Why do we enjoy the terrors of haunted houses and scary movies?
Aarav Singh disappeared into the "claustrophobia tunnel," clinging tightly to his daddy's shirt.
At the other end, the 8-year-old emerged from a maze of snarling werewolves, dangling mummies, strobe lights and vacant-eyed zombies, one of whom endlessly repeated, "Where is my patient?"
Aarav's father, Rajeev Singh, asked the boy if he was OK. He shook his head, his eyes welling with tears.
Aarav doesn't like haunted houses. But plenty of others do, judging by the hundreds of kids and adults who showed up at Scream Scene Haunted House in Skokie on a recent night, shrieking with delight as they were eventually chased out of the maze by a man wielding a growling (fake) chainsaw.
But why do they like them?
"I'm trying to think why. I still can't answer the question," said Juliana Lyles of Libertyville, waiting with her son Link, 10, to go inside the spooky house.
Odder still perhaps because Lyles is a hospice veterinarian where, as she put it, “It’s nothing but death and end of life all over the place."
Prof. Richard Zinbarg, director of clinical psychology at Northwestern University, seeks wisdom on the subject from the ancients.
"Aristotle considered courage and bravery to be a virtue. So it's something that feels good to us when we act in a courageous or brave manner," Zinbarg said.
That applies even when we understand that the fearful experience can't really harm us.
"We know that there are going to be special effects that are going to have the effect of provoking fear in us, and yet we move toward it anyway — for those who like that kind of thing," Zinbarg said.
About 10 years ago, Zinbarg had a patient with obsessive thoughts about killing himself. He didn't actually want to kill himself, but he was worried he might if he listened to music or read books with a suicide connection. He wouldn't listen to, for example, Nirvana because lead singer Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994. Zinbarg said it was important for the patient to confront his fears and listen to the music.
"Unfortunately, his mother got involved and it scared the bejesus out of her and so she pulled him out of treatment," Zinbarg said.
Spencer Parsons, an independent filmmaker and associate professor at Northwestern's Department of Radio/Television/Film, mentions the Greeks too — and the catharsis of confronting tragedy.
"The action in a lot of those tragedies is like horror films," Parsons said. "You get a bunch of bodies on the stage by the end."
Parsons cited a more recent example of the cathartic effect of horror.
"'The Exorcist' was really popular in the early 1970s because of the counterculture. People were frightened by the notion of children who they thought were out of control, especially adolescents ... ," Parsons said. "Your nice child is suddenly going though a lot of physical changes, growing very quickly and becoming gangly and getting pimples — also starting to swear and wants to have sex."
In "The Exorcist," the viewer may enjoy the horror, but we are still rooting for the good guys, Parsons said.
"What makes it so effective [is that] we really can identify with the group of characters who are trying to help. Ultimately, they are trying to help this young girl," Parsons said.
Does Parsons foresee a time when we might all become entirely numb to horror?
"There are fears we can reduce in the world and even fears that can go away and become gated," he said. "The thing is, fear is a very basic human emotion. The universe is much bigger than us. It will always give us things to be frightened of."
Mathias Clasen, an associate professor of literature and media at Aarhus University in Denmark and co-director of the Recreational Fear Lab, has made a career of studying things that scare us.
A 2020 survey of about 300 people in the United States found that fans of horror and the "morbidly curious" tended to be more psychologically resilient to the COVID-19 lockdown than those who didn't have such interests.
For example, people who enjoyed disaster, apocalyptic and alien-invasion movies "felt better prepared for the pandemic, even though it had no zombies," Clasen said.
Clasen said his lab's research strongly suggests that children can also benefit from exposure to fear. One study he and his team conducted involved a survey of 1,600 Danish parents.
“We found that 93 percent of Danish children aged 1 to 17 find enjoyment in something that scares them. That suggests that it’s really widespread, even among very small kids, to find pleasure in playing with fear," Clasen said.
Clasen said that society is doing kids a "disservice by shielding them from any kind of mental discomfort."
“We are not letting kids play with fear as much as we ought to," he said. “Playgrounds have been sanitized and made safe but also boring.”
Back in Skokie, Lyles and her son Link came racing out of the haunted house, the man with the chainsaw on their heels. She'd had time to think, she said, about why humans enjoy being scared to death. It's an "adrenaline rush," she said.
Then she added: “The nice part is that we are so privileged that we don’t get scares like that in our daily life. And so we pay for it ... . It’s so bizarre."
As for little Aarav, he was just glad to be out of the maze. He was also too shy — or perhaps too frightened — to talk about the experience.
“Probably a little scary for him and a new experience," his father said, his son still clinging to his side. “He generally never cries. He’s a brave boy.”