I’ve never watched a horror movie before.
Well, okay, I’ve watched one once. It was on a bus during a school trip. My friends later informed me that the small iPhone screen, noisy bus, and the sun shining through the windows definitely took away from how scary the movie was, and that I really ought to go to a theater for my next one.
I smiled and agreed, then turned around and promised myself that there was no way in hell I was putting myself through that sort of thing again. Because, tiny iPhone screen or not, that film was WAY TOO TERRIFYING TO BE ALLOWED. I would never, ever watch another horror movie.
Until now.
Haha, sike.
Actually, I was planning to break the streak for this article, but I got about five minutes past the opening credits of Insidious and knew I’d made a mistake.
I’m not a wimp or anything. I just value my sanity. Greatly.
But it did make me curious. What is it about horror movies that so fascinates people? The genre has expanded exponentially in the last few years. It’s taking over films, television and virtual reality games, infecting innovations that were perfectly good without that sadistic nonsense, thank you very much.
So I went to the one place you can always go to satiate hypochondriac fancies, and WebMD did not disappoint. There were scores of articles listed about horror, and articles linked to other articles, and even more branching off those. Evidently I was not the first to question the weird, feral sort of creatures that frequent theaters for horror movie showings.
Researchers think the horror-movie craze is a hormone thing. And a social thing. Apparently, it harkens back to when cavemen held initiation ceremonies and got themselves all hurt and bothered to prove their worth. After doing the caveman-equivalent of trying not to cry while watching Insidious (I SAID I’M NOT A WIMP), the brain gets high off the “I survived!” feeling.
It sounds a bit to me like I wouldn’t have enjoyed caveman rituals much and probably would’ve been kicked out of the cave and left to die. So from what I understand, our modern brains are wired to perform some bizarre type of horror-movie culling, or a sort of natural selection. Although I do wonder how we’d scale our accomplishments now to compare to cavemen ones. Maybe watching The Shining in the dead of night would be equivalent to a successful hunt. And marathoning the Paranormal Activity series would be like, I don’t know, punching a bear.
I wonder what listening to Iggy Azalea would get you in caveman days.
So in other words, it turns out that I am, in fact, a wimp, and evidently, by the standards of evolution and our ancestors, a detriment to humanity.
But more importantly, you’re all morbid masochists.
So I win.
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