In You Like It Darker, Stephen King writes:

“Horror stories are best appreciated by those who are compassionate and empathetic. A paradox, but a true one.”

At first glance, it sounds ridiculous. After all, horror fans voluntarily spend their evenings watching masked killers, demons, vampires, possessed children and all manner of unspeakable monsters terrorise innocent people. Surely, if anyone lacked empathy, it would be us. But the longer I’ve spent among horror fans, the more convinced I’ve become that King was right.

When I started joining Facebook groups dedicated to horror films, I noticed something unexpected. For the most part, horror fans were just… nice.

Of course, every fandom has its loud minority. There are always people who proudly declare that “nothing scares me anymore” or dismiss every new horror film as “garbage”. They seem less interested in praising horror for what it is than in proving they’ve become immune to it. Fortunately, they’re the exception.

The overwhelming majority of horror fans I’ve met are passionate, enthusiastic and respectful. They’ll happily defend their love of the The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, they’ll know everything there is to know about The Thing, and give plenty of recommendations whenever someone asks for the ‘hidden gems’ of the horror genre.

It made me wonder whether Stephen King was onto something. As it turns out, psychology suggests he might be.

Courtney Getzlaff’s article Psychology Behind Horror Movie Enjoyment (Courtney Getzlaff. “Psychology Behind Horror Movie Enjoyment” (2024). Psychology Student Publications. 52. https://commons.und.edu/psych-stu/52) summarises research suggesting horror fans generally fall into three broad categories:

  • Adrenaline junkies, typically young male fans, who simply love the rush of suspense and fear.
  • White knucklers, typically female fans, who experience horror more intensely but gain confidence by confronting fear in a safe environment. Horror becomes practice for dealing with stress in everyday life.
  • Dark copers, who often report higher levels of anxiety but find horror therapeutic because seeing the horror on the screen makes it seem like their own life is okay.

(For more details on these three categories, see: Scrivner, C, et al. (2023). The psychological benefits of scary play in three types of horror fans. Journal of Media Psychology, 35(2), 87–98. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000354)

Most of us probably aren’t just one of these. We enjoy the adrenaline, appreciate the emotional challenge and occasionally find comfort in remembering that, whatever problems we’re facing, at least we’re not trapped overnight in the Overlook Hotel or being hunted through the woods by Jason Voorhees.

Even more interesting is another study with the wonderfully appropriate title Bleeding-heart Horror Fans (Scrivner, C. (2024). Bleeding-heart horror fans: Enjoyment of horror media is not related to reduced empathy or compassion. Journal of Media Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000405). The researchers found no evidence that horror fans are less compassionate or empathetic than anyone else. In fact, horror fans consistently rated other horror fans as kinder, more compassionate and more empathetic than participants whose favourite genre wasn’t horror. (See also: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/strange-journeys/202403/why-its-healthy-to-like-horror).

Perhaps we’re biased. Or perhaps we simply recognise something in one another that we know to be within ourselves. Horror only works if we care.

The monster isn’t the emotional centre of the story. The final girl is.

When Nancy Thompson realises Freddy Krueger can follow her into reality, we desperately want her to survive. When Sidney Prescott refuses to become Ghostface’s latest victim, we’re behind her every step of the way. When Sally Hardesty escapes Leatherface in the back of that pickup truck, exhausted and hysterically laughing through her terror, it feels like we’ve escaped with her. More recently, we cheer as Erin in You’re Next, Grace in Ready or Not and Sienna Shaw in the Terrifier films stop running and start fighting back.

We don’t experience relief because the monster loses. We experience relief because someone we care about survives.

People sometimes describe the archetype as bland, but I think that’s missing the point. The greatest final girls aren’t superheroes. They’re recognisably ordinary people placed in extraordinary situations. Laurie Strode is a babysitter. Sidney Prescott is a teenager trying to finish school while processing unimaginable trauma. Erin survives You’re Next not because she’s chosen by fate but because of skills she never expected to need.

They’re ordinary enough that we can imagine ourselves in their place. We’re not just watching someone else’s nightmare. We’re imagining how we’d survive it ourselves.

However, while we emotionally invest in the protagonists, the enduring icons of horror are almost always the villains. They’re the faces on the posters, the T-shirts and the Halloween costumes. They’re the characters who return film after film while the heroes often change.

But without Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, Sidney Prescott, Sally Hardesty or Sienna Shaw standing against them, they’re just monsters wandering around empty sets.

Horror has always been a battle between good and evil. We want evil to feel overwhelming. We want Michael Myers to keep getting back up. We want Freddy to seem impossible to defeat. We want the Xenomorph to be smarter, faster and stronger than any human could ever hope to be. Because the more impossible the odds become, the more meaningful survival feels.

Horror doesn’t celebrate cruelty. It asks us to confront it. Every jump scare, every impossible monster and every relentless killer only succeeds because we instinctively stand beside the person trying to survive. We flinch when they flinch. We panic when they panic. Their relief becomes our relief because, for ninety minutes, we’ve become emotionally invested in their fight.

Whether we’re adrenaline junkies, white knucklers or dark copers (or, I suspect, we are a mixture of all three) horror asks us to care.

And perhaps that’s why horror fans are often such compassionate people. Beneath all the blood, monsters and mayhem is a community of people who willingly spend their free time empathising with strangers in impossible situations, hoping against hope that this time, somehow, the final girl will make it out alive.

I don’t think Stephen King was describing a paradox; he was simply describing horror fans.