Some people seem to find pleasure in experiences that make them tremble with fear, be it watching a scary movie or visiting a haunted house even though they are not able to sleep for an entire week. Lorella Fava looks into why one may be fascinated by anything spooky.
You feel tense, your heart is beating so fast you can almost feel it jumping out of your chest, your palms are sweaty and you’re shaking uncontrollably… Does this sound appealing at all?
With Halloween approaching, it’s difficult to avoid people’s enthusiasm for anything horror. A sense of fun seems to initiate from a feeling that is normally associated with threat or danger.
Patrick Vella, director of Dar Il-Waħx, a haunted house performance which will have its final edition this year, suggests that it’s all about “curiosity, courage or the lack of it, and group fun”.
Vella has always had a thing for interactive horror adventures, be it survival games or horror houses, and although it fizzled with time, his interest in what it is that makes a person jump never ceased. This led him to start Dar il-Waħx and the feedback has been very positive from the start.
“Horror is subjective and comes with genres and sub-genres, but in this case, the reality is factual – people want to face their fears and love to do so knowing that it is safe,” he says.
“The response was really high and people of all ages were curious to visit. Yet we do not allow kids as our house can be pretty graphic. The level of horror is crude and high.”
The experience involves claustrophobic moments, jump scares (which Vella claims work every year) and an eerie atmosphere.
“Ultimately, it’s a complete play on paranoia,” Vella says.
To heighten the fear factor, the route this year will be in pitch black (night vision goggles will be distributed) and the visitors’ senses will be “manipulated”.
“Eliminate their vision and their level of anxiety shoots up by 80 per cent… then little dozes of smell [humidity since the event is taking place in a shelter at Luqa] and dissonant sounds add to the scares.”
A sense of fun seems to initiate from a feeling that is normally associated with danger
Furthermore, isolation makes everything more scary. Although people enter the ‘house’ in groups of eight – so that albeit the intense level of horror there is still the idea of ‘safety in numbers’ – in one particular activity one ‘victim’ will be trapped in a room, in the dark, with a particular character.
“At some point they will have to walk through the corridors alone… we did it in the past… we will do it again,” he says.
In a 2012 online article titled ‘Why is Fear Fun’, Glenn Sparks, who studies media effects on people at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the US, suggests that there is no particular evidence that shows people actually enjoy the feeling of fright but rather there is evidence that “people enjoy other things that go along with this experience”.
For instance, the experience could provide the person with a context whereby they can “expose themselves to sensations that are different from the routine”.
Distancing one’s self from the normal, daily routine can be exciting and it is this excitement that is sought out by people who are interested in horror.
Another reason is that when the extreme sense of excitement and adrenaline wears off, it is replaced with an equally intense sense of relief and even mastery. These positive vibes, Sparks claims, lead people to seek out contexts that will eventually lead to these kinds of feeling.
“People may remember a haunted house at Halloween or a scary movie and they think ‘I really felt good after that’,” he writes.
Looked at in this way it appears that what is attractive is not the experience itself but the satisfaction it brings with it.
At the end of the day, as suggested by University of Pittsburg sociologist Margee Kerr in the same article, it only takes a minute to “realise we are safe and switch over to laughter and joy”.