This article looks at why so many people enjoy seeing even horrific violence on screen, most extremely in what are labeled as slasher films, and what types of people are attracted to them.
Some people are more likely to enjoy violent media than others. Being male, aggressive and having less empathy all make you more likely to enjoy watching screen violence. There are also certain personality traits associated liking violent media. Extroverted people, who seek excitement, and people who are more open to aesthetic experiences, like watching violent movies more.
Conversely, people high in agreeableness – characterised by humility and sympathy for others – tend to like violent media less.
…More recent research, derived from studies of horror films, suggests there may be three categories of people who enjoy watching violence, each with their own reasons.
One group has been dubbed “adrenaline junkies”. These sensation seekers want new and intense experiences, and are more likely to get a rush from watching violence. Part of this group may be people who like seeing others suffer. Sadists feel other people’s pain more than normal, and enjoy it.
Another group enjoys watching violence because they feel they learn something from it. In horror studies, such people are called “white knucklers”. Like adrenaline junkies, they feel intense emotions from watching horror. But they dislike these emotions. They tolerate it because they feel it helps them learn something about how to survive.
…A final group seems to get both sets of benefits. They enjoy the sensations generated by watching violence and feel they learn something. In the horror genre, such people have been called “dark copers”.
It turns out that getting a lot of blood and gore in scenes in films is very difficult for the filmmakers.
[Director Kevin Greutert] recalled that while shooting “Saw VI,” he and his special effects crews would often spend hours in a day setting up a single gory scene. Rubber limbs, blood-filled squibs and blood tubes are attached to actors who rehearse reactions of agony and terror; gallons of (fake) blood are pumped through hoses so they can be sprayed at precisely the right moment.
“Whenever you have to do a gore shot more than once, this usually involves cleaning up the set, replacing the actor’s bloody wardrobe and washing their hair and body off, re-rigging the special effects, and cleaning blood off the camera lens,” Greutert explained. “Sometimes the schedule doesn’t allow for any of this. The pressure to get it right is tremendous.”
…“Perhaps part of the ecstasy I feel when it all goes right is just professional responsibility and the desire to not waste other people’s time and money,” Greutert explained. “But who can argue with the spectacle of seeing someone realistically decapitated with a chainsaw before your very eyes, and knowing that you orchestrated this modern blood sacrifice, and it will be shared with millions?”
I can argue with it. I have no wish to see “someone realistically decapitated with a chainsaw”, thank you very much. Not only does it not appeal to me, I feel revulsed.
Oddly enough, violence does not seem to be necessary for enjoyment.
There are reasons to reconsider how much we like watching violence per se. For example, in one study researchers showed two groups of people the 1993 movie, The Fugitive. One group were shown an unedited movie, while another saw a version with all violence edited out. Despite this, both groups liked the film equally.
This finding has been supported by other studies which have also found that removing graphic violence from a film does not make people like it less. There is even evidence that people enjoy non-violent versions of films more than violent versions.
There are suggestions that watching horror films may actually soothe people’s anxiety.
“The paradox of horror is a very old puzzle,” says Mark Miller, a research fellow at Monash University in Australia and the University of Toronto. “Even Aristotle spoke about how weird it is that we’re set up to evade and to avoid dangerous, disgusting, harmful, horrible things. Yet we feel magnetised to be in spaces where we’re in touch with disgusting, horrible, noxious or horrifying things.”
Over the past 10 years, psychologists have finally begun to resolve this enigma. Some evidence indicates that horror stories tap into key processes of the brain that help us deal with uncertainty. The latest results suggest these fictional tales of terror may even bring some serious psychological benefits – including reducing the anxiety we feel about events out in the real world. They are a salve for our worries.
I am definitely in the group that is averse to graphic violence. Before I watch anything, I research to see what kind of content it contains. If it indicates that there will be gore and horror, I will give it a miss. I can tolerate a little bit of violence (it is pretty much unavoidable these days) but if it looks like there will be a lot of it, then that too is a disqualifier. I am squeamish when it comes to seeing other people in pain. Even when it looks like someone is merely going to get an injection, I look away. Oddly enough, I have no problems with getting injections myself, it is seeing others get them that bothers me. I may have got this from my father. I recall how once he had to accompany his granddaughter to the doctor to get a series of rabies injections because she had been bitten by a stray dog. While my eight-year old niece was perfectly able to cope with the injections without any problem and was very stoic, he had to leave the room while it happened.
But it seems like I am in the minority. There seems a huge audience for slasher films and TV shows that feature lots of horror and gore. Especially leading up to the Halloween, we get inundated with promos for films that emphasize the horror and gore. I skip all of them. Needlessly to say, this means that I also avoid all medical and hospital dramas because of the obligatory scenes in operating rooms. I also go nowhere near hugely popular shows like Game of Thrones and Squid Game because of their reputations for violence and gore. I even used to avoid The Simpsons Halloween specials, and those are cartoons.
I tried watching Squid Game but I couldn’t stomach it. Like you I can’t watch blood and gore. Gun fights are completely boring. Hand to hand combat is as well unless there is some very creative choreography involved. A fight scene in the first season of the Daredevil series qualifies that was filmed as a a single camera shot. Bloodless spaceship battles are watchable.
For the past year my favourite shows have been slice-of-life amine: ordinary people dealing with ordinary life problems. Still like quality science fiction when I can find it.
some counterpoints to the gendering -- bela lugosi’s fan mail from women who were like “suck my blood, kill me babey,” within ea poe’s life how more than one woman was freaky obsessed with him and caused trouble for him because of it, all the tumblr accounts i’ve stumbled across run by lesbians who also post gore content (hey i was just here for cute bats ma’am), … etc etc.
agreed on injections -- my least favorite part of pulp fiction was vincent vega doing heroin. i’m eager to get health care -- suck my blood for tests, shoot me full of vaxes -- but i can’t even watch the needle go in myself. come to think of it, i don’t think i watched my tattoos getting done either.
realism is a factor for me. i love the first evil dead movie, which is turbo gory, but it all looks fake as hell. so it becomes an idea, an abstract thing. the violence in old chinese “blood operas” likewise. the idea in the latter is easy enough to peg -- it’s a power fantasy about having your desire for justice easily transcend the limitations of your flesh. the idea in the former is a little harder to get.
the emotions on the characters as they experience horror scenarios, these are compelling. it’s dark humor? like in the evil dead series, i don’t wanna see ash say his catch phrases. i wanna see him upset, have him say “oh god no, not again.” sam raimi, bruce campbell et al drew the connection explicitly between slapstick like the three stooges and what they were producing.
I can’t stand gore, whether visual or verbal. But worse than gore is the depiction of a world that makes horror inevitable. Last year I read a book where it turned out there is a child who by his mere presence caused people around him to become sick (cancer, neurological conditions) and eventually die. It made me feel so bad because I couldn’t help thinking ‘so what if something like this were real, what would I do? What should people do?’
Context is everything. I’m not squeamish about violence in film, but if it’s gratuitous (as in slasher films) I find it boring.
A curious thing about North American culture is the acceptance of depictions of the most horrendous violence, while depictions or explanations of sexual activity, or even just nudity, are still deemed ‘questionable’.
BTW, just saw Dicks: The Musical last night. Hilarious. But I can imagine many people being scandalized by it.
The first Alien film was very good, despite not having so extreme (by modern standards) gore.
The same can be said about the first Terminator film.
The idiotic films with Jason Vorhees and similar flicks were just boring.
And cheap ‘wannabee’ slasher films often fell into the ‘so bad they are good’ zone, a fact used by wossname ‘Science 3000 something’ showing the worst films they could find.
‘Marathon Man” with Dustin Hoffman did not *show* much blood, but the implied dentist torture was hard to stomach.
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On the opposite side if you want to laugh off mega-violence, just watch any of the Japanese ‘kaiju’ films.
Yoicks ago, I read of a fourth incentive to watch horror films, specifically for younger hetero couples: the girl gets to play all femme-I-can’t-look-at-this, and the boy gets to be the he-man nothing-scares-me type (maybe some same-sex couples like to play the same roles -- this was before media acknowledged their existence). This provides, purportedly, an excuse for lots of hugging.
Then there’s another motivation, though I’ve only met its manifestation in slasher novels: a friend enjoys those, she says, because when it comes to the gory parts, she can visualize her ex in the victim role. Oddly, to me, she has no use for supernatural/fantasy horror: it’s gotta be “real”.
I’ve watched a lot of horror films, from the good (Alien) to the terrible -- not listed so you don’t get tempted to google (or worse watch) them. As an aside, when I gave my children unrestricted access to the internet, I cautioned them that it was unfiltered, that you can’t unsee things, and that if you search for things to disturb you, you’ll find them. I’m of the opinion that you can’t shut out the world though, and I still believe that that unfettered access helped them more than it hurt them.
But I do like horror, and I watch it for entertainment. Trying to analyse why I like it though is a bit like asking the question as to why anyone watches movies at all. There are many subgenres and lumping them all together under a category to be avoided is to overlook that. Like attempting to sanitise life.
What is horror to you? I’m very fond of fantasy and science fiction, and my favourite type of horror would be a merge of those genres. But I can’t stand watching people suffering in real life situations. Operations are right out. Reportedly, one of the Jackass franchise shows a sex change operation. If you can even think of watching that, you have a stronger stomach than me. So are realistic programs like Ambulance. I can see the appeal of watching the latter if you gain satisfaction from how people are comforted and broken bodies are fixed, but the suffering is too raw for me. (I don’t mind watching Dr Pimple Popper though, because you get the same thing -- satisfaction from the fix -- without the pain of an accident). But without people with those stronger stomachs, we wouldn’t have the medical profession.
However I liked movies like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Evil Dead franchise because of their humour. They wildly cross back and forth from shocking to farce. Movies like Riki-oh and Wrong Turn even made me laugh out loud at how over-the-top ridiculous they were. I like black comedy too, and I think I am well able to distinguish fantasy from reality.
I can watch things like the Saw franchise because of the cleverness of the traps. The movies are largely bearable. I prefer movies like Hellraiser because of their fantasy element, even if they’re objectively not that well made. Something like Hostel, although not as gory, is a much darker watch. By and large I don’t care to watch slasher movies; not so much because they’re real (they’re not) as because they’re pointless. Halloween was probably the best of them, or maybe Terrifier, because it’s so clearly a parody. But ghost movies I can’t stand -- you can break all the rules when making a ghost movie, and it becomes boring and unbelievable (literally). Movies don’t have to be realistic, but you have to have some consistency to be able to suspend disbelief while you watch them.
I did like The Ring though. There are exceptions to most rules.
So I watch horror for entertainment. If I want to be upset by something, I just have to contemplate Gaza. The real world is far worse than anything I’ve seen in movies.
The Ring? I must share a thing from Facebook.
.https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1A8A6YahY2/
For ‘So bad it is good’ I recommend Brandon’s Cult Movie Reviews on Youtube.
This is where I learned of Dennis Hopper’s over-the-top performance in the sequel to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. “He must have been paid in cocaine”. 🙂
Rob Grigjanis: “Context is everything”
Absolutely. Remember the legal drama with Jodie Foster as a sexual assault victim.
Also, as a fan of (some) anime, I liked ‘Goblin Slayer’, an anime about a traumatised warrior who deals with his trauma by killing monsters. The series is about him gradually opening up to others and recovering as he becomes part of a supportive group.
The extreme violence (including SA) of the first episode is justified as it shows the horrors that constantly threaten the rural population -- the adventurers (mercenaries) are not willing to take on quests in this D&D world to fight low-level monsters as the pay the farmers can offer is too small.
I really dislike blood, mutilations, etc. If there’s much, or sometimes any, on-screen depictions, I won’t watch it. Like Mano, I check for on-screen gore and avoid it.
Odd about those people who are “adrenaline junkies”, who watch gore all the time for the ongoing thrills, because, in books or in movies, if you keep repeating anything over and over, it becomes boring, or, if it’s heaped up on the same character, funny. Repeated gore for two straight hours has got to get old for anyone.
During the Game of Thrones fight-and-kill scenes, I’d read a book, look away, or just wait impatiently, thinking of how long it must have taken the actors to learn the choreography, and who spent hours of their life that they’ll never get back planning it all, and when were we going to get back to the plot. Really dull, and dragged the show’s quality down. And, if characters were too tormented by violence--had their heads cut off or tortured, whatever--I’d look away, it never really mattered to the plot anyway. And, I seem to recall that in the GoT books, all the bloodshed and torture happened off-screen, the author never spent pages describing it. Too boring.
Violence and gore are really just sideshows to the actual plot, excursions from the main theme, that I certainly don’t want to waste time on. Not to mention, see depicted.
I like what you might call “horror”, but more psychological. Both in books and in movies. Remember that in the acknowledged best horror novel of all time, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, not one drop of blood is spilled (as an aside, the book is *much, much* more frightening than the movie, and don’t read it home alone at night. Even Jackson got frightened as she wrote it.) Stephen King, the most famous of horror writers, dedicated one of his books “To Shirley Jackson, who never had to raise her voice.”
That’s what I like, voices not raised.
@13, garnetstar: agree about the book The Haunting of Hill House. There’s so much tension for the reader in wondering how much of the horror the characters in the book are experiencing is real, and how much is generated by Nell--the abused woman trying to break free after a lifetime of cloistered servitude to her mother--infecting the rest of the group with group panic. The 1960s version of the movie is also very psychological, while the 1990s remake was over-the-top silliness and should really have had a different title. The Netflix miniseries was okay as it reimagined the story and showed the lifelong aftereffects on the people who experienced the horror as children. There’s no gore in that version, either.
(Looks at my extensive DVD collection) …While I do have several horror films in my collection and a few violent action films, I don’t think it’s violence per se that I’m into, but the broader category of “violation”. Physical, Psychological, Sexual, Financial, Reputational, whatever, so long as it’s fictional. Key word here being fictional. Historical tragedies and atrocities are unpleasant to confront, even in documentaries and “based on real events” films, though that doesn’t always stop me from watching them or at least learning a about said events in some form, because education is important.
And I despise any real person or institution who/which would harm others, and take action when I can, whether it’s substantial like aiding in the downfall and firing of a workplace bully, or symbolic, like engaging in a boycott or protest. Or even once injecting myself into an actual horror situation (involving violent domestic abuse) because the police were useless -- long story, and I’m not sure I’m ready to tell it even if this were the appropriate place to do so.
I guess I’d be in the third category? I do enjoy it on some perverse level (if it’s purely fictional) but also desire to learn from it (regardless of fictionality). “Dark coper” sounds like something an incel would use as a self-description, though.
“What is the appeal of horror and gore on screen?”
Isn’t the answer simply ‘tastes are different’? We may as well ask about the appeal of bridge. And then when a person replies with ‘it appeals because x, y, z’ we are still left without any real answer, because the question now becomes ‘why do x, y and z appeal to you?’ At some point, the answer is simply ‘it appeals to me because it just does.’
One appealing element repeated in horror is the depiction of human resilience. It’s by no means a sure thing. Sometimes the protagonists die. Sometimes death is inevitable and the knowledge of this hangs like a shroud over everyone (just about every zombie movie ever made). But sometimes people show extreme character to make it through despite the ridiculously unfair odds contrived against them. Horror asks questions like: what kind of person are you when confronted by adversity? Do you have what it takes to survive without losing your humanity? What are your morals worth when civilisation collapses? And in what ways do humans fall short due to their innate imperfections (eg. Black mirror)? When the gore component is over the top it emphasises the consequences of failure. The message: failure is not an option, so what would YOU do? It’s food for thought.
Probably have added, since it’s also on topic: Gore doesn’t particularly bother me, beyond a mild “eww” if it’s particularly messy, nor does watching birthing or autopsy videos (and I have seen a few of each). I’ve joked that my revolt-o-meter is broken, except that it *does* work fine for a few specific things: destructive things being done to eyeballs, vomit, and bad things being done to real people (or stand-ins for that, in case of dramatized historical reenactments). I do absolutely hate being penetrated by needles, even for medical reasons, and seeing someone else (non-fictional) being in obvious discomfort from it does trigger my own discomfort somewhat. Doesn’t stop me from getting vaccinated, obviously.