What is it about horror stories that attracts people.

[Steven Clark Bradley]

Is it that people like to be afraid? Horror is one of the best selling genre on the market today. Do you have any insite into this phenomenon of why being scared to death is so popular?

[Ron Adams]

Wow, what a great discussion topic. My thoughts are along two lines. First, people have a need for a primal release of emotion, be it a good laugh, a good cry, or a good scream. Horror works because once that primal scream is released, it is almost like an internal reset button. We have the hero approaching the closed door, slowly reaching for what we as readers/viewers know is certain doom. We scream as the door opens, fearing the 50 foot blood thirsty monster we just knoe is behind the door. When the monster is revealed, and it's only 10 foot tall, we sigh in relief, grateful that it isn't as bad as ourimagination told us it would be. Our reset button has been set, and we can deal with things again.

Second, and maybe this one is only me, but I think that well written horror allows us to live, however briefly and vicariously, through the villian. Well written, the villian does what many of us with well placed psychological controls would long to do to those that, well, just piss us off. I mean, really wouldn't you love to just one time take the cellphone from the idiot in the movie theatre and literally ram it in thier ear? Or maybe, like I said, it's just me.

I'm looking forward to reading what others have to say. And by all means, please keep your phone off in the movies. You never know.

Ron Adams

[Ron Kruger]

Great question, Stephen.
I've given this subject a lot of thought, from a religious and spiritual point of view. In fact, in my book, A Higher Good, I have a whole chapter titled The Fear Factor. Here's just a couple of paragraph from it:
"...Had I not died and known a total absence of fear, I would not have realized how vastly this emotion infects and influences every part of our existence. All the problems of living and societies take root in some type of fear. It is the reason for all drug abuse. It is the fuel of anger and violence. It is the seed and the fodder of most illnesses. It infects our ability to love and our definition of love. It soils our good deeds. It is the underlying motive of our misguided survival instincts. It is the primary tool of the ego’s dominance over our lives. Fear is the fertile soil of all evil. There is no Devil, only the emotional evils that grow from our egocentric fears. Fear (evil) is simply the absence of love (God)..."
"...But most of our fears are unrealized and/or denied. They plague us like demons lurking in the shadows and infect our psyche. It is these vague and unidentifiable fears that cause us to project fearsome qualities into the unforeseeable future and into suppositions of the supernatural..."
This is why fear-based religions are so popular, and it is why I believe they are a part of the human problem, not the solution.

You may think this is beyond the question, but good horror fiction taps into the realized, and especially the unrealized, fears of readers.
Ron Adams provided some interesting a plausible points. I would ad that I think the fascination with horror movies or books has a lot to do with our unrealized or denied fears. It is a way to delve into this mysterious realm of our psyche in a safe, voyeuristic way.

[Steven Clark Bradley]

Yes, i think this is all true. I know that the fear of loss of a lover, the pain of sickness the hurt of being abandonned can drive people to imagine what they woould do if no one, including God could see them do it. The exression of such feelings on printed page or the tube give us a release of such feelings. My first novel, Probable cause was my therapy really after suffering a great loss in my life at the hands of a very good friend. I wrote in fiction what I wanted to do to him factually but never would, mostly cause god had his eyes on me even if people would not know. After writing it and publishing it, i was able to forgive all those who had hurt me so much! It is true, and fear drives us to do the bad until we face it and move on. All this is so true.! Thanks, you are both great writers!
Steven

[Jeffrey J. Mariotte]

Sadly (since most of my novels are horror novels), Horror is NOT one of the best selling genres in the market today, but one of the worst. There are a small handful of exceptions-_Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, etc., but for the most part the horror genre is suffering through a sales recession, if not depression.

I think both Ron and...um, Ron...made good points. Especially Ron. Horror lets us look at ideas and feelings and experiences that are taboo to us in real life, and that we wouldn't even want to face in real life, and to do it through the pages of a book so that when the fear gets too intense we can close the covers and walk away from it for a while. It lets us explore aspects of life and death, levels of pain and fear and disgust that would be too painful to get close to otherwise. It's also usually a conservative genre--not politically, but philosophically--since it presents us with the "monster" (whether human or supernatural) who is "the other," and the goal of most of the characters is to defeat the other in order to restore the status quo, or something like it. No matter how bad or how boring our lives are, when we live through a good horror story, we know things could be worse...and we're glad they're not.

Jeff

[Steven Clark Bradley]

I think you have a lot to say about writing and is interesting. I do think you are right that when people read or watch the horror genre, after they are scared and lived through it, they feel much is better in the real world. I also think human are anchored here, but our souls seek the unknown or inexplicable. It is a natural phenomenon inside us to seek to look into that which is controversial, accepted by faith and potentially threatening. It is what makes us different in that we seek the unknown.

[Ron Kruger]

Profound and brilliant, Stephen. In separate parts of my book, I examine man's fascination with horror stories and his innate sense of something beyond our sensory perceptions, but I didn't connect the two. The highest compliment I can pay someone is: I wish I would have said that.

[Padma Narayanswamy]

As you say the more gory or violent the movies are they are becoming a hit
probably I guess about the inherent trait in any living to fight for his food .
Now that we need not fight for food . Though we are civilised and feel that
violence is not good but subconsciously that trait xists and hence the love for violence
Howver I love romance
padma