The Setup:
Silence permeates through the cinema. Faces all around me are locked forward in suspense; An eerie glow from the dim stair lighting is all that allows me to make out their anxious stares. The black expanse of the screen looms ominously above me.
You know that it is coming.
Tick, tick, tick. Somewhere, a clock is ticking. It is counting down to something. The screen is changing. A scene is appearing.
He is coming. Closer, even closer now. He reaches into his coat with his right hand. A weapon appears, timeworn and rusty and coated with the blood of something or someone. He raises his hand.
The ticking stops. His hand comes down. A chime rings out, but so does a bloodcurdling scream.
The audience recoils in shock. Loud gasps are heard throughout the room. Some scream, some cover their eyes. I turn to look at my friends and see something different. Their screams of glee turn into giggles and I have to cover my mouth to stop myself from laughing any louder.
The movie is nearly over, you see. And I don’t want us to get any more dirty looks from the other cinema-goers.
The Explanation:
As a casual horror movie enthusiast myself, I know that you shouldn’t act this way in a cinema – especially if it interferes with other patrons’ enjoyment of the movie. But the hilarity that ensued from the first jump scare was something to behold – and it entirely challenged my expectations of how being in that audience would feel.
“We all go a little mad sometimes.”
Norman Bates, Psycho
I loved that I became more active in the audience. Often, watching movies can be quite passive. With my friends beside me, I laughed out loud – not necessarily because I found blood and gore funny, but maybe because the shock warranted a verbal response – and found myself more invested in their reactions to the movie, rather than the movie itself.
The only negative was that I found myself feeling slightly guilty afterwards, partly because I felt as though I personally hadn’t engaged with the movie itself, and also because I felt as though I (or we) may have annoyed the others in the audience a smidgen too much…
The Science Behind It:
So, why was it that we were giggling like school girls during a horror movie?
A psychological concept I looked at which explains this phenomenon well is called ‘social facilitation.’ Social facilitation is essentially when humans tend to perform better at tasks when in groups due to a range of factors including a heightened state of arousal (meaning alertness or attentiveness, perverts)(APA Dictionary of Psychology 2018). This could very much explain why, when you are together with friends, things that were once scary or daunting often become silly, cringe-worthy or easy.
Not to mention the increase of oxytocin hormones (such as endorphins or serotonin) in your body during heightened states of arousal is associated with peer bonding, as well as seeking comfort with others in response to stressors such as jump scares or horror movies (Taylor 2006). Laughing amongst friends feels very much like comfort when there is an axe murderer on the screen.
The Takeaway:
All in all, My main takeaway from this experience as an audience member is that your expectations of a certain media can be entirely subverted by the type of audience you use to engage with it.
Hilarity can be the foil to horror, if you’re with the right people of course.
References
APA Dictionary of Psychology 2018, dictionary.apa.org.
Taylor, SE 2006, ‘Tend and befriend: Biobehavioral bases of affiliation under stress’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 273–277.
Watson, S 2023, Oxytocin: The love hormone, Harvard Health.
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