Coltan Scrivner

So the first thing I had to do was just try to define it, right?

We had all these concepts about what morbid curiosity is in popular culture.

So film critics talked about it a lot, especially with respect to horror movies.

And a lot of the film critics had a similar opinion as you at first, where they said, who watches this morally bankrupt stuff?

And that was just the answer is like, well, they watch it because they're morally bankrupt or they watch it because they lack empathy or they watch it because they need an adrenaline rush.

And I think everyone just kind of accepted that, including psychologists and media researchers.

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?