This episode is haunted and spooky

Summary

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Unexplainable – "This episode is haunted and spooky"

Airdate: October 27, 2025
Host: Bert Pinkerton (Vox)
Guests: Matthias Claassen (English Department, Aarhus University), Mark Anderson (Cognitive Science, Aarhus University)

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Overview

This episode of Unexplainable delves into the scientific mystery of why people are drawn to recreational fear—why we voluntarily seek out terrifying experiences like horror movies, haunted houses, and rollercoasters. Host Bert Pinkerton speaks with Matthias Claassen and Mark Anderson, co-directors of the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, who study the paradox of why humans sometimes delight in being scared out of their wits. The conversation blends playful banter with cutting-edge psychological and cognitive science, examining what happens in our brains and bodies when we scare ourselves for fun, what purpose it might serve, and if horror experiences can actually help us navigate real-world fears.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Paradox of Liking What We Don't Like

• Opening question: Why do some people pay to be terrified?
• Evolutionary contradiction: Fleeing fear makes sense for survival, yet we sometimes run toward frightening experiences.
  • “Why is it that we like stuff that we don't like?” — Mark Anderson [02:45]
• Personal experience: Matthias loves horror, but also gets spooked; Mark doesn’t love horror but is scientifically intrigued.

2. The Origins of the Recreational Fear Lab

• Interdisciplinary collaboration:

  • Matthias (literature/horror expert) + Mark (experiment/stats expert) make for a uniquely equipped team.
  • “Mark is really good at designing experiments and doing statistical analysis. And I like Stephen King novels.” — Matthias Claassen [03:33]

• Recreational Fear:

  • Defines the spectrum: peekaboo, scary movies, haunted houses, tourism, roller coasters.
  • Despite being everywhere, this phenomenon is surprisingly understudied.

3. Studying Fear at the Haunted House

• Dystopia Haunted House: The team conducts studies in an abandoned fish factory turned haunted maze.
  • “Guests buy a ticket… they’re chased by pig men with chainsaws and killer clowns and zombies.” — Matthias Claassen [05:08]
  • Hostile-to-science environment: “Trying to mount a surveillance camera and then some clown, a literal clown actor, will come and throw fake blood on us.” — Matthias Claassen [06:52]
• Scientific value: The immersive scary setting lets them observe real fear in action, which would be unethical to create in a lab setting.

4. Finding the 'Goldilocks Zone' of Fear and Fun

• Study methodology: Pre- and post-experience surveys, heart rate monitors, video-taped reactions.

• Core finding: The relationship between fear and fun forms an upside-down U:

  • Too little fear = boring
  • Too much fear = unpleasant
  • Just the right amount = most fun
  • “There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.” — Mark Anderson [08:08]

• Physiology matches psychology:

  • Enjoyment peaks with moderate deviation from normal heart rate—not too mild, not panic-level.
  • “We seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.” — Mark Anderson [08:46]

5. Why Seek Fear? Play, Learning, and Coping

• Hypothesis: Fear as Play

  • Experiencing fear in controlled, playful environments might help people learn how their bodies react, and how to handle fear.
  • Parallel to curiosity: People are most curious about things that are unpredictable but not overwhelming.
    • “Maybe when people seek out a little fun fear, they're actually trying to learn through play...” — Bert Pinkerton [13:36]
  • “Recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way, you could say.” — Mark Anderson [14:11]

• Suppression & Desensitization

  • The brain suppresses stimuli it can predict, so repeated scare experiences diminish in intensity—this may be training.

6. The Real World: Pandemic as a Case Study

• Horror surge during COVID-19: Box office for horror films soared as the pandemic began.

  • “People became really, really interested in watching horror movies all of a sudden.” — Mark Anderson [15:06]

• Research study: Surveyed participants about horror movie habits and psychological distress during the pandemic lockdown.

  • People who watched more horror (and “prepper” movies) reported feeling less distress and more “prepared.”
  • “They had lived through similar scenarios in their imagination hundreds of times. So for them, you know, it wasn't just science fiction in an abstract sense.” — Matthias Claassen [16:28]

• Self-selection caution: The effect may be correlational. Perhaps people who seek horror are less prone to stress, rather than horror making them resilient.

  • “We can't say based on this study that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic.” — Matthias Claassen [17:20]

7. Therapeutic Possibilities: Fighting Fear with Fear

• Future plans:
  • Test if 'recreational fear therapy' (rollercoasters, climbing, scary-but-safe experiences) could help kids with anxiety.
  • “Could you do roller coaster therapy?... Could we fight fear with fear?” — Bert Pinkerton [18:14]

8. Imagination as Survival Tool

• Central philosophical point:
  • Imagination, stories, and fiction allow us to 'practice' dangerous or unusual scenarios, preparing us for reality.
  • “It seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world. For humans, we rely on the imagination. The imagination might be our coolest asset.” — Matthias Claassen [19:07]

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• “Why is it that we like stuff that we don't like?”
  — Mark Anderson [02:45]

• “Mark is really good at designing experiments and doing statistical analysis. And I like Stephen King novels.”
  — Matthias Claassen [03:33]

• “Trying to mount a surveillance camera and then some clown, a literal clown actor, will come and throw fake blood on us.”
  — Matthias Claassen [06:52]

• “There seems to be sort of a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.”
  — Mark Anderson [08:08]

• “Maybe when people seek out a little fun fear, they're actually trying to learn through play...”
  — Bert Pinkerton [13:36]

• “We can't say based on this study that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic.”
  — Matthias Claassen [17:20]

• “Could you do roller coaster therapy?... Could we fight fear with fear?”
  — Bert Pinkerton [18:14]

• “The imagination might be our coolest asset.”
  — Matthias Claassen [19:07]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:06 – Matthias describes his fascination with fear, and the “paradox of horror.”
• 02:33 – Mark and Matthias form their interdisciplinary research team.
• 05:08 – The team describes setting up a haunted house study.
• 08:08 – Discovery of the optimal (not too much, not too little) fear zone.
• 13:36 – Hypothesis: Fear-seeking as a form of learning through play.
• 15:06 – COVID-19 pandemic leads to a horror movie boom; research begins on fear and psychological resilience.
• 17:20 – Cautions about correlation, not causation, in horror’s real-world effect.
• 18:14 – Exploring fear-based ‘therapy’ for anxiety.
• 19:07 – The case for imagination as a central tool for survival and adaptation.

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Conclusion & Further Reading

The episode ends by inviting listeners to check out the Recreational Fear Lab’s published studies and research for further spooky (and scientifically credible) Halloween reading. The hosts emphasize that while we don’t have all the answers, asking why fear is fun can reveal new things about our minds, bodies, and even how to cope with a scary world.

For more: Check out the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University for papers on topics such as Stephen King, The Exorcist, and the psychology of peekaboo.

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Transcript

[Podcast Host (Unexplainable Announcer)]

Support for Unexplainable comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. You know those questions that keep you up at night? The ones that make you fall down rabbit holes until 2am Claude is an AI that can help you if you want to dive deeper instead of rushing to surface level answers. You can use Claude to help work through the complexity. You can upload documents, you can search the web, and you can explore different angles on problems that genuinely interest you. You can try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser]

We all have moments where we could have done better. Like cutting your own hair.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Yikes.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser]

Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Coulda done better. Same goes for where you invest Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get Market insights, education and human help when you need it. Learn [e-mail].

[Bert Pinkerton]

Matthias Claassen spends a lot of his time thinking about terrifying things.

[Matthias Claassen]

I have a fondness for scary books. I really like that experience of being really messed up by letters on a page. And I remember being really interested in scary stuff as a teenager, but also being puzzled at why. Because I would read a Stephen King novel or watch a slasher movie and then feel compelled to sleep with the lights on for several nights and found myself asking, what the hell? What's going on here? What's going on when people voluntarily seek out things that frighten them?

[Bert Pinkerton]

It's kind of weird if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, right? Like running away from scary stuff makes sense. Or probably more likely to survive if we skedaddle when we're spooked by something. But why do we also then run towards scary things sometimes? Like why do we pay good money to go to a movie theater and freak out? It is this paradox of horror that fascinated Matthias. He wound up studying horror for a living. He joined the English department at Aarhus University in Denmark, but also looked at other disciplines to try and understand his subject matter better. And that is where Marc Anderson winds up coming in. About a decade ago, Mark was doing his PhD at Aarhus University as well, studying cognitive science and religion.

[Mark Anderson]

And Matthias was this weird dude who came to our department and presented on, you know, all this weird horror stuff that he was very interested in talking about.

[Bert Pinkerton]

His questions like, why is it that.

[Mark Anderson]

Humans are attracted to experiences that at their core are negative? Why is it that we like stuff that we don't like?

[Bert Pinkerton]

Now, Mark does not really experience this contradiction firsthand.

[Mark Anderson]

I'm not really that much into horror. I don't like it very much. It's mostly Matthias that likes it and he's the sort of stone cold person in the room. Uh, I'm a much more timid kind of guy.

[Bert Pinkerton]

But he was still really intrigued by the weird paradox of horror that Matthias was talking about. And so this scientist, who does not really love horror, and this literature professor who loves it quite a lot, ended up starting a cross disciplinary quest to explore horror together.

[Matthias Claassen]

I think that's one key to our success is we have these nicely overlapping domains of expertise. You know, Mark is really good at designing experiments and doing statistical analysis. And I like Stephen King novels.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Matias and Mark are now co directors of an entire lab devoted to studying this thing that they call recreational fear.

[Matthias Claassen]

We see it everywhere. It's little kids enjoying peekaboo, it's teenagers liking scary movies. It's middle aged people going on dog tourism or getting on roller coasters. But at the same time, it's sort of scientifically understudied or even ignored. So there was something there that mandated serious scientific study. Plus we were having a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

[Bert Pinkerton]

So this is unexplainable. I'm Bert Pinkerton and today on the show, a hell of a lot of fun. With a paradox of horror. Mark and Matthias and some of their colleagues, they decided to explore some basic aspects of the relationship between fear and fun. They wanted to understand what was going on in people's heads and bodies when they were speaking, spooking themselves. And to do that, they went to a haunted house.

[Matthias Claassen]

Dystopia. Haunted house is an old abandoned fish factory lying in the midst of the woods. The factory consists of about 50 rooms, and so guests buy a ticket. They walk through the 50 rooms where they're chased by, you know, pig men with chainsaws and killer clowns and zombies and so on.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Mark, do you enjoy this house from the outside?

[Mark Anderson]

Very much? Yes. I have been forced into the haunted house, I think three times by now. And I mean, it is getting easier each time.

[Matthias Claassen]

Yeah, I remember once we were in the haunt with a collaborator and we kept yelling at each other, you know, you go first, you're the postdoc. No, you go first, you're the PI. All in a relatively good spirit. We made it through. It was a fun bonding experience. But it could have gone the other way. You know, one of us could have pushed the other in front of the guy with the chainsaw, which might have ended the collaboration right there. And then I'll just add that that.

[Mark Anderson]

Is exactly what Matthias did to Me, who was the postdoc back then, by the way.

[Bert Pinkerton]

This may not seem like a great place to do serious science, but Matthias and Mark thought it actually might be kind of ideal because in this setting they could study people who were really freaked out. After all, in a lab setting, there's only so much you can do to scare the bejesus out of people before you start crossing some ethical lines, right? But if someone shows up at an abandoned fish factory literally looking to be scared, that is their choice.

[Matthias Claassen]

So it's a ridiculously chaotic context in which to try to do any kind of controlled, systematic scientific investigation. They're trying to mount a surveillance camera and then some clown, a literal clown actor, will come and throw fake blood on us.

[Mark Anderson]

But in a way, this kind of horror house is much more well calibrated to investigate the kind of phenomena that we are really interested in deep down.

[Matthias Claassen]

The kind of insight we can get into. Recreational fear, that's just, it's out of this world.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Take this one study for example, that gave Matthias and Mark and their colleagues a really key set of insights into how fear and fun might be connected. In the study, they asked a bunch of participants to fill out a questionnaire before they went through the haunted house. They hooked them up to a heart rate monitor, filmed them during some of the house's biggest jump scares, and then surveyed them again right after they left the house. All of this to kind of get a sense of both how scared they'd been, but also how much they had enjoyed themselves. And they found that the relationship between self reported fear and self reported fun in the surveys had this kind of upside down U shape.

[Mark Anderson]

You can think of it as sort of the Goldilock principle of horror, right? That too little fear is not that enjoyable when you are in a haunted attraction. But a lot of fear is actually not that enjoyable as well. There seems to be sort of a, a middle way where participants report the highest levels of enjoyment.

[Bert Pinkerton]

And this pattern showed up in their other measurements too. Like some of the data from the heart rate monitors again showed that the people who enjoyed themselves the most tended to be the people whose hearts were behaving a little differently from their usual, but not like enormously so.

[Mark Anderson]

So it is as if humans dislike being very far from their normal physical state. But we, we seem to like being a little bit out of our comfort zone or a little bit out of our normal state.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Studies like this have fed into a hypothesis that Mark and Matias have developed about the potential purpose for recreational fear, like why we might seek it out. And the deeper that they have gone into their research, the more they've started to feel this nagging sense that something is terribly, terribly wrong. Like now that they've unlocked this awful secret, they will never be able to lock it away and ever again. I'm just kidding. Their research has not led to anything deeply horrifying, but it has given them a window into how we might be facing our fears. So more on that after the break.

[Podcast Host (Unexplainable Announcer)]

Support for Unexplainable comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is an AI that can help you explore different angles on all kinds of questions. Like the other day I was watching the Red Sox and they played this sound after a strikeout and I was like, huh. I don't remember when that became a thing, but it also wasn't something that I could just search for easily. So I asked Claude. He gave me some sources, I tracked him down and before I knew it, I had the definitive history of the I also use Claude when I'm curious about genuinely complicated things. I'll ask it something big. We'll go back and forth to hone exactly what I'm looking for. And yeah, it does get things wrong sometimes, but when I double check or ask for a citation, it'll give me a better source. Now it's important to know how to use Claude. Well, like ask it, follow up questions, actually check out the citations it gives you. But if you do, Claude can be a powerful tool. It helps me find articles and primary documents that I never would have come across. And it helps me dig wider and deeper, all while staying in control of the digging. You can try Claude for free at Claude AI Unexplainable and see why the world's best problem solvers choose Claude as their thinking partner.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser (Alternate)]

Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab at Schwab. How you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.

[Podcast Host (Unexplainable Announcer)]

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[Mark Anderson]

In a horror story, there are only victims and monsters.

[Bert Pinkerton]

And the trick is not to end up as either. So in their haunted house study, Mark and Matias saw this kind of u shaped relationship between fear and fun. Basically, too much or too little fear, not that fun. Somewhere in the middle, this kind of like sweet spot of fear. Very fun. And they were seeing this same pattern in other research too.

[Mark Anderson]

We know from studies on curiosity that humans get curious about things where they expect a moderate surprise. They are not really curious about things where they know that their predictions are going to be way off. They are typically interested in things that lie a little bit outside of their normal knowledge.

[Bert Pinkerton]

So that same kind of Goldilocks effect, where something that's just the right amount out of your comfort zone is the most interesting or the most fun. And seeing these similarities between curiosity on the one hand and fear for fun on the other side, it led Mark and Matthias to their hypothesis, which is maybe when people seek out a little fun fear, they're actually trying to learn through play, like trying to teach their bodies how to handle fear.

[Mark Anderson]

It's about learning how your, you know, your body reacts, for instance, when you become scared. We know from other studies in cognitive science that the brain has a tendency of suppressing input that it can predict. So if you have tried something several times, then oftentimes that experience feels less intensive. So one of the main hypotheses that we have is that recreational fear exposure allows you to learn about fear and handle it in a sort of more optimal way, you could say.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Unfortunately, Matthias and Marc's lab got a great opportunity to explore this idea further.

[Mark Anderson]

During the COVID pandemic, where the whole world closed down and we were all, you know, deadly scared of what this virus was. No one knew at the time.

[Bert Pinkerton]

I remember this vaguely.

[Mark Anderson]

Yeah. And so one really surprising thing that happened was that the horror box office exploded. So people became really, really interested in watching horror movies all of a sudden.

[Matthias Claassen]

A British science journalist who had written about some of my work years ago in which, you know, I told her that I thought horror might help us prepare for a dangerous world. She tweeted me and asked me if I thought that horror movie fans were doing a better job of keeping their stress levels down during the pandemic.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Matias and some of his colleagues wound up running a study to investigate this question to see if people who watched a lot of scary movies exhibited fewer symptoms of psychological distress in those early scary days of lockdown. Now, because it was the middle of the pandemic, they couldn't go out into the field for this.

[Matthias Claassen]

So we've distributed questionnaires looking at people's symptoms of mental distress, getting a personality profile, and also getting a measure of how often they watch disaster movies, prepper movies, that sort of thing.

[Bert Pinkerton]

When they went through the results, they found that people who watched a lot of scary movies reported at least feeling less psychological distress. And people who watched a lot of prepper movies, they said that they felt better prepared.

[Matthias Claassen]

They had lived through similar scenarios in their imagination hundreds of times. So for them, you know, it wasn't just science fiction in an abstract sense. They felt like they'd sort of been there before.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Anecdotally, these results fit in with their own experiences. Because Matthias, the horror fan, he was not super fazed by the pandemic.

[Matthias Claassen]

I was sort of cool with it.

[Bert Pinkerton]

You know, Mark, by contrast, I was.

[Mark Anderson]

Not cool with it at all. I remember, I remember, you know, the first days where I would like, disinfect Amazon packages, like have them rest three days in our shit before I dare to touch them.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Now, to be clear, their study results were all self reported stuff, right? And also, as Matias told me, this is all correlational.

[Matthias Claassen]

We can't say based on this study that watching a scary movie makes you better at keeping your stress levels down during a pandemic.

[Bert Pinkerton]

So maybe the kind of person who likes scary movies is just less likely to get stressed out in the first place. But they're excited to continue exploring this question. Mark says they want to do a longitudinal study with randomized control groups to see if exposing people to some kind of recreational fear does, does actually bring their stress level down over time. And they also want to see if this hypothesis could be applied to help kids who've gotten treatment for anxiety disorders.

[Mark Anderson]

We would like to sort of enroll them if they would like, in sort of a bravery module or whatever, inviting them to the rollercoaster theme park, having them enroll in a climbing course, maybe seeing some scary movies, not like seriously.

[Bert Pinkerton]

Freak some anxious kids out, but like them, have a little bit of fun with their fear. Matthias and Mark want to know if that would actually help these kids learn how to deal with anxiety better. Like, could you do roller coaster therapy? Essentially, could we fight fear with fear? So basically, right now, Matthias and Mark have a lot of cool, exciting questions about why we seek out fear for fun. And not that many perfect, complete answers. Like, they're still a long way from solving the paradox of horror. One thing they do feel pretty confident about, though, is that these questions are worth exploring. Like, there is something both really fascinating and kind of important at the heart of our obsession with horror.

[Matthias Claassen]

I mean, it seems to be the case that stories and fiction are vital instruments for navigating the world. For humans, we rely on the imagination. The imagination might be our coolest asset. We can use our uniquely evolved imaginations to run through scenarios, to imagine different states of affairs, and to prepare.

[Bert Pinkerton]

If you want to read more about the research that Mark and Matias and their various colleagues have done, please look up the Recreational Fear Lab from Aarhus University in Denmark. They have got papers about Stephen King and the Exorcist and Peek a Boo in daycares. It's like great Halloween reading all around. In the meantime, this episode was produced by Me Bird Pinkerton and edited by Meredith Hadnot, who also runs the show. Noam Hassenfeld is our host and does the music. Christian Ayala, the mixing, the sound design. Anouk Dussaud did our fact checking. Manding Nguyen is the fact that ostriches can run as fast as horses. Jorge just is a gem of a human. And we are always, always, always grateful to Brian Resnick for co founding this show. Thanks also to Jonathan Hill and Coleman Lowndes for their help with this episode. If you have questions about this episode or thoughts or just like spooky vibes, I don't know, please send them to us. We are@ unexplainablex.com you can also support this show and all of Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today or any other day. It would be very, very appreciated. That'[e-mail] members vox.com members to sign up. You can also support the show by leaving us a nice rating or a review. So many options. Maybe do one of them. But no matter what, Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast network and we will be back on Wednesday.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser]

We all have moments where we could have done better. Like cutting your own hair.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser (Alternate)]

Oh yikes.

[Charles Schwab Advertiser]

Or forgetting sunscreen. So now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education and human help when you need it. Learn [e-mail].

[Charles Schwab Advertiser (Alternate)]

Support for the show comes from Charles Schwab. At Schwab, how you invest is your choice, not theirs. That's why when it comes to managing your wealth, Schwab gives you more choices. You can invest and trade on your own. Plus get advice and more comprehensive wealth solutions to help meet your unique needs. With award winning service, low costs and transparent advice, you can manage your wealth your way at Schwab. Visit schwab.com to learn more.