Are Horror Fans Psychopaths?

The answer is more complicated than you might think

Every few months I see a post on social media that says something to the effect of, “SCIENTISTS SAY 41% OF HORROR FANS ARE PSYCHOPATHS!”

The “science of horror” world is pretty small, so I’m usually up-to-date on what studies say. I don’t know of any studies looking at psychopathic traits and how well people sleep after horror films, nor any empirical studies about Art The Clown.

However, there are a few studies that present data on psychopathic traits and horror movies.

Horror fans do score higher in measures of psychopathic traits

One of the first findings I came across when I began researching the psychology of horror fans was that they do score higher in some psychopathic traits. I found this in my first paper on morbid curiosity where I developed the Morbid Curiosity Scale.

In Study 2 of that paper, I tested what is called convergent and discriminant validity. Essentially, I wanted to know which traits correlated positively and negatively with morbid curiosity, and which were unrelated to it. This means my study participants took a battery of psychological tests that measured all sorts of personality traits and individual differences, including subclinical psychopathy, which was assessed using the revised version of the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI), and horror fandom.

The topic of that study was morbid curiosity, so you won’t find the horror media consumption/psychopathic trait correlation in the main text. But the raw data is available in the OSF repository. When you run the analysis and look at the correlations with frequency of horror media consumption, you’ll find strong positive correlations with most factors of the PPI. In fact, psychopathy is the second strongest correlate of horror media use, coming in just under morbid curiosity.

There are some interesting exceptions here, where factors of subclinical psychopathy are negatively correlated with horror use, including coldheartedness (PPI_COLD) and stress immunity (PPI_STRESS). But, as you can see, horror fans in this sample scored much higher in overall psychopathy (PPI_TOTAL) as well as many of the sub-factors.

Many of the findings in other studies are similarly mixed. For example, in a study looking at psychopathic traits and entertainment preferences, Bowes et al., (2019) found that those who prefer horror and thriller did score somewhat higher in the higher order factor of fearless dominance (FD) in the PPI. However, preference for horror and thrillers was unrelated to Self-Centered Impulsivity (SCI) and Coldheartedness (C), as well as Factor 1 and Factor 2 of the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (LSRP).

Another 2019 study also found a small positive correlation between horror media preferences and psychopathy. But here again, the correlation only existed for Boldness in the TRIP-M measure of psychopathy. Preference for horror was unrelated to Meanness and Disinhibition.

These findings echo my own: horror fans do score higher in some psychopathy measures, but not in the factors dealing with meanness/coldheartedness — those most associated with the antisocial, unempathetic aspects of psychopathy.

I suspect the media takeaway from studies like this are, “people who enjoy horror are more likely to be psychopaths!” However, that’s really not at all what these data are saying. The real picture is much more complex.

But psychopathy probably isn’t what we think it is

In fact, the complicated nature of these findings is one of the things that led me to conduct my own study on empathy and horror fandom, in which I found that horror fans have just as much empathy as people who don’t like horror. In fact, they score a bit higher in some measures of cognitive empathy and a bit lower in coldheartedness than the average person.

Of course, finding that horror fans are both high in psychopathy and average-to-high in empathy made things even more confusing. Aren’t psychopaths supposed to lack empathy?

Maybe not. Maybe we have psychopathy all wrong. Psychopathy may be less about exploitation and coldheartedness globally, and more about a threat-activated shift in cognition.

This is a new idea I’m exploring, so I don’t want to give away too much here. But, I think this view of psychopathy nicely explains why the data on psychopathy is so messy that the construct is no longer useful in its current form. It also explains how otherwise normal people can be capable of extreme acts of evil, yet maintain empathy for their friends and loved ones. And it may explain why horror fans score high in psychopathy, but aren’t really psychopaths.