California Prof Breaks Down Horror Movie Appeal

Just in time for Halloween, Stuart Fischoff, emeritus professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, has put together a treatise on why some people are more attracted to scary movies.

It’s complicated. Depending on a person’s lifestyle, age, gender, personality, heredity and physiology, they may or may not choose to fork out premium first-weekend movie bucks. Fischoff found that older people prefer “haunted, existentially pained monsters” and that the way people behave in the movie darkness depends partly on who the make-up of those they brought along:

My students did several small samples on how the sexes behave in theaters while watching horror movies with the same or opposite sex.

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