies would not exist! I also love Clinical Science because I feel it perfectly speaks to my interest as someone who knew I wouldn’t be satisfied solely operating in a laboratory setting nor a therapeutic settings, I needed both, and Clinical Science as a field allows one to thrive doing exactly that! 

What do I do in my free time?   

I am quite the avid cyclist in my free-time – I love to use a bicycle for every possible errand and have commuted to work almost exclusively by bike for the past 2 years (20 miles round-trip!). When I’m not riding a bike, I love to garden – vegetables, native perennials, and houseplants! Over the pandemic, like many others, I cultured a sourdough starter and found a new hobby in making whole grain sourdough bread and in baking more broadly. If I’m not doing any of those things, I am likely walking my tuxedo cat, Mr. Postman, in the yard! 

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(Why) Do You Like Scary Movies? A Review of the Empirical Research on Psychological Responses to Horror Films

Why do we watch and like horror films? Despite a century of horror film making and entertainment, little research has examined the human motivation to watch fictional horror and how horror film influences individuals’ behavioral, cognitive, and emotional responses. This review provides the first synthesis of the empirical literature on the psychology of horror film using multi-disciplinary research from psychology, psychotherapy, communication studies, development studies, clinical psychology, and media studies. The paper considers the motivations for people’s decision to watch horror, why people enjoy horror, how individual differences influence responses to, and preference for, horror film, how exposure to horror film changes behavior, how horror film is designed to achieve its effects, why we fear and why we fear specific classes of stimuli, and how liking for horror develops during childhood and adolescence. The literature suggests that (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror film but that specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s responses than are others; (2) there is a positive relationship between sensation-seeking and horror enjoyment/preference, but this relationship is not consistent; (3) men and boys prefer to watch, enjoy, and seek our horror more than do women and girls; (4) women are more prone to disgust sensitivity or anxiety than are men, and this may mediate the sex difference in the enjoyment of horror; (5) younger children are afraid of symbolic stimuli, whereas older children become afraid of concrete or realistic stimuli; and (6) in terms of coping with horror, physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; priming with information about the feared object reduces fear and increases children’s enjoyment of frightening television and film. A number of limitations in the literature is identified, including the multifarious range of horror stimuli used in studies, disparities in methods, small sample sizes, and a lack of research on cross-cultural differences and similarities. Ideas for future research are explored.

Horror: An Introduction

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” ( Hume, 1907 ).

Why do people watch, and enjoy watching, horror films, and why is this an important or useful question to ask? The primary aims of the horror film are to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, to mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown ( Cherry, 2009 ; Newman, 2011 ). It is the emphasis on these characteristics that tend to distinguish horror from the related genre of thriller or psychological thriller ( Hanich, 2011 ). Thrillers are designed to create suspense and terror, but the creation of these feelings is dependent not on the presence of mutilation, gore, or the supernatural but via more human devices. These boundaries, however, can be fuzzy. If these features are utilized in thrillers, they are not the principal focus of the film but are incidental to it (an example would be the ear-cutting scene in Reservoir Dogs, which is bloody and brutal but is contained within a film, which has a non-horror theme). Together with Westerns, science fiction, comedy, musicals, documentaries, and other film genres, which are characterized by particular tropes, styles, themes, characters, and visual leitmotifs, horror sets itself apart from other film types via its distinctive characteristics.

Although commercially successful, the cinematic reputation of horror film has been less than stellar. It has been frequently regarded (if it is regarded at all) as the runt of the cinema family and held in lower esteem than other film categories ( Stone, 2016 ). Etchison (2011) observed that “The horror film occupies in popular culture roughly comparable to that of horror literature. That is to say, it is generally ignored, sometimes acknowledged with bemused tolerance, and viewed with alarm when it irritates authority - rather like a child too spirited to follow the rules that rendition has deemed acceptable” (p. ix), a view that is echoed elsewhere. For example, Tudor (1997) noted that “a taste of horror is a taste for something seemingly abnormal and is therefore deemed to require special attention” (p. 446). Part of the reason for the disdain, apart from the broad and base nature of the content, may be the relative cheapness of horror film: these are often much less expensive to create than are other genre films such as westerns, comedies, or science fiction. The first horror film can probably be dated to 1855/1856. The Lumiere Brothers’ L’arrive d’un train en gare de la Ciotat depicts the arrival of a train into a station, the appearance of which, if anecdotal although possibly apocryphal accounts are to be believed, resulted in the audience becoming consumed with a fear that the train would emerge from the screen, such was the novelty of such a depiction at the time.

In terms of industry regard, the reputation of horror has not been high. The American Academy of Motion Picture Arts, which awards the Oscars, has nominated only six horror/supernatural films for Best Picture, and only one has won the Award ( The Silence of The Lambs in 1992, which also won the award for Best Actress, Actor, and Director). Other horror films to have been nominated include The Exorcist (1973), Jaws (1975), The 6th Sense (1999), Black Swan (2010), and Get Out (2017). The latter also nominated for best comedy/musical at the Golden Globes and was winner of the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Industry recognition for horror film has tended to be reserved for technical achievements; hence, the Oscars awarded for best art direction and cinematography for Phantom Of The Opera (1943), best score for The Omen (1976), best visual effects for Alien (1979), and best-make up for An American Werewolf In London (1981) and The Fly (1986). The number of actors to have won an Oscar nomination for horror roles is low – Frederic March ( Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde , 1931), Ruth Gordon ( Rosemary’s Baby, 1968), Kathy Bates ( Misery , 1990), Natalie Portman ( Black Swan , 2010), and Hopkins are exceptions.

Despite the relative lack of formal industry recognition and professional respect, horror thrives. In 2017, the second cinema adaptation of the Stephen King novel IT (2017) generated $700.4 m in global ticket sales, making this the most financially successful horror film of all time based on recorded box office sales (its production budget was $35 m). The success led to a sequel released in 2019 ( IT: Chapter 2 ), which has achieved global ticket sales of $185 m in its first week of release. In 1989, two horror films had grossed over $38 m ( The Fly II and The Abyss , earning $38.9 and $89.8 m, respectively). In 2017, this number was 15, with IT leading and occupying 13th place in box office revenue. The Mummy occupied 23rd position, Resident Evil: Final Chapter the 30th position, Annabelle: Creation the 32rd, and Get Out the 37th ($255 m). Nine horror films earned more than $100 m in 2017. These numbers illustrate how successful and popular the horror film has become and that viewers’ appetite for it is rapacious.

This commercial enthusiasm exists against a backdrop of considerable fan enthusiasm for the genre, as evidenced by the number of major, significant genre-specific international film festivals which exist. These include the UK’s three Frightfest events, the Sitges International Fantastic Film Festival in Catalonia, Toronto’s After Dark Film Festival, Screamfest and Fantasticfest in the USA, the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, Australia’s A Night of Horror International Film Festival, Amsterdam’s Imagine Festival, Argentina’s Rojo Sangre, Italy’s Ravena Nightmare Film Festival, Wales’s Abertoir, and several others. A number of print magazines devoted to horror is available (such as Rue Morgue, Diabolique, Scream , and The Dark Side ) as are various horror websites, online film streaming services (such as Shudder and Screambox ), and specialist satellite/Freeview TV channels such as The Horror Channel and SyFy . The TV company AMC airs and produces original horror content (and created Shudder ), and an Asian-based pay-TV horror channel is available called Thrill . Given the popularity of horror film, a useful question to explore is why people are attracted to this genre of film, given its distinctive nature, and why people are attracted to horror in the first instance, a question addressed in this review.

Historically, horror has formed a significant part of “Western” literary tradition since the Babylonian Gilgamesh and the English Beowulf . The Gothic tradition, a period that covers 1,760–1,820 features fiction in which the omphalos is their archaic themes, haunted castles, stylized period settings, a supernatural element in the story telling, suspense, and chaos ( Punter, 2014 ). Examples include Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto , Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, and The Italian and Lewis’ The Monk, among others. Although modern horror clearly has its roots and traditions in Gothic horror (and castles, spirits, and ghosts are well-documented tropes of horror films), very little modern horror film has been directly inspired by, nor has adapted, these works. Victorian literature has exerted a much greater and direct influence, as evidenced by the re-imaginings and remakes of films based on literary characters from this period, such as Dracula, Frankenstein (doctor and creation), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Phantom of the Opera, Dr. Moreau, Dorian Gray, the monsters and protagonists in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the trolls of Nordic literature. These figures have been interpreted and re-interpreted throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in different fictionalized forms – in theater, drama, radio, television, short stories, novels, and, especially, film.

Given the longevity of horror as a genre and its history in cinema, what is it that draws people to this particular genre and how does the genre create the psychological effects that it does? The study of individuals’ response to horror can be illuminating for several reasons. It may help us understand why people are attracted to a very commercially successful genre of film making but one which is seen as very distinctive and highly specialized. It may also help us to explain why some material that is perceived as being unpleasant and disgusting is appealing to some people more than it is to others. The study of horror film may also help us understand how emotions are generated and processed and may help us understand elements of fear (and the attraction of fear).

The current paper sets out to review the literature regarding the appeal of horror and why and how horror cinema exerts the effects that it does. Specifically, it will consider whether there are personality types or other individual differences associated with preference for, and enjoyment of, horror films; whether sex differences exist in the preference for, and enjoyment of, horror film; how fear of horror film develops and how coping strategies are recruited to manage the fear elicited by horror; the psychological and emotional consequences of watching horror and whether watching horror is associated with any adverse, short-term, or long-term psychological consequences; the behavioral responses reliably elicited by exposure to horror film; and the use of auditory stimulation to manipulate our response to horror. A number of texts exists that have discussed and addressed various aspects of horror and horror film, including the cinematic portrayal of the “mad scientist” ( Tudor, 1989 ; Frayling, 2013 ), the esthetics of horror film ( Sipos, 2010 ), the philosophy of horror ( Carroll, 2003 ), the process of horror fiction writing ( King, 2010 ), the use of sound and music in horror ( Hayward, 2009 ), and the marketing of horror films ( Hantke, 2004 ), among others. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first attempt to assimilate the psychology and related literature in a comprehensive review of our understanding of the enjoyment of horror film, the motivation to watch horror film and the effects of watching horror film. This review was based on keyword searches made via Google Scholar and PsycInfo between 2018 and August 2019 and included combinations of the words and terms “horror,” “terror,” “film,” “movie,” “cinema,” “fear,” “thriller,” “slasher,” “fright,” “gore,” “anxiety,” “the unknown,” “the uncanny,” “Gothic,” “blood,” “guts,” “scream/screaming,” “shudder,” shivering,” “trauma,” and “disgust/disgusting.” Material was also sourced from the reference sections of the papers obtained and of books where the topic was horror. The review begins with a definition of horror.

What is “Horror”?

The word “horror” derives from the Greek phryke (meaning “shudder”) and describes the physical manifestations of shivering, shuddering, and piloerection. In the fourth stasimon of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus , the chorus says after the protagonist blinds himself: “Alas, poor man, I cannot ever look at you … such is the shiver (phryke) you cause in me” ( Cairns, 2015 ). An exact and precise modern definition of horror, however, is difficult to determine. Horror has been defined as a “spontaneous response to shocking visual stimulus” (Ceirus, 2015) and as “a compound of terror and revulsion” ( Kawin, 2012 ). In Kawin’s interpretation, “imagined horror provides entry to the made-up world where fears are heightened but can be mastered … it accesses a core of fears we may share as humans, such as the fear of being attacked in the dark … it provides a way to conceptualize, give shape to and deal with the evil and frightening.” Horror, Stone (2016) argues, “confronts us with the disgusting and the fascinating simultaneously,” two aspects of horror returned to later. Horror, according to Marriott (2012) , is “the madwoman in the attic.”

One view of horror considers it to be of two types: horror, which is genuine and is designed to make us afraid because it is advantageous to our survival (e.g., fear arising from attack and being motivated to fight or flee), and “art horror,” which describes the imagined horror found in horror films ( Carroll, 1987 ). Carroll also argues that “horror novels, stories, films, plays and so on are marked by the presence of monsters of either a supernatural or sci-fi origin” (p. 52). In Carroll’s definition, it is the presence of a monster, which defines the essence of a horror film, as monsters do not exist within our conventional realm of understanding or reason; they defy science; they should not exist. Carroll views films that are typically classed as horror (e.g., Psycho ) to be of a different type (tales of terror) because “though eerie and scary, [they] achieve their hair-raising effect by explaining extreme psychological phenomena that are all too human.” This definition, of course, would exclude a significant number of obviously horrific horror films such as The Silence of the Lambs , Henry – Portrait of A Serial Killer , the Saw and Hostel franchises and other exemplars of the “torture porn” horror sub-genre and the cannibal films of the 1970s (e.g., Cannibal Holocaust and Cannibal Ferox ). The view has also been challenged ( Gaut, 1993 ). “Slasher” movies, for example, are clearly horror films but do not necessarily contain monsters as described by Carroll (although some, such as Freddie Kruger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers, possess supernatural elements, and Freddie Kruger is an oneiric fiction). Also, Chewbacca and The Force defy the conventions of science, but Star Wars would not be classed a horror film.

Horror invariably includes an element of evil, channeled via a human, a creature, or a supernatural force, which has the power to change events causing disruption and instability and which must be challenged and defeated ( Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, 2016 ). If this force is not human or supernatural (ghostly, spectral), it is natural – plants, monkeys, ants, leeches, sharks, birds, dogs, bats, rats, bees, fish, earthworms, alligators, spiders, snakes, cockroaches, and dinosaurs have all been employed to create chaos and instability in horror films. Freud (1919/2003) referred to horror as the uncanny (a peculiar translation of “unheimlich, meaning “unhomely”): “the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light.” Horror films also invariably present a Manichean view of the world, where good battles evil (as is literally the case in films such as Dracula, The Exorcist, and The Omen ). There is a driving motivation to overcome “a pure and unmotivated desire to inflict suffering” ( Clasen, 2014 ). But horror film, despite the features that the genre shares, is not a unitary cinematic phenomenon and distinct sub-genres or branches exist which are characterized by similar features or styles of film making and storytelling. Often, these are post hoc classifications of films, which seem to share core features, and the classification can seem like an exercise in pattern recognition. There are films, which do not easily lend themselves to these classifications (and some may straddle boundaries). However, the most common and typical sub genres include gothic, supernatural/occult/parananormal, psychological horror, monster movies, slasher films, body horror/horror typified by extreme gore, exploitation cinema ( Cherry, 2009 ), and found-footage, which have a very specific technical film-making approach and its own identifiable tropes bequeathed from such films as Cannibal Holocaust (1980) but more demonstrably from The Blair Witch Project (1999).

Horror film is the only fictional genre, which is specifically created to elicit fear consistently and deliberately rather than sporadically or incidentally. Behaviorally, horror film can create shivering, closing of the eyes, startle, shielding of the eyes, trembling, paralysis, piloerection, withdrawal, heaving, and screaming ( Harris et al., 2000 ). It can produce changes in psychophysiology, specifically increasing heart rate and galvanic skin response (see below). Mentally, it can create anxiety, fear, empathy, and thoughts of disgust ( Cantor, 2004 ). One of the earliest empirical studies to examine the effect of watching horror or suspenseful cinema on behavior asked participants to watch three programs, which varied in suspense (high and low) and in outcome – where the film had a resolved ending or an unresolved ending ( Zillmann et al., 1975 ). The suspenseful programs with the resolved endings were better appreciated than were those with unresolved endings. However, similar – but smaller – results were also found for the unresolved endings (i.e., appreciation levels were high if the program was suspenseful). Cantor (2004) asked students to write about their experiences of horror films and analyzed 3 years’ worth of the students’ papers (530 in total). Approximately 46% of the sample reported experiencing sleep disturbances after the event and 75% reported having experienced anxiety. The four most frequently cited causes of frightening experiences were the films, Poltergeist (5.5%), Jaws (4.3%), Blair Witch Project (4.2%), and Scream (3.2%). There were some film-specific anxieties – respondents would express fear of swimming in lakes and oceans, uneasiness around clowns and televisions, and avoidance of camping and woods.

Behavioral change has also been examined experimentally. Hagenaars et al. (2014) , for example, asked 50 participants to watch neutral, pleasant, or unpleasant film clips while “standing on a stabilometric platform.” This device measures a person’s motoric behavior as participants engage in some exercise or task. They found that when participants watched unpleasant films, the participants would freeze, show reduced body sway, and heart rate deceleration. The reduced body sway was found early on in the viewing of the unpleasant material (1–2 s after stimulus onset) suggesting that the behavioral effects of watching horror are immediate. The study is one of the few, methodologically well-controlled studies of behavioral response to films designed to elicit strong emotions (pleasant or unpleasant) and demonstrated empirically how exposure to certain types of film affects physical behavior and, in this specific example, how certain types of film inhibit motor behavior.

People’s enjoyment of horror can also be affected by priming. Cantor et al. (1984) found that providing adults with information about the types of events they were about to see in four horror films increased the degree of fright and upset that the participants experienced. Neuendorf and Sparks (1988) extended Cantor et al.’s study by presenting 121 attendees of two horror films ( The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night of the Living Dead ) at a US cinema with three levels of warning – the low warning involved the transmission of basic information such as the film’s name, the release date, and its R rating; the moderate warning involved all of the low information plus a description of the film’s content; the high warning included both of these plus a statement about a graphic scene in the film (e.g., a paraplegic being sawn in half by a saw-wielding maniac). If individuals reported being previously afraid of the specific types of content mentioned by the experimenters, these “cues” significantly predicted overall fear when prior experience of the film and anxiety was controlled for (fear was measured via questionnaire rather than behaviorally). There was no significant correlation between a trait known as sensation seeking (see below) and liking and enjoyment of either film. There was a correlation between prior experience and enjoyment for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre suggesting that viewers repeated their viewing because they enjoyed it the first time. Viewers’ anxiety level predicted the fright generated by Night of the Living Dead , as did fear cues. The greater the experienced anxiety and the fear cues, the greater the experienced fright. The availability of spoilers – the reveal of key scenes and plot points in a work of fiction in advance of viewing – appears to have little effect on the positive enjoyment of horror film or the experience of suspense ( Johnson et al., 2019 ).

Our behavioral reaction to horror tends to be consistent, although there is not much research that has explicitly investigated this response. The next section considers some of the reasons why people watch horror film and considers some of the dominant theories and models in interdisciplinary research that have been proposed to explain our enjoyment of horror film. It considers first some of the most salient ways in which horror film sets out to frighten viewers including sound.

Sound in Horror

In addition to the visual and verbal (dialogue) impact of horror, perhaps one of the most significant elements of horror film is auditory. To this end, some authors have argued that “horror is primarily a sound-based medium” ( Kawin, 2012 ): The creaking door, the scream, the shriek of an owl, the hiss of a cat, the squelching of a head as it meets a sledgehammer, the ringing of a phone, the bang of a falling object, and the crack of a branch in an otherwise quiet forest at night are all auditory devices deigned to make viewers and listeners afraid and to create suspense.

One of the most successful, and the most common, auditory tropes in horror is the use of a loud sound after a prolonged period of silence – the so-called “jump scare.” Often the sound is unconnected with what is on screen, but a loud noise might accompany a reveal, such as a face (an example from the genre would be a character opening a mirrored bathroom cupboard door, then closing to discover the reflection of another person standing behind them, with accompanying loud noise or musical note). A distinction is sometimes made between diegetic sound (which the characters can hear) and non-diegetic sounds (which is external to the characters, such as incidental music). Famous examples of the latter are the stabbing and screeching sound of Bernard Herrmann’s violins during the shower scene in Psycho, John Williams’s double bass that precedes the appearance of the shark in Jaws, John Carpenter’s “stings” and soundtrack in Halloween, and the foreboding chorus in The Omen. Carpenter has noted that when his film was screened without a soundtrack to a film executive “she wasn’t scared at all. I then became determined to ‘save it with music’” ( Hayward, 2009 ). The high strings and low bass of Psycho were influences on Carpenter and Dan Wyman’s score and its 4/5 signature leitmotif, as was the use of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells from the opening of The Exorcist.

Some examples of diegetic sounds in horror film include the bangs and creaks caused by entities that are invisible to the actors on screen; one horror film that relies less on gore and blood and more on the potency of audition to increase suspense is The Blair Witch Project with its use of nocturnal wails, screams, and creaking branches. The use of sound to amplify horror can be identified in many early horror films – Ruben Mamoulian’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1931), for example, which includes the first use of the sound of a human heartbeat in film, is familiar for the creation of the “Mamoulian sound stew” of noise, and sound used to generate suspense and excitement in the film.

The second most common auditory influence in horror cinema is the use of music and soundtrack. Research suggests that different styles of music can affect the emotional perception of what is seen in film, regardless of the content ( Bullerjahn and Guldenring, 1994 ), and this accompaniment allows us to interpret what we see in the context of this music ( Gorbman, 1987 ). In horror film, music even has its own trope or leitmotif – the tritone or diabolus in musica (“the devil in music”) otherwise known as the Devil’s tritone ( Lerner, 2010 ) and can be heard in Beetlejuice, Hocus Pocus (1993), and The ‘Burbs (1989).

Some types of music are designed to be unpleasant, be perceived negatively, and to create tension, and there are many examples of this design in horror film, as discussed earlier. Discordant music has been associated with activity in different brain regions to those found when listening to harmonic or pleasant music; these regions include the right parahippocampal gyrus and precuneus and bilateral orbitofrontal cortex ( Blood et al., 1999 ) and may suggest that these regions are involved in mediating our auditory response to some aspects of horror film. Frightening music has been associated with changes in monoamine receptor activity in the caudate nucleus and right amygdala (decreases) and in the neocortex (increases) in 10 men ( Zhang et al., 2012 ). This study did not include a comparison film clip, however, so the conclusion that can be drawn from it is limited.

The most well-used auditory (and visual) device in horror film is the startle reflex (SR), and this tends to be provoked by the jump scare referred to earlier – the sound of a bump, a sudden burst of noise, some dialogue, or music ( Baird, 2000 ). The first known example of a startle effect in horror film is seen and heard in The Cat People (1942) when the sound of a bus door opening occurs just when the viewer is expecting an attack, but the film cuts to this noise and the shot of the door opening. A more recent example can be found in Fatal Attraction where a child’s scream and the whistling of the kettle in the reveal of the boiled rabbit overlap. In the same film, Glenn Close’s character’s resurrection in the bath provides another example of the jump scare that employs an auditory device.

Under laboratory conditions, a startle reflex (SR) is produced by delivering 50 ms of 95 db of white noise at unpredictable intervals, while eyeblink is measured. The stimulation is not always auditory and can be visual or tactile. The acoustic startle reflex describes an in involuntary eyeblink, measured at the orbicularis oculi muscle via EMG, in response to this noise. The startle reflex can be potentiated when individuals anticipate danger ( Grillon et al., 1993a , b ; Bublatzky et al., 2013 ; Bradley et al., 2018 ) and when pleasant stimuli signal threat ( via conditioning) ( Bradley et al., 2005 ). This is called affective modulation of the startle reflex, and the startle potentiation is thought to reflect a person’s emotional reactivity to threat. When people watch fear-related or violent films, the blink magnitude (SR) is larger than when people watch films with sexual content ( Jansen and Frijda, 1994 ), neutral content ( Koukounas and McCabe, 2001 ), or sad content ( Kreibig et al., 2011 ). The startle reflex is also greater when people watch unpleasant slides – and smallest when people watch pleasant slides ( Vrana et al., 1988 ) – and when people listen to unpleasant music ( Roy et al., 2009 ). Roy et al.’s study, however, includes a very small sample of 16 participants.

The SR is higher when people recall fear-related sentences than when recalling neutral sentences ( Vrana and Lang, 1990 ) and is higher when people are exposed to negative stimuli than positive or neutral stimuli ( Cook et al., 1991 ), and this is referred to fear-potentiated startle ( Grillon et al., 1993a , b ). Women’s SR tends to be higher than men’s when stimuli are disgusting ( Yartz and Hawk, 2002 ). Fear, however, is the stimulus that creates the greatest SR ( Bradley et al., 1999 ) and people with specific phobias show potentiated SR when phobia-related stimuli are viewed. Some studies find that a SR does not occur to some types of negative stimuli such as mutilation or surgery ( Stanley and Knight, 2004 ). The startle effect is a highly replicable behavioral phenomenon and can be reduced with the administration on anxiolytics and when lesions are made to the amygdala ( Hitchcock and Davis, 1986 ; Angrilli et al., 1996 ; Davis, 2006 ). It would be instructive to study whether those high and low in empathy or sensation seeking (see below) and whether individuals who like horror film and those who dislike horror film would generate different SRs.

Why do People Watch Horror?

Suspense and resolution of suspense are two important components of horror and our response to horror film. Suspense refers to the build up to threat, the tension created prior to the manifestation of threat, and the resolution/elimination of threat. It has been defined as “acute, fearful apprehension about deplorable events that threatens liked protagonists” and “an experience of uncertainty whose hedonic properties can vary from noxious to pleasant” ( Zillmann, 1996 , p. 108). The tension created during the feeling of suspense can arise from events, which signify conflict, dissonance, and instability ( Lehne and Koelsch, 2015 ). One theory of horror enjoyment, Zillmann’s (1980 , 1996) excitation transfer theory, argues that we derive our enjoyment of horror film from this feeling of suspense (this theory might also explain the enjoyment of non-horror film, which involves the invocation of suspense). When a threat is resolved, our negative affect converts to euphoria and suspense ends. The vital aspect of the theory is that enjoyment is derived from the degree of negative affect built up during exposure to the horror film and from the positive affect/reaction that results from the resolution of the threat. If the resolution does not occur, then residual negative affect will lead to increased dysphoria. If there is no suspense but a complete certainty about what will happen, suspense is replaced by dread ( Oliver, 1993a , b ). Very few studies have tested the theory, although limited reviews provide some support for the model ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Zillmann et al. (1975) showed children animated cartoons that varied in suspense and measured participants’ facial expressions, physiological arousal, and cognitive responses. They found that liking of the film increased as suspense increased. Liking was especially great when the threat was overcome, but the relationship between fear and liking was not examined in the study.

Individuals high in empathy will express more negative affect regardless of a successful resolution to the threat in the film ( Zillmann et al., 1986 ; Hoffner and Cantor, 1991 ; Sparks, 1991 ). Zillmann’s model has some difficulty accounting for the motivation to watch and for the enjoyment derived from horror films in which the sympathetic characters are (1) dispatched and (2) where the story does not end happily ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). There is also evidence that enjoyment of horror may not be affected by the availability of resolution and that unresolved horror is perceived as just as enjoyable as resolved horror ( Hoffner and Cantor, 1991 ).

An alternative model to Zillmann’s suggests that enjoyment is associated with the presence of destruction, excitement, and unpredictability in films ( Sparks, 1986a , b ; Tamborini et al., 1987 ; Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ). This model, the uses and gratification theory of film consumption ( Katz et al., 1973 ; Palmgreen, 1984 ), argues that the enjoyment and seeking out of material are determined by their specific need for stimulation and the satisfaction they derive following the achievement of gratification. Some research suggests that certain personality types and individuals who are high or low on some psychological traits may seek out horror or violent material for gratification but that the material itself may not always provide this satisfaction (see the Individual Differences section below). Sensation seeking, verbal aggression, and argumentativeness, for example, have been found to be positively correlated with enjoyment of horror and violent films, but these are not consistent predictors of liking for horror/violent material ( Greene and Krcmar, 2005 ).

Zillmann (1980) has argued that a positive outcome for the protagonist and a poor one for the antagonist are the key predictors of satisfaction with a film. If neither occurs but a threat is removed, this would also lead to a satisfactory experience, but the experience would be diluted. A positive outcome is, however, necessary for the “cognitive switch from dysphoria to euphoria” (p. 148). There is no consistent evidence to support this view and the success of films where the threat is still very much present in some way at the end of a horror film (e.g., The Exorcist, The Omen, Friday the 13th, and so on) and even in thrillers such as Basic Instinct and Presumed Innocent, suggests that this explanation may not account fully for why we watch and enjoy horror.

It has been proposed that arousal itself might be self-rewarding – the act of watching horror provides us with a thrill regardless of the resolution and we like and enjoy the film for this reason ( Tamborini, 1991 ). The pleasurable experience of arousal motivates us to continue watching in order to sustain that level of arousal, as Berlyne (1967) suggests. Sparks and Spirek (1988) , for example, found a positive correlation between skin conductance (a physiological measure of emotional arousal) and self-reported arousal in people who watched a clip of A Nightmare On Elm Street , suggesting that the arousal we report also correlates at the physiological level, although whether the psychophysiological changes determine the arousal or the cognitive and emotional arousals (the interpretation of the material) determine the psychophysiological changes is an argument, which dates back to James.

Individual Differences in Response to Horror

Carroll (2003) asked, “How can horror audiences find pleasure in what by nature is distressful and unpleasant?” Some research has attempted to answer this question by studying the type of individual who enjoys and likes horror. Some of the personality traits and cognitive/affective traits that have been implicated in horror preference and/or enjoyment of horror include sensation seeking, empathy, theory of mind, need for affect, the dark tetrad, and personality. Other individual differences include age and sex (considered later). Unless a person expresses an interest and liking of horror, the response to graphic violence tends not to be positive. Weaver and Wilson (2009) , for example, assigned 400 people to one of three groups who watched either clips from five television programs showing graphic violence, clips with the violence sanitized, or clips with the violence removed. The non-violent programs were regarded as more enjoyable than the violent versions, a finding which is consistent with earlier research indicating that removing the violent content from a film does not reduce the film’s enjoyment ( Sparks et al., 2005 ). A meta-analysis of the enjoyment of media violence (not horror film specifically) found that greater selective exposure to violence (i.e., choosing to watch violent media) leads to a reduction in the enjoyment of its content ( Weaver, 2011 ). The implication of this finding appears to be that even though individuals may seek out exposure to violent media, they do not often enjoy what they find. In addition, participants may vary according to the degree of material they are routinely exposed to. When graduate nursing students and psychology students were shown videos of graphic medical procedures, for example, the nurses expressed less disgust and fear but more sadness ( Vlahou et al., 2011 ). Both groups, however, showed evidence of psychophysiological arousal (measured via Galvanic Skin Response) in response to watching the procedures.

Sensation Seeking

The most widely studied trait in the research on horror is sensation seeking. According to Zuckerman (1994) , sensation seeking is the “seeking of varied, novel, complex and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal and financial risks for the sake of such experiences” (p. 27). It peaks in the teenage years and declines thereafter ( Zuckerman, 1988 ). Zuckerman’s measure of sensation seeking describes four related but different factors: (1) thrill and adventure seeking; (2) experience seeking; (3) disinhibition; and (4) boredom susceptibility. In the original conception of the model ( Zuckerman, 1979 ), individuals thought to be high sensation seekers would experience much more positive emotion when highly aroused and stimulated and would seek negative stimulation to maximize their arousal because this stimulation was intense. A negative stimulus (such as a horror film) might, therefore, be interpreted by a person high in sensation seeking as being very positive; but a person low in sensation-seeking would find the stimulus unpleasant. High sensation-seeking individuals would also be less vulnerable to the experience of threat in these films ( Franken et al., 1992 ).

All four factors of the sensation-seeking scale have been found to predict enjoyment of horror film to some extent, but some factors are better predictors than others. For example, disinhibition was found by Edwards (1984) to be the strongest predictor, followed by experience seeking, thrill and adventure seeking, and boredom susceptibility. Edwards reported a positive correlation between high sensation seeking (in general) and interest in horror film. Tamborini and Stiff (1987) found a positive correlation between liking for horror and a combination of the sensation-seeking factors. Zuckerman and Litle (1986) found that frequency of horror film attendance correlated with disinhibition, thrill and adventure seeking, and boredom susceptibility, but in men only. The sex difference in this study highlights an important constraint on the model, and that is, individual differences (such as sex) may interact with sensation-seeking type to predict viewing, preference for, or enjoyment of horror film (see below). Cantor and Sparks (1984) found that sensation seeking was positively correlated with the enjoyment of frightening films in men and women. However, components of sensation seeking predicted enjoyment differently – thrill and adventure seeking were the best predictor for men, whereas disinhibition was the best predictor for women.

Other studies have reported no positive correlation between sensation seeking and liking and enjoyment for horror films ( Neuendorf and Sparks, 1988 ). Aluja-Fabregat (2000) found that disinhibition and psychopathy – a personality trait which describes a charming, remorseless, callous, and manipulative personality type – correlated with curiosity about morbid events in 470 eighth graders in Catalan. Sensation seeking correlated with consumption of violent films and consumption was associated with psychopathy, specifically in boys.

In a study of the enjoyment of fear experiences in video gaming, Lynch and Martins (2015) found that in their sample of 269 18–24-year-old players, men reported more enjoyment of violent video games and played more games and played more often. Sensation seeking and enjoyment were positively correlated, with high sensation seekers reporting less frequent fear (although p = 0.05) and low empathizers enjoying the violent games more. Low empathizers also played more but did not play more frequently. Resident Evil was the most commonly played game, and the game’s inclusion of zombies and surprises was cited as a cause of fear and fright. Agency in such games, however, appears to be important to the experience of the medium. When players were either asked to watch or to play a horror computer game (Konami’s “ PT ”), players showed increased heart rate and galvanic skin response (emotional arousal) compared to participants who watched ( Madsen, 2016 ). There were no differences between the two groups in self-reported fear.

While sensation seeking might be strongly associated with enjoyment of horror, it may not be the strongest predictor of attendance at horror films. Tamborini and Stiff’s (1987) study of 155 people (78 men; average age 21 years) attending a horror film in a US Midwestern city reported that men and younger participants scored the highest on the sensation-seeking scale, but that men and women attended for different reasons: men attended because they sought sensation and to experience the destructive nature of the horror while women attended because of they wanted to experience a just ending. More important than sensation seeking appeared to be participants’ expectations of the film: The greatest predictor of film attendance was not sensation seeking but a desire to experience a satisfying resolution (especially by women) and to see destruction (men).

Also of note is that there is evidence that sensation seeking is related to the startle potentiation described earlier. Lissek and Powers (2003) found that people low in sensation seeking (as measured via the thrill and adventure-seeking subscale) produced the typical startle potentiation during the viewing of threatening (vs. neutral) images but that those high in sensation seeking showed equal levels of startle to neutral and threatening images. One explanation for this finding is that high levels of sensation seeking are related to low levels of reactivity to threatening images. Because high sensation seeking involves a degree of sensory overload, less stimulation is required for a startle potentiation to occur and those scoring high in sensation seeking show less fear startle potentiation.

The literature on sensation seeking, therefore, suggests that this trait and specific components of it, especially disinhibition, may predict enjoyment of horror film, but this prediction does not apply to men and women consistently (a conclusion considered in more detail in the section on sex differences below). The literature also highlights a limitation in this – and other areas – of the horror research literature in that samples are often heterogeneous, the film selections are heterogeneous, and sample sizes tend to be small. These limitations are returned to at the end of the review.

Empathy is a multidimensional concept whose components have been defined in different ways but which in general are reflected in two types: a cognitive component (e.g., perspective taking) and an affective/emotional component (sympathy and concern for others and sharing of negative affect). One model suggests that empathy comprises a wandering imagination (a tendency to fantasize and daydream about fictional situations), fictional involvement (transposition of oneself into a story), humanistic mentation (a sensitivity to the emotional welfare of others), and emotional contagion (a susceptibility to be influenced by the emotions around oneself) ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ). Zillmann has proposed a three-factor model of empathy in which emotional behavior arises from the interaction of between these dispositional (a “response-guiding” mechanisms, which result in motor reactions to a stimulus), excitatory (“response-energizing” mechanism, which enables immediate arousal), and experiential (the conscious experience of the first two). Davis (1983) , who originally developed the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, argued that empathy was not a unitary or binary concept but was best considered as a set of constructs, which involve our reactions to others but are distinct from each other. These constructs included perspective taking, a fantasy scale (which measures the degree to which a person transposes themselves into the feelings or actions of fictional characters), empathetic concern (which measures the degree of sympathy felt for others), and personal distress (a description of unease or distress experienced in interpersonal relationships).

There is evidence that each component can predict enjoyment of horror film, with low empathy consistently associated with greater enjoyment. In one study ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ), 95 young people in same-sex pairs watched clips from two 1-h documentaries or two full length horror films ( A Nightmare on Elm Street and Boogens ). The study found that tendency to daydream and fantasize predicted the ability to sense the feelings and actions of the films’ characters. Those scoring high on the wandering item, fictional involvement, humanistic mentation, and contagion scales described above found graphic horror less appealing. Those scoring low in empathy preferred graphic horror. People low in fearfulness also prefer graphic horror ( Mundorf et al., 1989 ). Hall and Bracken’s (2011) study of 199 undergraduates found that fantasy empathy (but no other type) predicted narrative transportation (immersion in a text/film or “getting lost” in a story) and was associated with increased enjoyment of the film, although not necessarily horror film exclusively.

In a variant of this procedure, Tamborini et al. (1993) asked participants to watch a pleasant (a comedy) or an unpleasant ( Videodrome ) film, with a confederate. To evoke empathy, after the film, the confederate said they were distressed because they thought they were going to be thrown out of school and asked “what am I going to do?” If there was no reply, the confederate left. If they received a reply, the responses would be rejected. Those participants scoring high in fictional involvement and empathetic concern provided more comfort and more social support. Those who watched the horror film, however, provided less support than did those who watched the comedy. While providing a potentially useful contribution to the study of how people respond to horror and the effect of this on our interaction with others – the greater the empathy, the greater the responsiveness to others’ distress – the sample size is small ( N = 21).

Empathy has also been associated with less enjoyment of suffering displayed in frightening films but with more enjoyment of danger, of excitement, and of happy endings ( Hoffner, 2009 ). People high in enduring negative affect have been found to experience more distress and less enjoyment of suffering. Those who had prior exposure to frightening films enjoyed danger more and enjoyed happy endings less.

Classifying participants according to the degree of empathy and sensation seeking has not been the only approach that has been taken to determining the types of people who watch and enjoy/prefer horror. Johnston (1995) , for example, notes that not all audiences respond to horror in the same way, as this section has demonstrated and has typologized viewers and their motivations to watch into three types: (1) resolved-ending types; (2) thrill watchers; and (3) gore watchers. Resolved-ending types enjoy film with a satisfying, definite closure; thrill watchers enjoy being frightened and empathize with the principal characters; gore watchers watch because they enjoy the destructiveness in film. The typology is based on some of the research reviewed here. A prediction that can be made from this typology is that thrill watchers will have higher levels of empathy and adventure seeking, whereas gore watchers will be low in empathy and fearfulness but will be high in adventure seeking and will seek out high arousal ( King and Hourani, 2007 ). Research suggests that gore watchers are curious about the ways people are killed, are vindictive (they require satisfaction that characters receive their just desserts), and are attracted to blood and guts (gore) in film ( King and Hourani, 2007 ). Gore watchers are more likely to be men, to identify with the killer in films and are less likely to identify with the victim.

King and Hourani identified types of watchers from 229 individuals and showed them four horror films. Half the sample saw the films with a traditional ending (in which the evil antagonist is destroyed) or with teaser endings (in which the evil antagonist is revived/resurrected). The traditional ending was more entertaining than was the teaser ending, but it was especially enjoyable and entertaining for high gore and thrill watchers than low gore and thrill watchers. Traditional endings were less distressing and more frightening for high than low gore watchers and were regarded as being more frightening by high thrill watchers. High thrill watchers found the teaser ending version of the film to be less scary than did low thrill watchers. High gore watchers regarded the teaser to be more predictable than did low thrill watchers. The traditional ending was considered to be less predictable by high gore watchers than by high thrill watchers and by high thrill watchers than by low thrill watchers. Very little research exists on this typology, however.

Although individual studies indicate a relationship between empathy and horror enjoyment, a meta-analysis of studies investigating the enjoyment of mediated fright and violence has found that empathetic concern and personal distress were negatively correlated with enjoyment, but correlations for personal distress were not consistent ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). The authors note that the inconsistencies may be attributable to differences in the content of the film employed in these studies, and this is a problematic issue common to the field: There are no consistently chosen materials in either nature, content, length, age, or narrative. What is noteworthy, however, is that Hoffner and Levine’s review found that the strongest effects (reported in two studies) were for studies, which included horror films, and those films depicted torture ( Johnston, 1995 ) or brutal horror with no positive resolution ( Tamborini et al., 1990 ). When these studies were removed, the correlation between empathy and enjoyment became non-significant. The authors note that the other four films measured participants’ enjoyment of horror film as a genre (rather than their enjoyment of specific horror films or acts of graphic violence), and this methodological limitation in the literature is returned to the conclusion of this paper.

Need for Affect

A different form of individual difference – need for affect – may also mediate horror film preference and enjoyment, but the literature is limited. Need for affect ( Maio and Esses, 2001 ) is based on the assumption that we are motivated to seek interesting or positive experiences and avoid unpleasant ones. Need for Affect (NfA) is measured via a questionnaire, which comprises two subscales: the tendency to approach and the tendency to withdraw. People who prefer sad films experience more enjoyment when watching sad films, for example, because they regard viewing sad films as an enjoyable and a gratifying experience; their need for affect is satisfied by watching sad films ( Oliver, 1993a , b ; Oliver et al., 2000 ; Maio and Esses, 2001 ). Few studies have explored the relationship between NfA and horror film viewing. One study asked 119 attendees (mean age = 23 years) at a German cinema how likely they would be to watch United 93 or the 2006 horror film remake, The Omen ( Bartsch et al., 2010 ). Participants with higher NfA approach scores experienced more intense emotions and experienced more negative emotions such as anger, fear, and disgust. United 93 evoked more negative emotions than did The Omen . Higher NfA withdraw scores were associated with a more negative evaluation of emotions. Controlling for personality did not affect these results significantly. While NfA is little studied in horror, one possible research question that could be explored is whether preference for film genres correlates with NfA; no study to date has systematically examined this relationship.

Other Personality Traits

Other personality traits thought to be implicated in horror film preference or enjoyment include the Big Five, the Dark Tetrad, and repressive coping style. Dark personality traits are those which express some abnormal, sinister, and unpleasant aspect of behavior. Four such traits are Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy (described earlier), and Sadism. Machiavellianism (the enjoyment of power and the manipulation of power) has been found to correlate with enjoyment of horror, and the correlations between these two variables are stronger than the correlation between Machiavellianism and sensation seeking ( Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ). High psychopathy scores have been associated with preference for graphically violent horror movies ( Weaver, 1991 ), and individuals scoring high in callousness and who habitually express little or no emotion show reduced facial expressions of sadness and disgust when watching violent films ( Fanti et al., 2017 ).

A repressive coping style is characterized by the repression of negative affect caused by stressors ( Weinberger, 1990 ; Sparks et al., 1999 ). Sparks et al. investigated repressive coping style and enjoyment of horror film stimuli in 59 individuals. Based on a median split, 30 repressors and 29 non-repressors were identified and were asked to view a 25-min extract from When A Stranger Calls (in which a babysitter receives frightening phone calls and discovers that the calls have been coming from inside the house she is in). Women in general expressed greater negative affect than did men, as expected (see section below), but the repressors in general showed greater physiological arousal during the film than did non-repressors. An interesting pattern emerged across the course of exposure. Physiological arousal was similar for both groups at the beginning of the first two sections of the movie and then diverged in the final three sections as the suspense increased. No explicit analysis was provided of the psychometric response to the film (how much it was liked, how frightening it was, and so on). The study suggests that those who repress negative affect may nonetheless show high levels of physiological arousal during exposure to frightening films. What is less clear in this study is the relationship between this phenomenon and enjoyment of the film. It is also based on a very low sample of participants, and little subsequent research has focused on this particular personality trait/style.

Despite being the most commonly accepted model of personality, the Big Five has been the focus of very little published research in the context of horror film enjoyment and consumption. The Big Five proposes that personality is comprised of five core traits along which individuals differ. These traits are Conscientiousness, Openness to Experience, Extraversion, Neuroticism, and Agreeableness. One study employing a version of the Big Five found that a trait described as Intellect/Imagination (defined as a proclivity to engage in imaginative activity) was the strongest predictor of horror media consumption ( Clasen et al., 2019 ). There was a small but statistically significant and positive correlation between extraversion and frequency of horror media use, using horror media with others, enjoying horror media with others and being more scared with others. Agreeableness was positively correlated with being easily scared by horror media, using horror media with others, enjoying horror media with others, and negatively correlated with being more scared with others. People high in conscientiousness were less scared after using horror media, and people high in emotional stability were found to be less easily scared than those low in emotional stability, a finding which was also reported by Reynaud et al. (2012) , who found that psychophysiological arousal was greater in participants who were high in neuroticism when they watched a film designed to elicit fear. The number of participants in Reynaud et al.’s study, however, was small.

The finding regarding agreeableness contrasts with research on violent video game playing where people lower in agreeableness have been found to be more frequent violent video games players; individuals who score high in extraversion and openness and low in neuroticism have also been found to be more frequent users ( Chory and Goodboy, 2011 ). Low agreeableness is a significant predictor of enjoyment of the horror film genre but not exclusively – it is also a significant predictor of enjoyment of parody, animation, neo-noir, and cult genres across different media including books, television, and film ( Cantador et al., 2013 ). While the findings of Chory and Goodboy (2011) are informative, they are limited in terms of the measurement of response to horror film specifically because the stimuli used were not specifically horror film. A similar limitation can be found in Clasen et al.’s (2019) large Mechanical Turk study of 1,070 participants which asked participants for their responses to and perceptions of horror media generally, not horror film specifically. The study also administered a variant of the Big Five personality inventory and a variant of the sensation-seeking scale (Hoyle et al.’s (2002, Brief Sensation Seeking Scale) not normally administered in research examining the relationship between personality and horror film. Although research on violent video games might help understand some of the correlates between use frequency and personality trait, it should be acknowledged that violent video games are qualitatively different stimuli to films. Films are a passive experience – viewers are unable to influence the action they see on screen – whereas gaming is specifically an active experience where the player engages with what they see and are expected to do so as this is the principal motivation for gaming. Horror films and horror games are not equivalent stimuli, although they share many characteristics and elements of content.

In conclusion, the literature studying the relationship between personality and horror film consumption has been limited in number and scope. Two studies have reported a correlation between low agreeableness and preference/enjoyment of horror media, and one has not. It is noteworthy that in one of the studies reporting an association, agreeableness was the only trait to be significantly associated with horror media use. This aspect of personality may be worth exploring further.

Sex Differences

The most consistent individual difference predicting individuals’ response to horror film is biological sex: men and boys enjoy frightening and violent visual material more than do women and girls ( Zuckerman and Litle, 1986 ; Harris et al., 2000 ; Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Correlations between intensity of “scary media” or horror and the enjoyment of horror in men are consistently positive ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Men enjoy horror media more than do women, are less scared by horror media, use horror media more, and show a greater preference for frightening horror media ( Clasen et al., 2019 ). One of the earliest experimental studies of sex differences investigated the role of social comparison in individuals’ response to horror. Zillmann et al. (1986) asked 36 men and 36 female undergraduates to watch horror films ( Nightmares , Nightmare on Elm Street ) in the presence of a same-age, opposite-sex companion who either expressed control, indifference, or distress during the film. Men enjoyed the horror more and found it less boring and more satisfying and frightening than did women. Men expressed more distress if the female companion expressed distress (but engaged more with them than with a masterful woman) and less if the female companion was masterful. Zillmann et al. also manipulated initial appeal of the companion (high and low). Women enjoyed the films more in the company of a man with high appeal, but women’s appeal had little effect on men’s responses. Women engaged more with masterful than with distressed men. Cutting violence from films can increase enjoyability and decrease arousal in women (but has no effect on men): women regard these films to be generally more disturbing than do men ( Berry et al., 1999 ).

Male undergraduates experience less distress and anxiety than do women when watching horror film ( Sparks, 1991 ), and women find film clips depicting sadness and fear more unpleasant and distressing; they also show greater arousal to fear clips than to clips depicting compassion ( Davydov et al., 2013 ; Maffei et al., 2015 ). The findings reflect a more general sex difference in that women, in general, report greater fear and anxiety than do men. Women have been found to express more fears, more severe fears, and greater fear of repulsive but harmless animals ( Tucker and Bond, 1997 ), a finding that applies cross-culturally ( Arrindell et al., 2004 ). Anxiety disorders are more commonly reported by women than men ( McLean and Anderson, 2009 ), and women appear to be more susceptible to variety of anxiety-related disorders such as panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, and agoraphobia ( Kessler et al., 1994 ). The exception to this pattern is fear of bodily injury, social stimuli, noise, or enclosed spaces, where no consistent sex differences have been reported ( McLean and Anderson, 2009 ). Disgust sensitivity – the degree to which individuals find stimuli repulsive – also tends to be higher in women, and this phenomenon might provide an explanation for the sex difference in the fear of animals – and horror film ( Connolly et al., 2008 ). This is considered in more detail below. Women and girls, for example, are less likely to enjoy violent media when blood and gore portrayed are described as extreme, rather than mild or moderate ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ).

The sex difference is not only reported in the horror genre but also across a number of cinematic genres. One study of 150 undergraduates in Germany ( Wühr et al., 2017 ) asked participants to indicate which types of films they believed that men and women would generally prefer. In a second study, participants were asked to indicate the films they themselves preferred. In the first study, men were regarded as preferring action, adventure, erotic, fantasy, historical, horror, sci-fi, thriller, war, and western films, whereas women preferred animation, comedy, drama, heimat, and romantic films. Both sexes liked crime and mystery equally. In the second study, women expressed a preference for drama and romance, and men preferred action, adventure, erotic, fantasy, horror, mystery, sci-fi, war, and Western films. Animation, comedy, crime heist, history, and thrillers were liked by both sexes.

Enjoyment and liking of the degree of explicit (graphic) horror also appear to show sex differences. Men tend to prefer very graphic horror material more than do women ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Men also report watching more violent television and attend more horror films. One explanation for this finding has been proposed by gender socialization theory ( Zaslow and Hayes, 1986 ), whereby boys and men are socialized to not be afraid and to not make expressive shows of fear, whereas girls are not constrained by such expectations and can “express their sensitivity by being appropriately disturbed” ( Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Such an explanation is probably locked in a prison of its own time in the sense that it is unclear whether such attitudes still exist now, at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Sex differences have been reported in the context of other behaviors such as the identification with a film’s character. Tamborini et al. (1987) asked 44 male and 50 female undergraduates to rank their preference for two different versions of 13 films (12 of which were fictional). In one version, the victim of graphic violence was male; in the other, the victim was female. One theory of horror enjoyment discussed earlier (the uses and gratification perspective; Rubin, 1994 ) argues that our reasons for watching horror and the benefit and gratification we derive from it will determine whether we identify with a victim or an aggressor ( Johnston, 1995 ). Viewers who identify with a female victim are usually more likely to experience distress ( Zillmann and Cantor, 1977 ) and are not satisfied by happy endings ( Tannenbaum and Gaer, 1965 ). Oliver’s (1993a , b) study of 96 16-year-old high school students found that there was a correlation between gore watchers and enjoyment of retribution (liking to see victims get what they deserve). Participants’ high punitive sexual attitudes have been found to be positively correlated with higher ratings of enjoyment; men prefer horror films in which the female rather than the male is the victim, but there is no significant association between enjoyment and the films’ portrayal of victimization of sexual characters, of women, or of women expressing their sexuality.

Tamborini et al. (1987) found that participants’ recent and past viewing of horror film strongly predicted enjoyment of graphic horror in general. However, the responses to men and women as victims in the film interacted with other viewing preferences. For example, men’s enjoyment of pornography was correlated with preference for graphic horror, which depicted female victimization but not male victimization. Preference for graphic horror correlated with disinhibition, moderately for boredom susceptibility and experience seeking, and not at all for thrill/adventure seeking. Sensation seeking in general did not predict preference for graphic horror. Women regarded the films with female victims to be higher in violent content than films featuring male victims; the opposite pattern was found in men. Boredom susceptibility was a good predictor of preference for graphic horror in men. No one factor was a strong predictor of graphic horror preference in women when the victim was male. Deceit and boredom susceptibility predicted graphic horror preference when the victim was female. Physiological arousal (measured via GSR) has also been correlated with enjoyment of horror after men finish watching a film ( Sparks, 1991 ).

A retrospective study of 233 psychology students (125 men) asked participants to recall details of a date they had been on as a teenager/young adult during which they watched a frightening film ( Harris et al., 2000 ). The participants reported that the films most commonly seen were Scream, Scream 2 , I Know What You Did Last Summer, and I Still Know What You Did Last Summer . Men were younger when they watched the film (16.7 vs. 17.6 years), and the study found some notable and significant sex differences: Thirty-one percent of women reported looking away from the screen, whereas only 7% of men did. About 61% of women reported feeling anxious, whereas 44% of men did; 34% women reported that it had increased their imagination (men – 1%); 19% of women said they feared sleeping alone afterward (men – 8%); 67% of women said their heartbeat were faster (men – 53%); 56% of women said they became very jumpy (men – 31%); 41% of women were amused and entertained (men – 59%); 55% of women held onto their date (men – 21%); 32% of women screamed (men – 6%); and 26% of women felt disgusted (men – 10%). Men gave more positive reactions than did women, and women gave more negative reactions than did men, and women reported more sleep disturbances than did men. About 80% of women reported being somewhat or very afraid (men – 46%), and 18% reported not being afraid or being a little afraid (men – 51%). This study also measured empathy and found a positive correlation between overall empathy scale scores and negative reactions but not between negative reactions and any one specific subscale. There were some associations between negative reactions and empathetic responses. Low empathetic concern, for example, predicted sleep disturbance. Higher boredom susceptibility was associated with fewer negative reactions and with increased liking but not with sleep disturbance. Women who scored high on empathy were more likely to be scared at the time of the study (i.e., they were more likely to express fear as adults) than were low-scoring women or men generally.

In a similar study, Hoekstra et al. (1999) asked 202 introductory psychology students to describe their reactions (especially fear reactions) when they recalled the frightening movies they watched as children. The mean age at watching was 10.8 years, a similar finding to Cantor (2004) . Female participants as adults liked slasher films less than did male participants as adults – of the 14 categories included, this was the least liked by women. The most liked genre by women was romantic comedy; by men, action and adventure. Men reported choosing to watch horror more often than did women. Both sexes noted fear-related changes after watching films as children but not during the film, with women reporting more negative reactions during the watching of the films when they were girls. The earlier their exposure to horror films as children, the greater was the sleeping disturbance they experienced afterward. The behavioral measures indicated the typical sex differences reported earlier: more girls than men hid their eyes (64 vs. 26%), held someone (35 vs. 6%), and were jumpy (65 vs. 45%).

In terms of the enjoyment of specific content, one study asked participants to rate a 10-min horror film in which the sex of the victim and sexual content was manipulated ( Oliver, 1994 ). The context of this study concerned the types of victim and protagonist in slasher films. An earlier content analysis of 10 slasher films found that a third of sex scenes concluded with the death of a character ( Weaver, 1991 ). Women, however, are not more likely to be killed. In an analysis of 56 slasher films, Cowan and O’Brien (1990) found that men and women were equally likely to be killed off. Women were more likely to be survivors, a cliche that has its own term in horror film: the Final Girl. More screen time is devoted to the deaths of women than men, however, and non-surviving women are more likely to be promiscuous, wear revealing clothes, appear nude, use sexual language, and undress and engage in sex when they are killed. Non-surviving men appear to be identified only by their use of sexual language. Oliver (1994) found that sexual portrayals of victims were associated with increased viewer enjoyment, especially in men. These films were also regarded as more frightening.

As discussed earlier, one possible explanation for women’s reaction to horror may be their disgust sensitivity. Women in general report greater disgust sensitivity than do men. Disgust is a protective response to a direct threat to survival, such as contamination, lesions, sores, or disease ( Krusemark and Li, 2011 ). People high in disgust sensitivity show higher levels of disgust toward low, moderate, and severe facial disfigurement ( Shanmugarajah et al., 2012 ). Individuals with anxiety disorders are more prone to be disgusted, especially those who are anxious about contagion ( Olatunji et al., 2017a , b ). People who are exposed to disease primes are more likely to judge themselves to be less extravert and open to experience ( Mortensen et al., 2010 ), and people distance themselves from contagion or symptoms of contagion ( Neuberg et al., 2011 ). Women’s disgust thresholds for imagining incest, reacting to images of insects, seeing open sores, feces or dirty clothing, and statements about death and sex are significantly lower than those for men, and women are less likely to work in environments in which pathogen exposure is likely ( Al-Shawaf et al., 2018 ). Women’s sexual disgust and pathogen disgust are higher than that for men, but their moral disgust appears to be no difference. This elevated sense of disgust sensitivity in women may partly explain why they enjoy horror film less than do men.

The literature on sex differences in response to, and preference for, horror film provides the most consistent finding in the field that men and boys prefer and enjoy horror film more than do girls and women. One possible explanation for this, besides differences in empathy, may lie in differences in higher-order traits such as anxiety proneness and disgust sensitivity. This possibility, and the evidence for it, is discussed in a later section.

Horror Films and Mental Health

While a typical person’s response to horror film is fear and anxiety, some studies have suggested that exposure to horror films can lead to abnormal stress or distress reactions requiring psychological or psychiatric intervention, a condition called cinematic neurosis ( Ballon and Leszcz, 2007 ). The rarity of these case studies and the details they present – Ballon and Leszcz found only seven such case studies – suggests that the individuals’ behavior arise because of causes unrelated to the horror film and that the horror film was a catalyst for provoking an underlying and pre-existing pathology that would have been provoked by any, other relevant stimuli. The pattern of behavior has echoes in Freud’s (1919/1971) account of seventeenth century “demonological neurosis,” whereby depression or psychosis arose from experiencing the death of a father and individuals made a pact with the Devil to relieve their distress.

According to Johnson (1980) , at least a quarter of horror film viewers had experienced “stress-type” reactions, although this is likely to be within the confines of the normal stress reaction that horror is specifically designed to evoke. Many of the studies reported are case studies, lacking in control participants and largely anecdotal. In a typical example, Horowitz and Wilner (1976) observed that after the release of The Exorcist in 1973, individuals lost “control over thought and emotions,” experiencing “denial and numbing … extremes of anxiety, tension and impaired relationships.” The Exorcist is the source of a number of abnormal behaviors reported by individuals responding extremely to horror film.

Bozzuto (1975) described four adults who developed abnormal stress behavior within a day of watching the film; participants reported insomnia, excitability, hyperactivity, irritability, and decreased appetite. The symptoms dissipated after seven sessions of psychotherapy. Mathai (1983) reported the case of a distressed 12-year-old boy who felt that when somebody touched him, they would go right through him and that when sitting on a chair, he would fall through it. Prior to presentation, he had watched The Invasion Of The Body Snatchers with two of his siblings. Waking from his sleep, he saw “an awful face with bulging veins staring at him.” Hamilton (1978) reported the case of a young woman who had seen The Exorcist and presented with “acute unremitting anxiety and a pervasive fear of being alone especially at night” and refused to go to work. She felt that the “Devil was in a young girl” and “she dreamt of the Devil with a penis in his mouth” (p. 569).

Five of the cases identified by Ballon and Leszcz (2007) cited The Exorcist as the cause of their distress. The other two were Jaws and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers . Robinson and Barnett (1975) reported the case of a 17-year-old girl who had watched Jaws and experienced anxiety and sleep disturbances consequently. She was found the next day jerking her limbs, screaming about sharks. Turley and Derdeyn (1990) reported the case of a 13-year-old boy who became “addicted” to horror films, particularly A Nightmare On Elm Street . One study found that two 10-year-old boys experienced anxiety for up to 8 weeks after watching the TV program Ghostwatch ( Simons and Silveira, 1994 ). Symptoms included fear of ghosts and of the dark, refusal to go upstairs alone, nightmares, sleeping with the light on, and panic attacks. Ballon and Leszcz (2007) reported the case of a 22-year-old unemployed woman with three children who were at 23 weeks’ gestation but felt possessed and had flashbacks of watching The Exorcist . According to the authors, all of the cases of “cinematic neurosis” they reviewed involved individuals who had experienced a recent loss (or potential loss) of a family member about whom they were ambivalent. Individuals also held strong religious or cultural ideals, and their behavior included recalling imagery from the films they had seen. The films also appeared to have some personal meaning to the individuals.

Sparks (1989a , b) found that around half of the women and the quarter of the men surveyed in his study reported enduring fright after watching horror. Women appeared to be particularly affected ( Sparks et al., 1993 ) with around half of the women subsequently avoiding such films, 68% perceiving specific rooms as anxiety provoking (compared with 10% of men), and 43% reporting nervousness. Harrison and Cantor (1999) found that 90% of their sample of 136 young people (average age – 20.6 years) had experienced a film that was so frightening that the experience had lasted beyond the viewing of the film. More than 50% of the sample reported sleep disturbances and eating problems.

The rarity of such extreme emotion distress requiring psychiatric intervention suggests that horror film, while designed to evoke fear and panic, has no significant long-term consequences than can impair an individual’s mental, social, and occupational function and that those individuals who do report this impairment in functioning have other characteristics or have undergone other experiences, which may underlie the condition they report. While there is no evidence that exposure to horror films has adverse or sustained effects on mental health in individuals with no pre-existing mental health issue, there is evidence that watching horror films can lead to self-reported short-term anxiety and disturbed sleep.

Development of Fear and Horror Liking/Avoidance

Children express fear to horror, just as adults do, and they also express enjoyment of horror and graphic violence, just as some adults do, and some have argued that this interest peaks at adolescence ( Twitchell, 1989 ). The form of the stimulus children fear appears to change as they develop, with unfamiliar or threatening versions of concrete objects the source of anxiety in infancy and imaginary and symbolic stimuli the source of fear in the pre-school years. Fear stimuli become more concrete and realistic when children are at school age ( Hyson, 1979 ). Bauer (1976) found that drawings of imaginary feared objects decreased with age (from kindergarten to age 11 or 12), whereas depictions of realistic injury increased. Fright reactions occur to violence, injury, or physical danger ( Cantor and Wilson, 1988 ).

Early Childhood

An early study of children’s preferences for scary movies found that 24% of 43 7–8-year olds and 13% of 46 11–12-year olds reported having nightmares, and younger girls reported more fears than did younger boys ( Palmer et al., 1983 ). Younger boys liked scary films more than did younger girls. About 40% of the younger children liked scary programs; 65% of the older children did. Seven percent of older children and 28% of younger children disliked scary films; 68% of younger children said they avoided scary TV shows, whereas 11% of the older group did. Cantor and Reilly (1982) found that 11–12-year olds reported avoiding frightening TV and films more than did 15–16-year olds, and Cantor et al. (2010) found that the most common content causing fear in 219 8.5-year olds was the supernatural (imaginary/fictional monsters) with someone being hurt the next most common. Having a television in the bedroom was the best predictor of fright severity, and the average age of exposure to stimuli was 6.6 years; 67% were able to provide the name of the show. Seventy-one percent could not stop thinking about the experience; 52% worried about it; 36% reported shaking; 59% did not want to sleep alone; and 56% had nightmares. When another sample ( N = 164) was asked why they watched, 40% said it was because they wanted to and 40% because someone else was watching. A study of 314 7–12-year-old Dutch children’s response to TV-induced fright found that interpersonal violence was the most fear-inducing content and fantasy the least; the films, which caused the greatest fear, had been intended for adult audiences – Gremlins, IT, Commissaris Rex, and The X Files ( Valkenburg et al., 2000 ). Girls experienced more fear than did boys but fear in both sexes declined with age. Girls physically intervened and used social support and escape more than did boys. Cognitive reassurance was the most common coping strategy, and social support was the least common.

How children cope with horror has been the subject of some research on child development and horror because of the potentially harmful psychological consequences of exposure to frightening stimuli. Cantor and Wilson’s (1988) review of the effect of horror stimuli on children’s behavior concluded that two methods of coping were generally employed. Non-cognitive strategies were those which did not involve the processing of verbal information and which might involve desensitization (the gradual exposure to the fear stimulus); cognitive strategies were those whereby children were encouraged to think about the source of their fear as a means of coping with the stimulus. There is evidence that desensitization is successful ( Wilson and Cantor, 1987 ). For example, children (5–7 and 8–9 year olds) who had been gradually introduced to a videotape of snakes showed less fear when watching the snake pit scene from Raiders Of The Lost Ark . A similar effect was found in a study of 5–7- and 8–11-year olds in which participants played with a rubber tarantula and later saw a scene from Kingdom Of The Spiders ( Wilson, 1987 ), and in a group of kindergarteners and 5–6-, 7–8-, and 6–9-year-old children who were exposed to photographs of worms and then saw a frightening film featuring worms. The children who had been previously exposed to the creatures enjoyed the film more than did those not exposed; exposure to live worms reduced the fear evoked by the film in boys ( Weiss et al., 1993 ). Cantor et al. (1988) found that 3–5-, 6–7-, and 9–10-year-old children’s fear of the Hulk in The Incredible Hulk could be reduced if children saw a TV program, which showed the making of the TV series, and how the make-up of Lou Ferrigno (the actor who played the Hulk) was applied. Children of different ages become afraid at different stages of the TV program and the Hulk’s transformation ( Sparks and Cantor, 1986 ): 3–5-year olds became more frightened after the transformation, whereas 9–11-year olds became more frightened before the transformation. Cantor et al.’s finding is also anecdotally illustrated in the preface to Englund (2009) . Here, Wes Craven (the director of A Nightmare On Elm Street ) describes filming Robert Englund (Freddy Krueger in Elm Street) explaining that he was the actor who played a character so that the video could be sent to a distressed child who found Krueger very frightening.

Younger children (4- and 5-year olds) appear to benefit from adopting more physical strategies such as holding on to a blanket/toy or eating/drinking ( Wilson et al., 1987 ). The reasons for the success of this strategy might be the provision of relief from anxiety and the provision of tactile contact in linguistically developing children or by the occupation of working memory, which reduces the cognitive resources available to think about and process fear stimuli. Proximity to a parent is perceived as being the most successful fear-reduction coping strategy in young children ( Wilson et al., 1987 ). Very young children (under 2 years) experience less fear through covering their eyes; in 3–5-year olds, this behavior increases fear ( Wilson, 1989 ).

Cognitive strategies, such as talking about films and programs with parents or other adults, have been found to be effective ( Cantor and Wilson, 1988 ). By far, the most common type of cognitive strategy employed by parents is reassuring children that the stimulus children are afraid of does not exist ( Cantor and Hoffner, 1990 ), although this is likely to be successful in older children but not in younger children (4–5 years; Cantor and Wilson, 1984 ). Explaining that the source of fear is not likely to be harmful is also successful in older (8–9 year old) children ( Wilson and Cantor, 1987 ). Wilson and Cantor’s study, which involved informing children that most snakes were not poisonous and telling them about the behavior of snakes, found that these instructions increased fear in 5–7-year olds. Verbal explanations may be ineffective in younger children who are less likely to discuss horror materials with their parents. Cantor et al. (1986) found that none of their 3–7-year-old children discussed a film with parents, but 43% of 8–12-year olds and 50% of 13–18-year olds did. However, verbal priming prior to seeing the film can sometimes increase the child’s emotional response to what they see ( Cantor et al., 1984 ). If children are informed that a film has a happy ending, they report less fear ( Hoffner and Cantor, 1990 ; Hoffner, 1997 ). Introducing probability information about events prior to watching a film such as telling children the likelihood of an event occurring appears to have no effect on 5–9-year olds’ emotional response ( Cantor and Hoffner, 1990 ). If children rehearse verbal information (e.g., “this tarantula cannot hurt people; they are not poisonous”), older and younger children respond less emotionally to a film about tarantulas ( Wilson, 1987 ). Children also regard the spiders as less dangerous after being given these instructions.

Two physical means of coping with frightening stimuli studied in children are blunting (avoiding threat or transforming a threat by distraction; looking away, for example) and monitoring (being action oriented and attending to the threat). Sparks and Spirek (1988) found that high blunters and low monitors were less physiologically aroused by horror films than were high monitors and low blunters suggesting that underlying physiology might predict or predispose individuals to react in a given emotional way to frightening stimuli; Sparks (1989a , b) also found that low monitors were less negative about horror when given information about the film but this information had no effect on blunters. A study of 228 14–15- and 15–16-year olds examined the role of blunting and monitoring on coping with scary films ( Hoffner, 1995 ). Hoffner investigated empathetic concern (EC, other-oriented) and personal distress (PD, feelings of anxiety/discomfort in response to suffering) by examining four coping methods – interpersonal comfort (IC), distraction (D), momentary avoidance (MA), and unreality. Davis and Kraus (1997) had previously reported that high empathetic concern was associated with less loneliness and unsociability; high personal distress was associated with shyness, poor interpersonal functioning, and social anxiety. Empathetic concern was found to encourage altruism, whereas personal distress prompted people to reduce their own emotion expression ( Batson, 1987 ).

Hoffner found a series of interesting results. A belief that something was unreal was the most common coping strategy, followed by interpersonal comfort and momentary avoidance; these were used more than was distraction. About 50% of the sample considered unreality and momentary avoidance to be effective; 26% considered distraction to be effective. The study found that boys preferred scary films more than did girls, a finding consistent with the literature, that girls reported more empathetic concern and personal distress, that personal distress correlated with empathy and with monitoring and blunting, that these correlated negatively with liking for scary films, that blunting predicted use of distraction and unreality, that monitoring was more widely used and was more effective, that monitoring and blunting were associated with increased interpersonal comfort, that girls were more likely to use momentary avoidance and interpersonal comfort and consider them more effective, that people who reported using one strategy were more likely to use all four, that empathy, but not personal distress, was associated with greater use of reality, IC and personal distress were associated with increased use of distraction, and that higher empathy scores were associated with greater use of Unreality. People who liked horror were less likely to use distraction, unreality, and momentary avoidance as coping strategies, which suggest that coping is related to the dislike of horror – it is something that must be done to mitigate the effects of something that is disliked. If people thought the coping strategies worked, they enjoyed the films more.

Hoffner also noted that participants who reported finding scary films and television to be violent were likely to use all four coping mechanisms; those who found the material to be realistic were more likely to report using distraction, unreality, and interpersonal comfort as coping mechanisms. Material featuring blood and gore was more likely to lead to the use of momentary avoidance. Girls reported using momentary avoidance and interpersonal comfort more than did boys and considered these to be more effective strategies than did boys.

Adolescence

As children enter adolescence, their reasons for seeking out horror develop and change – they will watch to be thrilled, to rebel (because parents have prohibited them), or to enjoy gore because they are interested in how people die ( Oliver, 1993a , b ). One study of 220 13–16-year-old boys and girls examined their motivation for watching slasher movies ( Johnston, 1995 ). Reasons for watching included gore watching, thrill watching, an increased feeling of independence bravery, and problem avoidance. Thrill watching and independence were positively related to positive affect; positive views of slashers were associated with high gore and thrill watching and gore watching predicted preference for graphic violence. Boys were more likely to watch graphic horror because they were motivated to seek out gore, and they were also more likely to identify with the killer than were girls; girls were more likely to identify with the victim. A larger survey of 6,522 10–14-year-old US adolescents in 2003 found similar sex differences: watching violent films was associated with being male, older, non-white, having less educated parents, and having poor school achievement ( Worth et al., 2008 ); teenage boys in another study who were regarded as aggressive and excitable found violent cartoons to be as funny or thrilling ( Aluja-Fabregat and Torrubia-Beltri, 1998 ). Both boys and girls who found violent cartoons funny and thrilling also scored higher on neuroticism, psychoticism, and sensation seeking.

Aging and Horror Enjoyment

The majority of the research on the development of horror preference and response to horror film has recruited children and adolescents as participants. There is very little research on how horror film and horror media in general are perceived as individual’s age and approach caducity, a paucity that is also reflected in humor research. There is some, but not much, research on how older people respond to horror, and this suggests that the preference for horror declines with age ( Tamborini and Stiff, 1987 ; Hoffner and Levine, 2005 ). Clasen et al. (2019) , for example, found a negative correlation between age and enjoyment of horror media and horror use suggesting that both decline as we age. As Clasen et al. concede, however, their sample was clustered around the 35-year age. The average age of those who agreed that they strongly liked horror media was slightly lower than those who disagreed (33.5 vs. 36.5 years). They also note that since sensation seeking also declines with age, this might explain the reduction in enjoyment and seeking out of horror with increasing age post adolescence.

The literature from developmental research mirrors the findings from that in the adult sex differences research in that boys prefer, and seek out, horrifying/scary material more than do girls. Children tend to express greater fear to different types of stimuli and content depending on the age of the child. There are also differences between boys and girls (and between age groups) in the types of coping strategies they adopt during and after watching frightening television and film material. Cognitive strategies, in particular, have been found to be effective with talking about film content and explaining that “monsters” do not exist or that the characters can actually cause no harm being the most effective.

What Causes Fear?

One of the principal purposes of horror film is to induce fear. The nature of fear and its etiology has a long history in psychology, and various models have been proposed, which have attempted to explain why we become afraid and to what types of stimulus. One model, for example, has proposed that we have evolved a “fear module,” a theoretical construct, which comprises a number of domain-specific programs and which is “preferentially activated … by stimuli that are fear relevant in an evolutionary perspective” ( Öhman and Mineka, 2001 ). Fear, it is argued, motivates us to escape and escape very quickly from potential threat and threats to survival ( Mineka and Öhman, 2002 ). The module has four features: it is selective, it is automatic (when encountering fear-relevant stimuli, it responds without mediation), it is encapsulated (i.e., it relies on proven strategies to deal with threat), and it is underpinned by specific neural behavior ( Öhman and Mineka, 2001 ). It is considered to be an adaptive mechanism for allowing us to avoid physical danger rapidly ( Schaller and Neuberg, 2012 ). In the context of horror film, this is, of course, counter-intuitive as horror film viewers who enjoy horror may not wish to escape the horror and deliberately and proactively approach and seek it, and those that do not enjoy horror and who may serendipitously watch horror engage in other withdrawal behaviors such as shutting the eyes or holding on to a companion (they may also leave a cinema or turn off a screen). What occurs during horror film viewing is the willing acceptance that the film will induce fear and that a contract is reached between the medium’s manufacturer and the viewer that this is what is to be expected. The questions that then arise are whether there are specific stimuli or situations, which horror films deploy or recruit which are more likely to induce a fear response and, if so, what are these stimuli and why do they have this effect.

Mineka and Ohman’s conceptualization draws on the (controversial) notion that there are some stimuli to which we are evolutionarily predisposed to fear – that evolution has rendered us more afraid of some objects and situations – and there are stimuli to which we have become socially or cognitively conditioned to fear (e.g., examinations, being in objectively non-threatening social groups). The latter stimuli pose no immediate and real physical threat to survival (i.e., they are not fatal), but the former may potentially present this threat by endangering or causing death, may generate threat, and, therefore, make us more alert to our environment, and these stimuli and situations were experienced by “pre-technological” humans ( Seligman, 1971 ). These stimuli and situations were those which once posed threats to our ancestors and that we, therefore, developed an evolutionary disposition to avoid or to respond with fear, a form of selective association. Guns, for example, are not fatal unless used, and our exposure to them is limited; guns are not phobic stimuli and seeing photographs of guns – or seeing guns – does not elicit significant fear, and not the degree of fear that stimuli to which we are evolutionarily predisposed to fear evoke. A person pointing a gun at us, however, with the intention to fire or with the threat of the intention to fire is clearly a direct threat but not one that is evolutionarily created.

One of most common phobias is arachnophobia, and spiders have been a staple of horror films since the 1950s, although only 0.1–0.3% of spider species are venomous ( Gerdes et al., 2009 ) and conditioned fear to spiders is very difficult to extinguish ( Davey, 1994 ). Individuals are faster at detecting images of spiders and snakes among innocuous stimuli than they are innocuous stimuli placed in an array of threatening stimuli ( Öhman et al., 2001 ). This predisposition facilitates vigilance (occasionally, over-vigilance and we see threat in ambiguous situations) to sources of threat or danger with greater attention paid to some stimuli ( Clasen, 2014 ; March et al., 2017 ). It is a self-protection and survival-enabling mechanism motivating us to confront (and, therefore, remove the potential source of threat) or flee (thereby, removing us from the context in which a threat could result in endangerment).

Fear is related to expressions of disgust, and the literature on phobia suggests that the strength of fear for phobic objects is closely related to disgust sensitivity but not trait anxiety ( Davey, 1994 ) such that people who express abnormal fear of an object also show high degrees of sensitivity to disgusting stimuli but are not dispositionally, highly anxious. A specific phobia, which appears to be qualitatively and quantitatively different from others and is relevant in the context of horror film, is the fear of blood or blood-injection-injury phobia ( Wani et al., 2014 ; Brinkmann et al., 2017 ). This accounts for 3–4% of phobias and is characterized by fear of blood withdrawal, medical intervention, and seeing others’ blood ( Brinkmann et al., 2017 ). Vasovagal syncope (fainting due to low blood pressure and heart rate caused by exposure to a stimulus) is seen in 75% of phobic individuals – there is a short increase followed by a decrease in heart rate. Individuals experience fear, anxiety, and disgust and avoid or decline medical treatment because of the strength of their phobic reaction ( Wani et al., 2014 ). This extreme experience may explain why some people feel squeamish at the sight of blood in horror: blood is unique as a stimulus, which evokes a strong fear or disgust reaction.

Neuropsychology and Horror Film

Fear is the most widely studied emotion in science because it can be easily conditioned, studied, and observed in non-human organisms. There is a substantial literature, which has attempted to explain fear conditioning and learning through reference to its underlying neuropsychology, and much of this work has been conducted on non-human species ( LeDoux and Hofmann, 2018 ). In humans, much of our understanding of the neurology of fear has derived from neuroimaging research and studies of brain injury. One of the brain regions involved in fear recognition and experience is the amygdala ( Martin, 2008 ; March et al., 2017 ), and a considerable literature exists examining the role of this structure in the conditioning and maintenance of fear.

No study has specifically examined the effect of exposure to horror film on brain activation, although hundreds of studies have examined the effect of exposure of fear-related stimuli, including films designed to induce fear, on brain activation measured via MEG, PET, fMRI, and EEG. Many studies have examined the consequence of brain injury on the fear response, and one study is especially relevant to horror film as it examined the effect of bilateral amygdala injury on responses to fear-related stimuli in a film-related context ( Feinstein et al., 2011 ).

In this study, a 44-year-old woman with normal IQ and language showed impaired fear conditioning, impaired recognition of fear in faces, and impaired social-related fear. Feinstein et al. attempted to induce fear by taking her to the pet shop where there were snakes and spiders, walking her through a haunted house, and having her watch horror films. Although she verbally indicated avoidance of the spiders she physically approached them and asked 15 times if she could touch one; at the haunted house (a visitor attraction), she volunteered to lead a group of visitors, did not hesitate in walking around, and was not scared by the monsters (she scared the actors). None of the 10 horror film clips elicited fear (other film clips designed to elicit other emotions successfully elicited those emotions) and she asked for the name of one so that she could rent it. She recognized that most people would be scared by them. This is only comprehensive study of the effect of region-relevant brain injury on the perception of horror films and horror-related stimuli in a single-case study, and while single case studies need to be interpreted cautiously, the study does provide the opening for other studies to confirm the role of these structures in horror appreciation. One possible extension of this study would be to examine whether amygdala reactivity is associated with enjoyment of horror film (those with highly reactive amygdalae may fear or enjoy horror more than those with less reactive amygdalae) or whether the amygdala becomes increasingly active with greater stimulation, and the intensity of the experience correlates with the increase in activity while watching.

Conclusions

The current review sought to determine why people watch horror film and how exposure to horror film affects behavior. Based on the literature from various disciplines, the following conclusions can be reached: (1) low empathy and fearfulness are associated with more enjoyment and desire to watch horror; (2) specific dimensions of empathy are better predictors of people’s responses than are others, but these dimensions are inconsistently predictive; (3) empathetic concern and personal distress are negatively correlated with enjoyment of horror involving torture; (4) there is a positive relationship between sensation seeking and horror enjoyment/preference, but this relationship is not consistent and may depend on the component of sensation seeking; (5) men and boys prefer to watch – and enjoy and seek out – horror more than do women and girls; (6) women and girls report experiencing more fear and anxiety generally than do men and express greater anxiety and fear when watching horror than do boys and men; (7) this sex difference may be attributable to women’s typical higher disgust sensitivity and anxiety proneness (both of which are inter-related); (8) women report more empathetic concern than do men, and this may be another explanatory mechanism; (9) no study to date has systematically explored disgust sensitivity as a mediator in horror enjoyment and preference, but the evidence would suggest that the former will predict the latter; (10) older children are more afraid of concrete objects/stimuli when very young but of symbolic stimuli when younger; (11) individuals tend to prefer horror less as they age, but there is little literature on this topic; (12) children use various coping strategies to overcome horror film-related fear and the success of these depends on the age of the child; (13) physical coping strategies are more successful in younger children; (14) priming with information about the feared object helps reduce fear and increase enjoyment when children watch a film featuring the feared stimulus; (15) the startle reflex is amplified in the presence of threatening stimuli; and (16) little is understood about the role of neuropsychology in the response to horror film generally although the understanding of the structures and regions of the brain implicated in fear and fear conditioning is well documented; the amygdala is likely to be involved in the reaction to (and enjoyment of) horror.

Limitations and Future Directions

The conclusions in the previous paragraph are based on a very limited set of data. The studies from which such data have been drawn have varied in sample size, methodology, and materials, and these are three clearly identifiable and major limitations in this field. Hoffner and Levine (2005) have highlighted similar limitations in their meta-analysis. The type and selection of stimuli used in behavioral studies of horror film and researchers’ definition of what constitutes a “horror” or “graphic” horror film has led to a literature, which renders making generalizations about horror’s effects difficult, the summary above notwithstanding. Studies have used a variety – although a very restricted variety – of horror films over 30 years of research, and the films share little in common apart from being classed as horror film. The Silence of the Lambs, Cannibal Holocaust, The Babadook, Saw, The Blair Witch Project, Psycho, Dracula , and The Devil Rides Out are all horror films, but each has distinctive mechanisms of evoking fear and disgust based on story, film making, plot, characters, sound, performance, visual effects, credibility, and use of music. No one study can fully take into account our response to horror because not all horror films are the same ( Oliver, 1993a , b ), and this limitation needs to be more clearly recognized and addressed in future work.

Hoffner and Levine (2005) have concluded that the nature of the media content in these studies can explain the failure to find homogeneity in the correlations between enjoyment of horror media and empathic concern in their meta-analysis. As noted earlier, when correlations were found for empathy and horror enjoyment, the most consistent correlations found were in those studies in which victimization formed the dominant aspect of the horror stimuli. When these studies were removed, the correlations for the remaining studies fell to almost zero. These studies measured participants’ responses to the enjoyment of horror film as a genre (or response to a drama with a likeable victim), rather than their responses to specific horror films or their experience of watching specific horror films. Hoffner and Levine’s analysis identifies at least two limitations in the field noted here: the heterogeneity of the material used as stimuli in experiments, and the nature of the question asked in these studies (for example, whether the question is: do you enjoy this specific film/film clip? or Do you enjoy this genre of film?). The former limitation can be easily resolved via empirical research. Studies, for example, might examine the role of the nature of the character, the narrative drive of a film (point of view), the esthetics of the film, a film’s use of music, the number acts of violence, and the types of acts of graphic violence and the perpetrator of the violence, the characteristics of the perpetrator, and the victim (their attractiveness, age and sex, for example), a film’s use of color and the use of specific tropes and techniques (such as found-footage and types of horror film). This is not to say that some of these elements have not been studied – this review and others have described studies in which they have – but there has been little research which has examined these elements systematically and methodically, and some elements have not been explored at all.

The issue of self-report – and self-report based on very small samples – is another possible limitation in that authors rely on individuals’ subjective reports based on their impressions and perceptions, and these reports are based on responses to standard questionnaires or questionnaires developed by the authors. This is an issue for any research, which aims to determine how people think and feel and is currently the most effective way of measuring people’s responses. It is possible to study non-verbal measures (such as movement, EEG, brain activation, GSR, and so on), but these are indirect, correlational measures of what an individual might be thinking or feeling. Motor behavior, however, may be a very informative indicator of response to horror, as some of the studies reviewed here suggest.

Given the current accessibility of film and media generally via smartphones, as well as internet-ready TVs and, of course, computers, one topic of research that has been little studied is whether the medium affects the perception and enjoyment of horror films. Filmmakers may bemoan the viewing of material on a smartphone that was designed for a screen that is 1,000 times larger, but it would be instructive to examine whether screen size affects people’s esthetic, emotional, and cognitive response to horror. Screen size and its effect on the enjoyment of displayed material have been relatively well-studied (see, for example, Grabe et al., 1999 ; Lombard et al., 2000 ; Rigby et al., 2016 ). In the context of horror, however, it is hypothesizable that increased screen size leads to increased visibility and that this would result in a stronger fright reaction because more of the horror can be seen and seen more clearly. It is also possible that the augmentation of the screen would also augment the sound (an auditory-sound illusion) so that bigger screens might affect our perception of horror because of this visual illusion.

There is also scope for further research on coping with the effects of watching horror film and of mitigating the fright if the experience is considered too intense or too unmanageable. Of course, individuals could choose not to watch or could chose to watch selectively if they are in front of the screen. But there may be more imaginative strategies that might be adopted such as the introduction of non-visual, non-verbal, and non-auditory stimuli (e.g., scent). It is possible that the presence of a pleasant scent might alleviate some of the fright generated by horror film if such alleviation is required (either because it distracts or because it creates or elevates positive mood). There is some evidence that this might be possible ( Martin, 2013 ), and this is a question that merits pursuit. Wes Craven’s film, The Last House On The Left , utilized a similar, if non-olfactory distraction technique in the tagline for the film, which was “Keep repeating, it’s only a film…it’s only a film…”

The majority of the studies reviewed here has included mono-cultural samples, and the current review was unable to uncover any cross-cultural research on horror enjoyment or preference. An understanding of the cultural influences on film preference (especially horror) and the individual differences that may underpin them warrants investigation given that certain genres of horror appear to be more popular and appear more often, in specific cultures: Different cultures place different emphases on certain types of content and Japanese horror with its emphasis on ghosts, the supernatural is an obvious example ( Balmain, 2008 ; McRoy, 2008 ). Others have argued that the European horror film is distinct from other types of horror film and has a specific “esthetic” ( Allmer et al., 2012 ). There is a considerable literature on the difference between collectivistic and individualistic cultures with research suggesting that the psychological responses of individuals from each type of cultural background are different ( Matsumoto et al., 2008 ; Alotaibi et al., 2017 ; Gendron, 2017 ). In the field of horror film perception, experience, and enjoyment, it could be hypothesized that individuals from collectivistic cultures might respond differently to horror (and victims in horror) than do individuals from individualistic cultures – specifically individuals from collectivistic cultures may express greater fear compared to those from individualistic cultures – and this is an hypothesis that can be easily tested.

With interest and appreciation in horror increasing, the scope for undertaking research into horror film has never been more timely. There is still much to discover and still much to understand. Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. The research would suggest that the weight of evidence is on the side of one of horror’s innovators. Without psychology, Dario Argento once said, the horror film does not exist.

Author Contributions

The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work and has approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Dr Charlie Allbright, Phil Hughes, and four reviewers, especially reviewer 2, for their detailed and thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and to Edward Lionheart for planting the seed for this review.

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'Curious Conversations' podcast: Rosanna Breaux talks about navigating back-to-school emotions

• Travis Williams

12 Aug 2024

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Rosanna Breaux joined Virginia Tech’s “Curious Conversations” to chat about the challenges and emotions children may experience during the transition back to school. The discussion includes red flags to look for as well as coping skills and support parents and caregivers can provide to help their children navigate the school year. The conversation touches on the impact of recent bans on students having individual smart devices in schools.

About Breaux

Breaux is assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and director of the Child Study Center at Virginia Tech. Her research focuses on the social, emotional, and academic functioning of children and adolescents, particularly those with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. She is also interested in understanding the role parents play in shaping children and adolescent's social-emotional development with a focus on emotion regulation.

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Three takeaways 

Anxiety is a common emotion associated with the return to school, but major changes in behavior or emotions may indicate that a child is struggling with the transition.

Establishing routines and healthy habits, such as consistent bedtimes and nutritious meals, can help children adjust to the school year as well as teaching them coping skills, such as deep breathing.

Having at least one friend or ally in the lunchroom can increase a child's likeability among other peers and help that child feel more comfortable.

Psychologist offers tips for parents and schools to help address bullying

Rosanna Breaux named Jerry L. Hulick Faculty Fellow for Special Needs, Disabilities, and Inclusion

Seed grants fuel multidisciplinary, community-engaged mental health research

About the podcast

"Curious Conversations" is a series of free-flowing conversations with Virginia Tech researchers that take place at the intersection of world-class research and everyday life. Produced and hosted by Virginia Tech writer and editor Travis Williams, university researchers share their expertise and motivations as well as the practical applications of their work in a format that more closely resembles chats at a cookout than classroom lectures. New episodes are shared each Tuesday.

Lindsey Haugh

• Child psychology
• College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences research
• College of Science

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