Interest in fear-inducing or potentially dangerous things is called morbid curiosity.
“That could be things that are fictionally dangerous, that kind of tap into our minds a little bit, or things that are actually dangerous, like the things we read on the news or hear about from others,” explained behavioral scientist Dr. Coltan Scrivner.
Interestingly enough, he says that most people have a pretty moderate amount of morbid curiosity.
Dr. Scrivner even came up with his own Morbid Curiosity Scale and test to evaluate how many people are morbidly curious, which you can also take here, if you’re curious!
During it, he presents his respondents with statements like, ‘If a head transplant was possible, I would want to watch the procedure’ and ‘I am curious how a Ouija board works’ and asks them to rank them from ‘strongly disagree’ to ‘strongly agree.’
From this test and his research, he was able to find out that most people are morbidly curious. “Some people have a lot and some people have a little bit, and this has been true not just in the U.S. but in other countries as well, including Canada, Brazil, Denmark, and several other countries that have taken this test.”
After completing the test itself, I found out that the overall morbid curiosity score is 4.42, and since the maximum on the scale is 6, we can say that people are pretty morbidly curious.
But, hey! It’s nothing to be worried about. “I think morbid curiosity is sometimes talked about as if it’s this fringe trait or a fringe thing that only some people have. But in all the research I’ve done, if you give people, for example, the Morbid Curiosity Scale, you find that morbid curiosity is pretty normally distributed, meaning that most people have a pretty moderate amount of morbid curiosity,” said Dr. Scrivner.
Through his research, he also found out that only a small part of horror fandom seeks out scary experiences because they get an adrenaline or dopamine rush. Most do it because they feel like they can learn something from it.
“A lot of people feel as if they learned something about themselves and sort of develop as a person through these experiences. And so you hear about this in real tragedies a lot, this kind of post-traumatic growth or ‘I’m glad I went through this so that, because I learned something and I grew as a person,’ Dr. Scrivner explained.
To find out more about why people like morbid, creepy, and scary things, Bored Panda reached out to Sadie Hartmann, horror lover, author, and co-owner of Night Worms.
She tells us that what draws her to horror is the fact that it helps her manage her anxieties.
"I am an anxious person who manages a lot of fears and phobias, so reading horror is a way I get to live adventurously without too much risk involved. I might have a nightmare or feel like I need to lock all my windows and doors, but for the most part, reading horror allows me to engage with real-life fears in a healthy and safe way."
Sadie also shares that her favorite kind of scary stories to consume are about people who have gone missing in national parks.
"Many of these people have never been found, and their cases have gone cold or unsolved for decades.
Sometimes the ones who have been found have no memory of what happened or have something odd about them, like they aren't wearing shoes but their feet are relatively clean, or they are way too many miles away from their last known location. It's just a very unsettling topic with a lot of information that completely freaks me out."
