My hubby and I are not the target market for haunted attractions, if I’m being honest. We don’t get startled by jump scares. The first time we visited the Hudson River Valley in NY state, the home of Washington Irving’s famously haunted stories, and attended the best attraction we’ve ever been to, Headless Horseman Hayrides & Haunted Attractions, it was for the atmosphere. Seriously, if you love Halloween attractions, that one is a must-do!
The night typically (at least when we went) begins with about a 20-minuted Hayride through the large farm property. Each year there’s a different theme: the last time we went, it was The Escape of Prisoner X, who’d eluded confinement in his max-security cell in a prison and was rampaging about killing everyone. The effects were phenomenal, and plenty of people on our hayride shrieked regularly.
After that there’s a spooky walk through a creepy corn maze, filled with all manner of scares. The first time we did it (we’ve been twice), a rather nervous mother and two of her children asked if they could tag along with us (her hubby and son were going through the several haunted houses). Around a bend in the darkness we came upon a ragged woman with a large maggot baby cradled in her arms. She was looking for food for her baby, and asked if the kids with us were ours. They thought they were safe until my hubby, with his usual twisted sense of humour, said, “Nope, you can have them!”
We attended Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios a number of years ago, and during the entrance sequence, which is truly like being immersed in a horror movie, when a monster loomed over me and whispered “Boo” in my ear, I laughed delightedly. (One of the coolest things ever, but sadly it was very short and the rest of the event was a disappointment.)
So there you have a sense of our reactions to creepy stuff. These attractions are maybe a little wasted on us, but we enjoy the ambience and the artistry that’s gone into their creation.
Do you enjoy getting scared on purpose?
Recreational fear – seems like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? But every time we choose to watch a scary movie, or read a creepy book, go on a ghost tour or visit a haunted attraction, we get a thrill out of it.
Not everyone does, and that’s fair enough. But we’ve been conditioned to enjoy little bits of fear from childhood. Games like peek-a-boo, or a parent pretending to be a monster that chases their child around, lay the groundwork for handling emotions. That small moment of uncertainty, followed by smiles and laughter, helps children confront the feeling of fear in manageable bites. I don’t recall ever worrying about a monster under my bed or in the closet. And I flat out loved Halloween, which was genuinely eerie in those days. That was the point: the thrill of being out unattended in the darkness. I suppose that’s when my love of nighttime and a certain fear factor took root.
Doesn’t mean I was impervious to fear. I read The Exorcist when it first came out in paperback, and it frankly scared the crap out of me. I had to sleep with the lights on for a week, when I slept at all. That was my introduction to the idea of demons and possession – not just ghosts moaning around, but deeply invasive attacks on a child. My hubby was working as a teenage usher in a theatre when the movie came out, and he later told me that people fainted regularly during showings.
So there’s a need for balance. If we’re too frightened, the experience is awful; if not frightened/creeped out enough, it’s boring. Very much like being ‘in the Zone’, in a state of Flow that keeps you so absorbed you lose track of time. Fear, like Flow, requires a certain amount of Challenge to be successful – well, Fear by Choice, any way.
Psychologically, when we engage with horror in whatever version we appreciate, research shows that even though our brain realizes we’re safe, our amygdala – our brain’s protection sentinel – activates anyway, triggering our sympathetic nervous system to release fight-and-flight hormones. It creates a ‘sweet spot’ of safety vs. thrill that we enjoy. And interestingly, that temporary spike in adrenaline boosts our immune system.
Not only that, but our brain also releases dopamine, our pleasure hormone, when the fearful thing passes.
As we grow up, more than 90% of children enjoy at least one activity that provides a ‘playful’ fright. Fear becomes something social – with a feeling of safety-in-numbers, teenagers watch horror movies together, or visit haunted houses to bond with each other and demonstrate bravery.
And we continue to test ourselves, don’t we? Maybe it’s true-crime stories, or thrill rides, or extreme adventure. The desire to feel safely frightened remains a stable part of our nature.
My hubby and I experienced a Category-5 hurricane on our honeymoon, and a tornado that tore through the valley below our resort in the Caribbean, ripping the tops off palm trees and sucking windows out. Over the years, we’ve gone through many more such events, and rather than frighten us off travelling, we’ve developed equanimity in the face of risk. We’ve become resilient, and have a helpfully strong sense of humour. There are still things we won’t do, though, like bungee-jumping – one must have limits, after all 😉
One of the most remarkable feats of courage I’ve ever seen was a woman getting fitted out to do our zip-lining adventure in Jamaica. She was sobbing passionately, and her kind husband kept saying, “We don’t have to do this. I don’t care about the ticket cost!” But she went through with it, all nine zips down the mountain, and when we finished, she had the biggest smile on her face!
There’s something to be said about facing our fears and conquering them. The confidence and emotional lift are remarkable, and can stand us in good stead when genuinely awful situations come along.
No aspersions on people who don’t enjoy horror movies or novels – we all have different preferences. But it seems that those of us who do have one key personality difference: ‘morbid curiosity’, which is defined as “a natural human drive to seek out and explore information about danger, death, violence, and threatening phenomena” (Psychology Today). It’s believed to be a healthy adaptation to assessing danger, going back to our prehistoric ancestors.
It seems that about half of us actively seek out scares that the other half avoid. Now, which one of these might you be, because we’re classed into three broad categories:
a) Adrenaline Junkies – love the rush, the exhilaration from something scary.
b) The White-Knucklers – enjoy testing their limits and the self-discovery they gain from scary experiences.
c) Dark Copers – use frightening experiences as a way to deal with their real-world anxiety. From what I’ve read, a lot of this went on quite successfully during the COVID lockdowns (e.g. watching horror movies), when we suddenly entered a horror story in real life.
I think I’d put myself in the White-Knuckler group. The roads in Peru are hair-raising, especially the coastal road that’s been excavated into the side of the Andes Mountains as they drop precipitously down to the crashing waters of the Pacific Ocean. The photo below was taken just above our tour bus’s tires – one misjudgement on our driver’s part and we’d have been rolling violently down two thousand feet to a bloody death on the rocks. I couldn’t look when I was taking the photo – just stuck the camera out the window and pushed the button. The sense of relief when we finally reached the town of Camana, on a small plain, was intense. And yet, a few years later, we were zig-zagging through the storm- and wind-blown mountains of South Island, New Zealand, in a tiny prop plane to get to Milford Sound. (I vomited three times.)
Scientists, who’ve been studying our fear reactions by attaching gizmos to people visiting haunted attractions to measure their bodies’ physiological responses, feel that deliberately courting fear is about balance. When the fear factor is approached by choice, it’s a learning opportunity and a study in mustering up our courage.
We may all differ in how much fear we find fun, but to those of us who relish it through variations in horror, whether it’s a “cozy horror” novel read by the fire with a cup of tea, or a full-on slasher movie that makes us put our hands over our eyes, we’re free to indulge, especially in this most scary of seasons!
My new horror novel, The Summer Door, is currently available in soft-cover on Amazon. 😉
