Coltan Scrivner

And that's usually how you measure things like cortisol.

But what we did do is there was this idea for a long time that people like horror movies because the adrenaline, it's intuitive.

makes sense, seems true, probably is true.

But I thought, well, that doesn't really explain all of the horror fans.

Just anecdotally, I was like, well, I know a lot of people who are just not adrenaline junkies, but they love horror.

And so what I did is I collected 50 or 60 statements about why people like horror.

And I showed them to hundreds of people.

And I said, how much do you agree with these things?

And I wanted to see which questions were answered similarly.

And you can kind of group them into factors.

And what I found was there were three factors that kind of emerged from that data.

One of those factors was sort of an adrenaline junkie factor.

People who scored high in that liked horror because they like the way they feel when they're afraid.

They like the rush.

I don't get scared is my thing.

No, so that's an excellent point.

And that was part of the reason I didn't think that was true because a lot of true adrenaline junkies don't get scared enough from horror films.

So it wouldn't make sense to me that adrenaline is the main driver of horror interest.

It is a driver for some people, but it didn't seem like it could be this answer.

Unifying explanation.