Halloween is nigh, and along with the parade of adorable elves and fairies knocking on your door come some more disturbing phenomena: scary haunted houses, wild parties and, perhaps most jarringly, a new onslaught of ghastly horror films.
If you’re not a horror movie fan, you may be puzzled about why some people love watching such movies. Behavioral researchers even coined a phrase for it: the “horror paradox.”
“No doubt, there’s something really powerful that brings people to watch these things, because it’s not logical,” says Joanne Cantor, PhD, director of…
