Why Do We Love the Horror of Halloween? | Philosophy Tube

1. 

   @cicadadadays

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   9:55 not to once again mention "superman smashes the klan" in the comments of a video that was made four years before that book came out, but it actually directly deals with white supremacists using superman as a symbol for their ideology (he's proof of "the strength of the white man" or whatever) and how that is fundamentally inaccurate. its not wrong to say that superman is an immigrant.

2. 

   @jenny_azoth

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   reenactment can be therapeutic for victims of trauma, especially when it's virtual, vicarious, and clearly simulated (you can turn the movie/game off if you get too stressed out), all of which can help people work through complex emotions that arise from stressful situations in a safe environment

3. 

   @spookyrob4106

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   Did he actually answer the question?

4. 

   @SasskiF

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   Asking why people like horror is like asking why some people are masochistic. Not saying that people who like horror are masochists, but, as a masochist might say, “it hurt so bad and I loved it!”, so too might a horror genre fan say, “it scared me so bad I nearly shit my pats, it was brilliant!”
   Fact of the matter is, in my opinion, this is more a psychology question than a philosophical one.
   Why do some people enjoy jumping out of plains to their potential death. Why enjoy any extreme sport.
   The question is; why are our pleasure centres and pain centres in our brain sometimes interchangeable, and why does the simple mental state of having consented or not consented to being subjected to something impact so heavily on how we experience both.

5. 

   @horrorhabit8421

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   Aside from the fact that not all horror happens within a narrative, not all horror happens within a well- structured narrative. People love Friday the Thirteenth movies (so do I,) but are they well- structured? Not really. So what's the explanation? I don't know; I'm asking.

   Also, by the way, in the 19th Century, the convention of the gothic romance was to explain all the "supernatural" events logically. But we rarely find that satisfying these days.

6. 

   @DelapierceD

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   I think part of it is around us not "meant to" be safe around horrible things. So when we can be safe in the face of them, we can relax into the experience, rather than freak out. I think this helps account for people who do not enjoy horror too, as they either do not feel safe enough, or they have no fascination with the subject matter, so do not care that they can safely experience it

   I also think this gets at why Paranormal Activity would not be fun if it were all normal explanations: We get to be safe with normal explanations for weird house noises everyday

7. 

   @boblouis1659

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   I think there might be two things that happen to us which helps us enjoy horror. First it's a learning experience. Like driving past a motor vehicle accident. We have to look to see what happened. I think we are wired to look at unpleasant things in order to learn from them. Second, the flight-or-fight response kicks in releasing hormones, and cortisol, as well as the neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin. You have a physiological rush without having to actually defend yourself or run away.

8. 

   @Turalcar

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   And you're surprised people mistake philosophy for psychology

9. 

   @TheJas-vr2vr

   December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

   Another interesting idea is why are we scared by things we expect and know can't harm us,
   Once I played a horror game where the first time I got through it quite quickly, but in subsequent playthroughs I was scared to leave the final area you can see the sun from.

10. 

    @littledisneygoddess

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I need to tell you that Superman is a metaphorical Moses, not Jesus

11. 

    @RelativelyBest

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I guess I enjoy horror on occasion because it feels like I'm challenging myself to be brave. Or, maybe it's more like practicing to be brave via simulation? While there is no actual danger in watching a horror movie or playing a horror game, etc, evidently some part of our brains interpret it as such – hence the fear reaction – and voluntarily braving an experience that feels threatening is empowering.

    I was never really into horror as a younger man, so when I for some reason decided to play Silent Hill 3 I wasn't prepared for what I was in for, and it sorta messed me up. It actually caused me to experience this oppressive anxiety that loomed over me for days, even when I wasn't playing. Some of you may think it's silly to react so strongly to a game, it's not real after all, but that's sorta my point: Just the fact that fake dangers can still scare us proves that on an unconscious, instinctual level, we can't really tell the difference. At any rate, Silent Hill 3 is possibly the only game I've had to abandon playing not because I didn't like it, per se, but because I feared it was causing legit damage to my apparently somewhat sensitive mental state. It wasn't a bad game, but it did bad things to me.

    A while after I recovered from all this, I decided to watch a lot of Silent Hill let's plays on Youtube as a sort of therapy. Which may seem strange, but I just… really didn't want to admit defeat. I distinctly recall the feeling of wanting to overcome something that had antagonized me, I didn't want a damn video game to be what broke me. Now, watching other people play scary games is actually less scary than doing it yourself, so this time I got through it all without getting halfway traumatized. And, hey, that still felt like a win – like I had personally overcome a monster, albeit by proxy. Then I moved on to watching people playing Amnesia, etc. It's what got me into horror game lets plays and led me to discovering some of my favorite youtubers.

    Point is, resolving to face the things that scare us makes us feel stronger and braver. And, as we get used to those things, we may even get disappointed that the thing wasn't scary enough. That is to say, we've started to seek greater challenges. Monsters scare us, yes, but the purpose of monsters in the first place is to give us the chance to become heroes.

12. 

    @horrorhabit699

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    So this is quite an area of study for me, and I've heard a lot of observations from fans of the horror genre, but I'm more curious about why some people dislike it. Most people just say, "I don't like to be grossed out or scared," but I suspect that answer covers more nuanced reasons.

13. 

    @evelienheerens2879

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    New genres of horror usually follow a real-life horrible event or persistent situation. One example is body-horror becoming a thing in post-hiroshima japan. There are many other examples, like Vampiric aristocrats being the subject of stories in victorian england where rich factory owners were sucking the life out of factory workers. In a way most kinds of entertainment follow the state of real world events, like the brady bunch being a product of everyone believing in the american dream. I digress

    The point is, that horror, like other forms of entertainment, is shaped by what's going on in the world. I believe the reason we enjoy horror, is because it helps us process the things that happen to us in our lives. This is because it is a story, and stories provide us with a framework for our experience. Stories are heavy in tropes for this reason, the predictability is reassuring, as it tells us we know what to do in those circumstances, conversely, a breaking away from a trope feels relevant because we feel like we are learning something important.

    So horror in a way, is a form of psychotherapy.

14. 

    @ak2wa2or

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    oh my, haven't seen younger olly in a while…

15. 

    @Waning13Moon

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I enjoy horror for catharsis. I have pretty bad anxiety, and find that experiencing things which stimulate that anxiety in a safe environment (not real, I control what horror I consume and can leave at any time) allows me to process those anxieties in a way that calms me down. It is a building and releasing of tension, almost like when you tighten your muscles and then release them. It doesn't make my anxieties go away forever, but when I am exceptionally tense it can give me somewhere to release some of that tension in a safe and controlled way.

16. 

    @awesomesauce3951

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I feel like it’s because you’re receiving stimulus indicative of danger, but you know you’re not in danger. It allows you to experience what would ordinarily be awful, in comfort, and out of choice. There is an underlying sense of safety, so all the energy created by fear is channeled into a more curious excitement, rather than overwhelming dread

17. 

    @Lurdiak

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    First of all, the obvious point must be made that horror films can be enjoyed for multiple reasons, but also that horror films are multiple things, like any work of art. While Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are tragedies, that doesn't diminish the appeal of the humor or wordplay present in them. And indeed, by understanding that most narratives evoke various emotions, we can begin to understand another aspect of why horror is so appealing: catharsis. Not in the sense of purification, but rather the interpretation G. F. Else provides, that of intellectual clarification.
    While viewing Dracula may not alleviate our fears of what he represents, and indeed, due to his being a metaphor, we do not even confront what he represents at all, he does allow us to explore, both emotionally and intellectual, that fear itself, and how it relates to ourselves. We see the abstraction of what is terrifying in a new, oft-fantastical form, and thus are able to better define the fear which lurked within us all along. It also allows us to understand how these fears intersect with other fears, and even other emotions. With a threat comes the instinct to survive, with the fear of death comes defiance and courage. Parts of our mind may begin to formulate plans about how we would deal with the monster, much like how a philosophical problem makes us think about how to resolve a moral quandary. We may even make value judgements in these hypothetical scenarios where we inhabit the world where the monster is real: do we let the monster take others to save ourselves? Do we bargain with it, flee from it, accept our death to save others? Comedy, mystery or drama can scarcely put our minds in the space needed to consider such things.
    To circle back to the fact that a work of art is more than one thing at a time, there is, simultaneously, and perhaps paradoxically from a certain perspective, a certain element of schadenfreude to horror. Many horror films exult in the violence and suffering inflicted on the victims, and while most audiences may not be rooting for the monster or villain, it would be a lie to say that no one enjoys seeing Jason take a weed-whacker to someone's face. There is a streak of sadism in all of us, and horror fiction is a particularly safe way to indulge in that part of us. For not only is it within the confines of fiction, we project that atavistic part of our psyche onto the antagonist of the story, both as the perpetrator of violence on innocents and, often, as the victim of "righteous" violence. Their monstrosity allows us to enjoy both sides of this violent exchange while never feeling like we're compromising our moral integrity.
    There's also the simpler consideration that fear "makes us feel alive", and that horror is a way to feel that thrill that is both safe and easy. Certainly, one could jump out of a plane or enter the ring with a bull or climb a mountain without a harness, but all of those require considerable risk and effort, whereas horror provides us the antidote to ennui with the least amount of labour on our part, as it has been courteously provided by the creator.
    Finally, there is an element of horror which lends itself to imagination of a sort that other fiction rarely does. Horror, more than any other genre, seems to encourage the unexplainable. A monstrous entity in a horror story can be allowed to not make sense in a way that is rarely allowed in genres like drama or mystery or science fiction. This is precisely because things that defy our reasoning in one way or other are inherently disconcerting, so what would be a weakness in other genres becomes a strength. Of course there are plenty of surrealist works that aren't horror, so this is not an all encompassing argument, but as fiction is many things at once, I think our analysis of horror and the enjoyment thereof needs to also come from more than one angle.
    I think another reason horror can be enjoyed has to do with the notions of romanticism and the outsider. Though the literary discipline of romanticism came well after the invention of horror, the concept of the outsider and horror have always been bound together in storytelling tradition. The wolf comes from outside the village to devour the innocent children. Whether the monster is a tragic mutant, a normal-seeming human, a beast, or something unfathomable, they are always "outside" society, "outside" the normal person. Even monsters which stand in for pervasive systemic problems that shape society are still represented as outside the perspective of the average individual. Where this ties into the appeal of horror is that all of us feel outside of something in some way, whether it be society as a whole, our circle of acquaintances, an economic system, or something as shallow as a fashion trend. And horror both thematically and aesthetically embraces otherness and the outsider, and allows us to identify with the part of us that is outside the whole, outside the norm. We are Frankenstein's creature, all of us.

18. 

    @mammalian5489

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I have a vague memory of an article about a women who couldn't feel fear, she couldn't even recognise when other people expressed fear, but she found scary things funny, like she would laugh at horror movies and not because they were naff but because she found the scenes amusing. This was a case study so it's hard to know how much you can generalise to the general population but we also know people who on a physiological level dont feel empathy (psychopaths and certain ppl with brain traumas) find real world violence pleasurable. If im remembering the article right i thought it was interesting and semi relevant so… there you go.

19. 

    @Polarwolf98

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    I might be a bit late to this.

    I think the explaination for this is less philosophical and more biological. When we get scared our body releases adrenaline and endorphine. Endorphine binds to the opiate receptors and causes, among other things, a state of euphoria. That, combined with the adrenaline, produces a euphoric rush.

    All of what you said might still be true, however I think the bodys response is the more important aspect here.

20. 

    @gvtcheese69

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    Pretty late to the game, but, it's a safe way to experience dying IMO.

21. 

    @apollo4132

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    Why do you enjoy horrer? because I'm an edgy bitch and its an aquired taste that I picked up for the aesthetic back in middleschool and now actually apresiate.

22. 

    @allisondoak9425

    December 31, 2025 at 4:26 am

    But like I can’t just let out all my negative emotions about capitalism when I encounter capitalism or the idea of capitalism. If I did that I’d be committed to a mental health institution but in a setting which exposes the idea where it’s safe and okay to process those feelings properly without holding back I might feel better.

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