The Economy of Fear: Why We Love Being Scared

Halloween is a bizarre time of the year. This is when we dress up in scary outfits and really lean into the macabre – from the camp and silly to the downright terrifying. Halloween has become a huge event in recent years, and largely driven by how much of a key calendar date it is in the US – as a result pumpkin picking, haunted houses and trick or treating have gone into overdrive around the world. But Halloween hype begs the question – why do we like being scared?

The origins of Halloween

Halloween is nothing new and stems from a 2000 year old Celtic festival called Samhain, meaning ‘Summers End’. The belief then was, as summer gave way to winter, this was the time of the year when the spirit world blurred with the real world. The Celts would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off spirits.

Today Halloween is much more fun and innocent. You get a knock on the door and a chaperoned group of children – dressed as Iron Man, Princess Elsa and a non-copyrighted vampire – will gleefully cry out ‘trick or treat.’ Nice, harmless fun. But for the Celts 2000 years ago, this festival would have been a very serious time – back then, these people didn’t know better and they would actually be terrified of the dark spirits they felt lurked in the shadows.

So how did we get from that, to today?

The Halloween economy

Unsurprisingly, money has driven the phenomenon and Halloween is big business – often giving retailers something to generate activity around between the summer holidays and the festive season. People spend money on sweets, decorations, costumes and pumpkins soar in price for a few weeks of the year. This isn’t just about the campy fun of Halloween. For some very bizarre reason, deep within our psychology, we love being scared.

This is why horror movies are often the best performing genre at the box office – with the likes of Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Exorcist, Scream, Saw, Hostel, Hereditary, and The Shining all being cultural phenomenon. When we sit down to watch these kinds of films we know it’s all fictional. The killers are actors, the monsters are CGI, the blood is simply red food dye. And yet we throw ourselves into the theatrics and seek the fights and the thrills. The same could be said for haunted houses or interactive experiences which have become increasingly popular, taking the horror movie experience and enhance it even more with costume-clad actors jumping out and chasing visitors.

The fear creates adrenaline, which spikes in times of danger. The adrenaline essentially puts human beings on edge, dulls pain and gives us that super speed we need to flee to safety. Thousands of years ago, adrenaline would help save cavepeople from sabretooth tigers. Now, we don’t have the real life danger of those times, so we manufacture it.

This extends even to things like rollercoasters. These rides have never been safer, and are engineered to provide thrilling and terrifying experiences but with no danger. When you reach the top of a roller coaster ride you know the safety harness will keep you safe and the odds of an accident or injury are one in a billion. And yet when your body tips over the edge and you hurtle down and twist every way at 100mph you feel real adrenaline. You want to be scared – a slow roller coaster defies the point.

A safe world

We crave fear and adrenaline because, to put it simply, life has never been safer.

We’re fortunate enough to live in a time of peace. Violent crimes are at record lows. Cars and other forms of transport have never been safer. Medicine has advanced to eradicate many household diseases. While there are still a lot of problems in the world, to put it lightly, on a historical basis these are very safe times to live in. Day to day we rarely encounter danger or anything that spikes our adrenaline. Case in point, the first few weeks of the pandemic were widely regarded as a time of fear – queues around the corner of supermarkets, panic buying, people hiding in their houses. Then soon after this abated and then the pandemic became boring. It wasn’t a 28 Day Later scenario, and the regular lockdown press conferences were the most terrifying thing for some.

These are safe times indeed. Which means we seek thrills as adrenaline, at a primal level, makes us feel alive. No one wants slashing maniacs like Freddy Kreuger or Ghostface to run around the streets in real life, but at a psychological level we want to dip into that feeling. This is not a uniform phenomenon and a lot of people will hate horror movies, and shun experiences geared around instilling real terror, but enough of us feel this way that it’s created a real economy of fear. We only need to look to children to see this. Every Halloween, millions of kids dress up as scary monsters but they do so for the fun of it. Does an eight year old really understand the horror of a zombie or vampire? Instead, they see the fun in being scared.

However you like to be scared, or play in the fun of fear, we at Cardaq wish you a happy Halloween!