Fear should send us running. Yet millions of people willingly buy tickets, press “play,” and lean forward in the dark just to jump back in fright. Horror movies have been box-office mainstays for over a century. The question isn’t just why horror exists—it’s why we seek it out.
Psychologists describe horror’s appeal as “benign masochism”—a term coined by Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania to describe experiences that mimic real danger without actual threat. The heart races, adrenaline surges, but we know we’re safe. It’s the emotional equivalent of a roller coaster: fear without consequence, dread with a seatbelt. In MRI studies, researchers have observed that the amygdala (which processes fear) activates during scary movies—but so do the reward centers of the brain once the scare passes. We’re designed to feel good about escaping a predator so we’re encouraged to do it again next time – which is also why we keep combing back to horror movies again and again.
Economically, horror is one of the most cost-effective genres in film with typically low budgets combined with the opportunity for big returns. Paranormal Activity (2007) cost about $15,000 and grossed over $190 million worldwide. Get Out (2017) earned an Oscar and nearly $255 million on a $4.5 million budget. The formula works because horror doesn’t depend on stars or spectacle—it depends on emotion, and fear is universal. When a horror film connects, it travels across languages and cultures effortlessly: a scream sounds the same everywhere.
While “Eek!” is universal, so is “Eww!”. Being scared is not the same as being grossed out. In the earliest decades of film, violence was suggested more than shown. Cinema inherited the morals of the stage, the constraints of early censorship, and the unspoken promise that if you went to be frightened you wouldn’t be confronted with the full anatomy of pain. But by the 1960s and ’70s a new wave was stirring: directors willing to show not just terror, but dismemberment; not just presence of death, but the process of it and the “splatter film” — a sub-genre that deliberately focuses on graphic portrayals of gore — was born. This has since led to “gorn” (“gore” + “porn”), where gore and blood are not used to frighten or upset, but to excite and thrill. An early and infamous example being, Cannibal Holocaust (1980), a found-footage film that was so realistic that its directed, Ruggero Deodato, was arrested and charged with murder.[1] More recently, we’ve seen the rise of “torture porn” in films like Hostel, Saw, The Devil’s Rejects, and Wolf Creek.
Personally, I like horror films (I got my start with black-and-white Universal monster movies on late night television), but I do not like all that graphic violence and gore, so I have to be selective when I want to get my “Eek!” on. For those of you who also like a good scare but want to keep your popcorn down, we’ve assembled a list of the 50 best horror films with the least amount of gore.[2] Alfred Hitchcock once observed that, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”[3] These films will scare, but won’t disgust. I’m not saying they’re family-friendly viewing (there is blood and violence, so parental guidance is definitely advised), but they are worth a look.
[1] Deodato wanted to experiment with the Kuleshov effect, named for Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov who demonstrated that editing added meaning to film: viewers derive more meaning from the interaction of two sequential shots than from a single shot in isolation. So, in Cannibal Holocaust he juxtaposed shots of killing real animals with staged shots of killing and eating people in the hopes that it would make the simulated violence more gruesome. He was right and the film ended up being banned in around 40 countries.
[2] One of my favorite horror films, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), did not make the list because it does have some rather graphic scenes. I would argue that they’re not gratuitous, so I still recommend it.
[3] Directors Alfred Hitchcock, Roman Polanski, and James Whale have two films each on this list. Hitchcock does not appear more often because, which he has a reputation as a horror director, most of his movies were actually suspense.