Coltan Scrivner

And I was a little skeptical of that.

I thought, OK, that maybe explains some portion of it.

But I thought maybe it's really more about the curiosity than it is about needing to see something morally gross because you are morally gross.

And so I started looking into it.

And that's what I started to find was that for most people, this really was.

A lot like other kinds of curiosity, it just happened to be about something that was dangerous.

So I define morbid curiosity as an interest in or curiosity about things that are dangerous, right?

And that can come in nonfiction forms like true crime,

is obviously probably the most popular example of that.

But I think even the news, like honor news is pretty threat-laden.

And then it can also come in fictional forms because fiction does a really good job of tailors the story and the characters to be, in the case of horror movies, to be threatening.

It does a really good job of kind of pulling on those cognitive strings.

And so it attracts us in the same way that real threats or stories of real threats would.

Well, that's what makes it scariest, right?

Some of the work that I'm doing now is looking at, how do we even define what horror is, right?

We have this conception, again, if I see a horror movie, I can say, oh, that's a horror movie.

But I have a hard time, like,

coming up with a recipe for what makes a horror movie.

The traditional answer, again, has been if it scares you.

That's kind of a flimsy definition, right?