How Horror Keeps Trauma at Bay

Getting the creeps can prevent concept creep

It’s been one of those days, the kind that tests your patience in small, unremarkable ways. You stayed late at work, got stuck in traffic, and then blew a tire on the highway. By the time you make it home, it’s too late to cook, so you eat leftovers from two nights ago and collapse onto the couch.

You’ve got maybe two hours before bed. As you scroll through your options you land, inexplicably, on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

As you watch Leatherface chase terrified strangers through rural Texas, you take another bite of cold pasta, and the frustration in your chest loosens. You think to yourself, “I guess my day could have been worse.”

An experience like this might reasonably be interpreted as schadenfreude — taking pleasure in another person’s misfortune. However, something more interesting might be going on. Rather than leading you to feel joy at another’s misfortune, horror could be reality-checking the seriousness of life’s little difficulties. In fact, getting the creeps could help prevent trauma concept creep.

Concept Creep

Concept creep refers to the expansion of what counts as a particular thing. In an elegantly simple study published in Science, researchers demonstrated how frequency alone can influence what category we assign something to. They showed people a series of 1000 dots ranging from very purple to very blue and asked for each dot, “is this dot blue?” After 200 trials, they surreptitiously reduced the frequency of blue dots for the experimental group and asked the same question.