Dr. Coltan Scrivner

And so, of course, we asked them, well, why did you pay money to come to a haunted house if you don't necessarily enjoy the adrenaline?

Because these people also told us they didn't necessarily enjoy the adrenaline rush itself.

And what we found were that these people, who we called the white knucklers, because they would sort of clench their fists.

And so you could see the white across their knuckles as they would walk through.

What they got out of this was more, I would say, epistemic or self-directed.

They sort of learned about themselves.

So we had the adrenaline junkies and the white knucklers who were kind of opposite ends of the spectrum there.

And then we had a third group that we didn't expect to find.

And this group told us that scary entertainment helped them work through difficult emotions they were feeling.

Sometimes that meant feeling depressed or anxious was one that came up a lot.

or if they were just sort of struggling with more difficult negative emotions in general, horror-themed media helped them kind of work through those emotions more effectively than other kinds of media, or even in some cases, maybe therapy or talking to other people.

And we called them the dark copers, so they used dark media to kind of cope with what was going on in their life.

And I think what's going on there is that in the horror genre in particular, but I think that's true of probably true crime as well.

That's really one of the only genres that deals largely in fear and anxiety.

Other genres have bits of that kind of spattered in, but it's not really what they lean on.

And horror really leans into

frightening, terrible situations in a way that other stories just don't.

So it's the only place we can go to safely experience what it feels like to simulate a frightening scenario and to think about what we would do in those kinds of situations.

And so I think that's really attractive for some people who have trouble working through things like anxiety in their daily life.

The research on that is pretty new.