Horror film viewership has been studied by psychologists interested in why people voluntarily subject themselves to fear experiences. The research consistently finds that horror film fans report lower anxiety levels and show greater resilience when exposed to real stressors. The mechanism appears to be practice: controlled fear exposure in a safe context trains the nervous system's fear response.
The sensation-seeking personality type that gravitates toward horror films also correlates with higher empathy scores in some studies — horror requires imagining what it would feel like to be in the protagonist's situation, which is an exercise in perspective-taking.
The best horror films function as allegories for real anxieties. Get Out (2017) is explicitly about the horror of racism experienced by Black Americans in ostensibly welcoming white spaces. Hereditary (2018) is about grief and the ways family trauma transmits across generations. The Witch (2015) is about religious extremism and the particular experience of adolescent girlhood in a rigidly controlled environment.
Elevated horror — a term coined to describe prestige horror that takes its genre seriously — has produced the most interesting films of the last decade. Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, Mike Flanagan, and Jordan Peele are the central directors working in this mode.
For viewers new to horror: start with psychological horror rather than slasher or gore horror. Films like The Others, The Sixth Sense, and Midsommar deliver dread without relying on shock content. Once you've calibrated to sustained tension, the transition to more visceral horror becomes easier to manage.