Dark Minds, Soft Hearts
Dark Minds, Soft Hearts
The Personality of a Horror Fan: Part 1
This is Part 1 of a series I’m writing on the personality of horror fans.
One of the most common questions I get is, “what kind of person likes horror?”
Most people have intuitions about what certain groups of people are like. Software engineers are smart, politicians are untrustworthy, and club-goers are extraverted. Our mind creates these generalizations based on statistical averages of what we see (or, what we think we see). Sometimes they are accurate, and sometimes they aren’t.
One stereotype I’ve been investigating recently is the belief that horror fans are lacking in prosocial traits like empathy or compassion. To many, it seems like people who watch and enjoy a genre that is filled with blood, screams, and fear must be more calloused than those who don’t watch these films.
Dark minds, therefore dark hearts, their logic goes.
When Spiral: From the Book of Saw came out in 2021, it received a blistering review from New York Post movie critic Jonathan Oleksinski. Actually, it was the fans of the movie that received the blistering review. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Fans of these films — whom I so look forward to hearing from! — are depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most other living things. Their arguments in favor of the genre’s most egregious titles — they harness the beauty in the grotesque; they expose the animalistic underbelly of humanity — are total BS.
These so-called movies are completely and utterly worthless and barely deserve to exist on the periphery of cinema.
Harsh.
But Oleksinski isn’t alone in thinking this. Horror has a long history of being side-eyed by critics.
The 1980s opened the decade with a machete-wielding masked killer stalking Camp Crystal Lake. Friday The 13th was a success at the Box Office, drawing in nearly $60 million worldwide against a budget of only half a million dollars. Still, the film was not as widely embraced by critics as its thrilling older brother, Halloween (1978). Compared to Carpenter’s Halloween, Friday The 13th was much bloodier. And critics took note.
Photo from Gemma Ryles on Trusted Reviews.
One of the most vocal critics of slashers generally and Friday The 13th specifically was Chicago Tribune film critic Gene Siskel. Siskel co-hosted a television show in the 80s called Sneak Previews with the famous Chicago Sun-Times film critic Robert Ebert. In their show, the duo would provide narrative critique of movies alongside clips that were shown to the audience.
Siskel and Ebert dedicated an entire episode of their show rebuking Friday The 13th and the spate of slashers that cropped up after the success of Halloween. Like Oleksinski’s review of Spiral, the duo’s ire was palpable and bled into outrage at fans. In the episode, Siskel speculated that the fans of Friday The 13th and other films like it were “some very sick people.” Ebert agreed with his co-host, suggesting that fans of slashers “don’t seem to like women very much.”
Most horror fans I know find views like Siskel’s and Oleksinski’s to be comically mistaken. If you go to a horror convention, you won’t run into deranged psychopaths waiting for you to be caught alone in a dark hallway. Instead, what you’ll find is a group of people who care dearly for one another and would do almost anything to help someone in need. You’ll find people whose skins have been thickened from years of side-eyes and hushed comments.
You’ll find people with dark minds, but soft hearts.
Questionable Claims
The belief that horror fans lack empathy has some roots in the scientific literature. Following the slasher-era of horror, there were a handful of psychology studies that looked into how horror fandom might relate to empathy. These studies were collected an analyzed in a 2005 meta-analysis on the enjoyment of mediated fright and violence. This meta-analysis is now the go-to citation for the claim that horror fans have low empathy.
For those of you who aren’t academics, a meta-analysis looks at results from all previous studies on a given topic and systematically synthesizes them. The authors then look to see if results across studies are consistent for any given set of variables. In other words, a meta-analysis asks: what can we say about a particular effect given what has been found already?
Meta-analyses are the gold standard when it comes to the scientific consensus on a topic, but they can have limitations that skew their findings. When I took a closer look at this meta-analysis, I saw three red flags that made me seriously question the claim that horror fans were likely to have low empathy.
1. Low Number of Studies
The first concern was that the meta-analysis only included 6 studies that look at empathic concern, which was their measure of empathy. It’s difficult to make a strong claim of consensus from such a small number of studies. This wasn’t the fault of the authors — there simply wasn’t (and still isn’t) much research on horror fandom and empathy.
2. Restricted Age Group
The second concern was the participants' ages in the studies. All of the studies in the meta-analysis had high school or undergraduate students as participants. There’s nothing wrong with those study populations, but it would definitely skew the average levels of horror enjoyment. At a population level, horror fandom peaks in the late teens and early 20s and slowly declines after. Other traits that change over the lifespan such as thrill-seeking and rebelliousness could also skew results in these studies. At best, the results can only say that teenagers and young adults who enjoy horror have lower levels of empathy. This limitation is also important to consider if we want to know something about potential long-term effects of horror on empathy or compassion.
3. Poor Stimuli Choice
The third concern was the most substantial for me. Of the 6 studies that looked at empathy in the meta-analysis, the two strongest ones showed correlations of -.40 and -.17. These two studies were driving the effect. In the discussion, the authors noted a major caveat concerning these two studies:
“one examined the enjoyment of graphic violence such as torture and the other investigated the enjoyment of violent horror clips that concluded with brutal murders and no satisfactory resolution. In other words, these studies specifically focused on the enjoyment of victimization.
In the case of these two studies, the variable being measured wasn’t really enjoyment of horror movies per se. Rather, it was something closer to enjoyment of seeing victimization. It was closer to a measure of sadism, not horror fandom. It would be like showing a bunch of people a rom-com scene with a breakup and asking them how much they enjoyed it. The results probably wouldn’t tell us much about the psychology of rom-com fans, but they might tell us something about the psychology of sadists.
The authors recognized that this might be an issue and they performed an analysis with these two outlier studies removed. When these two studies were removed from the analysis, the association between empathic concern and enjoyment of horror vanished with them. In other words, the meta-analysis couldn’t really say much about the association between empathy and enjoyment of horror.
Unfortunately, this caveat wasn’t featured in the abstract. Instead, the abstract stated that, “The analysis confirmed that male viewers, individuals lower in empathy, and those higher in sensation seeking and aggressiveness reported more enjoyment of fright and violence.” It’s difficult to include any nuance in an abstract, but this seems clearly incongruent with what they report in the paper.
A Zombie Finding
This study has been cited numerous times in support of the idea that horror fans lack empathy. At the time I am writing this, the paper has been cited by 300 other scientific papers. Because people often cite meta-analyses as authoritative support of their assumptions, it’s had a huge influence on how the scientific community and the public view the relationship between empathy and horror enjoyment.
I don’t expect every person who cited this meta-analysis to have read it as closely as I did. A casual reader would easily come away thinking that there is good evidence for a negative correlation between empathy and horror enjoyment. However, a close reading of this meta-analysis would have you come to a very different conclusion. The argument that horror fans lack empathy seems to hold very little water.
In Part 2, I’ll present some of the research I’ve done on this topic that runs counter to the narrative that horror fans are low in prosocial traits like empathy and compassion.