Are you someone who enjoys watching or listening to horror and/or true crime stories? You are not alone in that. In popular culture, it is widely acknowledged that women enjoy true crime/horror content. In this post, we explore what makes the horror and true crime genres so appealing and why some people have a penchant for the macabre.
Horror and true crime are often paired together and can be thought of as two sides of the same coin. Horror is a fictional genre that was specifically created to deliberately elicit fear from the audience. True crime is a non-fictional genre that details violent actions. Both genres deal with violence and can result in psychophysiological behaviours such as increased heart rate, thoughts of disgust, anxiety, and fear. In 2004, a study by Cantor found that watching horror movies could have lingering effects, also known as emotional memory (1). In the study, 530 students were asked about their experiences and reactions to horror movies. 46% of these students reported sleep disturbances and 75% reported feeling anxiety in situations related to the horror movie that they saw, for example, some had difficulty swimming after watching Jaws (1975).
If engaging with these genres causes so much distress, why do people enjoy them so much?
There are a few theories out there to explain why people like engaging with horror/true crime. Most of them focus on people’s reactions to suspense, as well as the resolution of suspense. One of these theories is the Excitation-Transfer Theory (2). The theory suggests that for some people, when exposed to suspenseful scenes in horror, they experience a build-up of tension. This is called negative affect. When the suspense is resolved, their negative affect is converted to euphoria (positive affect). The level of enjoyment that they feel when engaging in horror/suspense-filled content is proportional to the amount of negative affect build-up and its subsequent conversion to positive affect. In short, the more scared you are, the happier you are when the fear is removed!
Some researchers believe that people may enjoy horror and true crime due to personality and cognitive traits like high sensation-seeking and low(er) empathy (2). Some studies suggest that high sensation-seekers are more likely to experience positive emotions when highly stimulated. For people with high sensation-seeking traits, a negative stimulus such as watching a horror movie might be interpreted as a positive as it would provide intense stimulation. However, a person with a low sensation-seeking trait might find horror movies uncomfortable to watch. Similarly, some studies have found that people with lower empathy are more likely to enjoy horror because they are less likely to daydream about fictional situations or imagine themselves within the story.
Are women really more likely to prefer horror/true crime than men?
The short answer is: it depends on the way you look at it.
The majority of researchers would argue that men prefer horror because they are more likely to enjoy violent media than women. Other researchers believe that preference for horror/true crime is not about enjoyment at all. These researchers argue that women prefer horror/true crime to men because it acts as a threat-coping mechanism (3,4). Studies suggest that women engage with horror/true crime media as a form of ‘defensive vigilance’. In other words, we use horror/true crime to learn about dangerous situations and how to better protect ourselves in the future.
While there is a lot of research out there on ‘horror liking’ and why men are more likely to enjoy violent media, there is much less literature on why women engage with these genres. There are still a lot of unanswered questions such as: is defensive vigilance the main/only reason so many women like true crime/horror? Is this a universal experience for women? How does defensive vigilance affect our mental health?
Hopefully, we’ll have some answers one day, but until then, I hope all you lovers of the macabre are thriving this spooky season.
By Esther Ansah, Blog Writer
References
Cantor J. “I’ll Never Have a Clown in My House” — Why Movie Horror Lives On. Poetics Today. 2004 Jun 1;25(2):283–304.
Martin GN. (Why) do you like scary movies? a review of the empirical research on psychological responses to horror films. Front Psychol. 2019 Oct 18;10(OCT):430538.
Vicary AM, Fraley RC. Captured by True Crime: Why Are Women Drawn to Tales of Rape, Murder, and Serial Killers? Soc Psychol Personal Sci. 2010;1(1):81–6.
Perchtold-Stefan, Corinna & Rominger, Christian & Ceh, Simon & Sattler, Katharina & Veit, Sarah-Vanessa & Fink, Andreas. (2024). Out of the Dark - Psychological Perspectives on People's Fascination with True Crime.
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