K-State Professor's Opinion:
WHY WE LIKE TO WATCH SCARY MOVIES

MANHATTAN -- Is it the chill on the backs of our necks, or the acceleration of our hearts pounding in our chests that make us watch scary movies?

According to Leon Rappoport, professor of psychology at Kansas State University, it is the same thing that attracts people to amusement parks to ride roller coasters.

"It goes all the way back to sitting around the camp fire telling ghost stories and folk tales," Rappoport said. "It's a very prevalent, deep-seated, human characteristic to explore the boundaries where they can tolerate fear and anxiety, and then master that fear and anxiety by working through it."

Rappoport says that Freudians and analytical thinkers believe that the more we develop and progress as a civilization, so things become efficient, safe and secure.

"The more civilized we get the more we repress our sort of uncivilized nature," Rappoport said. "And one way to release that is through festival occasions, vicariously enjoying horror movies and all sorts of related things."

In a study, Rappoport asked people about the sorts of films and television shows that they enjoy watching. Results showed that there was a shift in the age of people who enjoyed horror movies and extreme fantasy.

"For example, you don't see too many people over the age of 25 playing the game Dungeons and Dragons," Rappoport said. "Maybe they don't have time, but the general view is that people basically get bored with that type of thing."

Rapport says this is why horror movies are so popular with teenagers.

"There is a pleasure that kids experience by exploring unconventional boundaries of these movies," Rappoport said. "It's sort of like forbidden territory when horror films come out, and parents or adults say they're not fit for children. It makes them even more attractive."

He says that for some teenagers, watching scary movies is somewhat of a passage into adulthood.

"As people grow up, they have to explore or test their limits to discover what sorts of things make sense to them -- what they enjoy and can tolerate, compared with things that are too extreme and threatening," Rappoport said.

"And so the horror movies have a great appeal that way," he added. "It's a safe, convenient and relatively easy way to try to explore your own feelings of anxiety and your own repressed feelings of hostility or aggression."

According to Rappoport, sociologists argue that in our society, teenagers are physically mature, and yet they're required to conform to a system that insists on keeping them out of the mainstream of society, so they're not allowed to do all sorts of things that adults do until the ages of 18 or 21.

"They no longer have the indulgences that we give children, but they are not allowed to take the freedom that we give adults, so they're in between," Rappoport said. "And in addition to that they are seen as potentially troublesome, with all the anxieties about teenage crime, drugs and sex.

"So teenagers are going to develop a fair amount of tension," he added. "And by vicariously going to see movies in which the high school gets burned down, or a teenager turns into a werewolf or a vampire and eats the principal or something, it releases some of the repressed frustration and tension that's associated with being a teenager nowadays."

Rappoport says there will always be criticism that movies of this type will harm impressionable youth. However, he says the same was said for comic books, video parlors and rock music.

"The general view is that people who re-enact what they see in films probably would get into trouble anyway, because they are right on the edge to begin with," Rappoport said. "In every society at every time there are always people out on the edge who are just not socialized or developed to the point where they are able to manage their rights in a more reasonable way, so you get criminal behavior and the more extreme kinds of actions."

But mostly watching horror and scary movies is just for fun.

"There seems to be this general quality that almost all of us share in enjoying a certain level of threatening stimulation or hazardous stimulation," Rappoport said. "The ability to do something that seems to go beyond the usual range of things."

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For more information, contact Leon Rappoport at 785-532-0616.

October 1997