A fondness for scary movies and true crime may not offer the emotional shield against real-world catastrophe that earlier research suggested. In a study published in BMC Psychology, researchers examined whether enjoying horror content is linked to how young people withstand chronic hardship, finding that fictional frights showed no meaningful link to personal resilience among university students living through war and economic collapse.
Psychological resilience describes an individual’s capacity to maintain mental health, daily functioning, and emotional stability when encountering severe adversity. Rather than implying a total lack of pain or anxiety, resilience reflects how effectively a person manages intense disruption and regains their footing. In recent years, psychologists have tried to identify the psychological habits and leisure activities that might support this capacity during collective hardships.
One prominent framework is threat-simulation theory, which proposes that fictional entertainment functions as a safe mental laboratory. By following characters through terrifying scenarios, audiences can experience fear, evaluate dangers, and practice regulating their emotions without facing genuine bodily harm. As argued in a theoretical paper covered by PsyPost in 2025, frightening entertainment may help audiences manage unpredictable situations by allowing them to experience controlled uncertainty in a secure setting.
A 2020 survey of about 1,000 people found that horror fans tended to be higher in sensation seeking and imagination, which its authors took as support for the threat-simulation idea. Soon after, a 2020 study conducted during the early months of the pandemic found that horror fans reported greater resilience, that fans of “prepper” genres such as alien-invasion, zombie, and apocalyptic films reported both greater resilience and better preparedness, and that more morbidly curious people showed more positive resilience.
Most earlier investigations took place in Western societies during short-term or novel emergencies. The research team, led by Rawad Affan of the School of Medicine and Medical Sciences at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in Lebanon, set out to test whether this protective association persists in a society enduring continuous, overlapping crises. For years, residents of Lebanon have faced deep financial instability following the 2019 economic collapse, the 2020 Beirut port explosion, and escalating hostilities since October 2023, creating an environment where danger is neither hypothetical nor brief.
To explore this question, the authors recruited 235 undergraduate and graduate students from universities across Lebanon during the 2025–2026 academic year. The participant group was 66 percent female and 34 percent male, with an average age of about 20 years. All respondents completed a confidential online survey that collected demographic details and evaluated their media tastes, curiosity, and psychological health.
The survey assessed movie preferences by asking participants to rate their liking for ten distinct film categories, including horror, psychological thrillers, zombie films, crime, romance, and comedy, on a scale from 1 to 7. Psychological resilience was evaluated with the Pandemic Psychological Resilience Scale, a 12-item questionnaire originally developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and used in the 2020 study. Adapted to reflect broad responses to ongoing collective hardship, the measure captures both emotional distress, such as anxiety, depression, and poor sleep, and adaptive strengths, such as optimism, coping self-confidence, and the capacity to find joy.
The authors also administered the Morbid Curiosity Scale, an established 24-item inventory that measures trait morbid curiosity. Morbid curiosity refers to an individual’s psychological drive to learn about dangerous, violent, or frightening events. The scale breaks this trait into four subcategories: curiosity about the minds of dangerous people, interpersonal violence, bodily injury or violation, and paranormal occurrences.
When analyzing movie preferences, the authors found that lighthearted and familiar genres were the most favored. Comedy received the highest average score at 5.08 out of 7, followed by romance at 4.60 and crime stories at 4.43. Threat-heavy categories were much less popular, with horror averaging 3.32, alien-invasion films averaging 3.00, and zombie movies scoring lowest at 2.85.
Student responses revealed a mixed psychological picture. Participants demonstrated moderate to high overall resilience, scoring an average of 4.26 on the 7-point scale. Many students expressed confidence in their ability to endure difficult times, with 51 percent agreeing or strongly agreeing that they believed they could get through their current struggles. At the same time, symptoms of psychological strain were common, as nearly 50 percent of the sample agreed or strongly agreed that they felt more nervous or anxious.
Morbid curiosity scores among the students were moderate, averaging 3.42 out of 6. Participants showed much higher interest in learning about the motives of violent people and criminal psychology than in seeing graphic physical harm. For instance, questions regarding killer motives and criminal profiling averaged 3.99, while questions about watching public executions or viewing bodies at funerals averaged about 2.7.
Statistical analyses showed that higher morbid curiosity was strongly linked to an appetite for darker media. Students with higher curiosity about threatening events showed greater preferences for crime films, horror movies, and psychological thrillers, with correlation figures around 0.51 to 0.54. Romance films showed no meaningful link to morbid curiosity.
Despite these connections between morbid curiosity and movie tastes, engagement with frightening media was not linked to psychological resilience. The correlation between horror genre preference and resilience was not statistically significant, registering at just 0.056. The correlation between total morbid curiosity and psychological resilience was 0.156, which the authors reported as not statistically significant, though a correlation of that size would typically reach significance in a sample of 235.
The only film preference that showed a statistically detectable link with resilience was the alien-invasion genre, which had a weak negative correlation of negative 0.177. Students who enjoyed alien-invasion stories reported slightly lower levels of resilience. Preferences for other scary or suspenseful genres, such as zombie stories, supernatural films, and apocalyptic narratives, had no detectable association with resilience scores.
These results stand in tension with that 2020 pandemic study, which PsyPost covered at the time. That work examined U.S. adults during an acute public health emergency rather than young adults living under prolonged conflict and economic collapse, and it linked alien-invasion fandom to greater resilience, the opposite of the weak negative association seen in Lebanon.
On the other hand, the findings regarding film preferences align with research covered by PsyPost in 2024, which found that higher morbid curiosity predicts greater enjoyment of horror media. While that earlier laboratory experiment focused on real-time emotional reactions to short movie clips, the current study observed the same general pattern through broader, self-reported genre preferences among university students.
“Well we can say that there is still no strong evidence that horror films or morbid curiosity contribute to psychological resilience,” said Uri Lifshin, a senior researcher and head of experimental research at the Israel Center on Addiction and Mental Health at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem who was not involved in the study. “Although we always need to be careful from concluding anything from null findings.”
“The idea that controlled self-exposure to horror may increase resilience is appealing, and was raised in the past for example in regards to the appeal of tragedy e.g., Goldenberg et al., 1999. More recently Profs. Daniel Sullivan and Jeff Greenberg wrote an edited book Death in Classic and Contemporary Film – Fade to Black 2013 where they also discuss the general appeal of horror films.”
According to terror management theory, human awareness of inevitable mortality creates deep existential dread, which people typically counter by clinging to cultural worldviews, religious convictions, and social systems that grant a sense of enduring purpose.
“Unlike other types of phobias, for which exposure therapy may offer promising results, death poses a bigger problem,” Lifshin told PsyPost. “From the perspective of terror management and anxiety buffer disruption theories, the notion of mortality, for a creature who wants to live, creates the potential for debilitating anxiety. Normally people are able to avert death anxiety by embedding themselves within cultural worldviews and invest in close relationships that provide them with a sense of value, meaning, order certainty, and importantly, beliefs in literal and or symbolic immortality.”
“So ultimately, to avoid death anxiety people need to find ways to beat death if you may,” he continued. “Religion is of course the classical solution. In line with Terror Management Theory, in times of war, when mortality is very salient (such as in the case of Lebanon) we see increased investment in religious or national ideologies for example (see for example the book In the Wake of 9/11 by Pyszczynski et al., 2003; or this recent study from Israel, by Greenwald et al., 2026 on increased religiosity after the October-7 attack and the following wars). Long story short, to develop resilience to existential threats, exposing yourself to horror and morbidity is not enough (and may even be detrimental too, if one does not have strong enough buffers e.g., Mikulincer et al., 2020).”
To explain why horror fandom was not linked to resilience in this setting, the authors drew on a theory that describes stress as the loss or depletion of valued personal resources. They suggest that ongoing crises may drain the mental and emotional resources people would need to turn fictional fear into coping skills, though they describe this as speculative, since the study did not measure participants’ exposure to the crises.
Lifshin noted that people who work at cremation grounds in India showed persistently high defensiveness about death, while a 2019 study of Buddhist monks found less defensiveness after years of meditation training, though he noted that the monks’ practice is religious in nature and that the study was not conducted during wartime. “Thus, it is more likely that engagement in things that give a sense of symbolic immortality are more effective (e.g., Lifshin et al., 2026),” he said. “So perhaps – it’s not just the horror in the film – but the ways that the heroes overcome it to obtain a sense of meaning and immortality that matters.”
“We cannot draw strong conclusions from this study (aside from replicating the obvious relationship between morbid curiosity and liking horror films),” Lifshin said. “Nevertheless, the study is important because it tests a plausible theory, and it does so in places that are understudied. The overall goal of the study is thus very important. Also because the hypothesis makes sense, many people are likely to repeat the study again – so it’s good to have these null findings published.”
As with all research, there are some caveats to consider when interpreting these conclusions. The study relied on a cross-sectional survey design, meaning the researchers captured thoughts and feelings at a single moment in time. Because the data were collected all at once, the findings cannot determine cause and effect, nor can they demonstrate how media habits influence emotional stability over several months or years.
There are also statistical and measurement factors that complicate the picture. About 31 percent of participants strongly disliked horror, while only about 12 percent strongly liked it, a skew that may have made an association harder to detect, as the authors note. In addition, with ten different film genres tested against resilience scores, a single weak correlation such as the alien-invasion result could reflect chance.
“I think that the researchers are very straightforward and transparent,” Lifshin told PsyPost. “If they had found a relationship between horror fandom and resilience then we would scrutinize the findings more, and consider alternative explanations. But because no relationship was found (in regards to psychological resilience), there is not much to critique. It may be that the theory is wrong, that the methods are off, or that the sample is strange (probably all of the above). But we cannot know this from a single null finding.”
All measures in the study were self-reported, which leaves room for personal reporting biases or differences in how individuals interpret survey questions. Film engagement was measured using brief single-item questions about general genre affinity rather than detailed tracking of actual viewing hours, specific titles, or personal reasons for watching. In addition, the researchers used a convenience sample of university students that contained twice as many women as men, meaning the results may not reflect older adults or the wider population of Lebanon.
Lifshin, who lives in Israel, said that “being in a war-infested country myself, I find it difficult to enjoy horror.” “It’s more fun to watch horror when your life is nice and safe – not when you are in current Lebanon or Israel,” he explained. “I think that maybe this might have also affected the results.”
“Would the findings be the same for people who live in more peaceful environments?” Lifshin asked. “I think that to be able to benefit psychologically from horror, you need a healthy dose of safety first.”
Future studies could track participants over time and include precise measures of personal trauma, economic loss, and direct exposure to violence. Examining why people seek out scary movies, whether for light distraction, social bonding, or genuine adrenaline, could also clarify why media habits interact differently with mental health across various global settings.
Lifshin suggested that future work should examine non-linear patterns. “It would be interesting to also explore curvilinear relationships between the horror film watching and resilience,” he said. “Perhaps some exposure is good, but at some point it’s detrimental (i.e., an inverted U shape). This could result in a flat zero linear correlation like we saw in the study. Perhaps the researchers could also investigate this in the existing data.”
The study, “Horror Fandom, morbid curiosity, and psychological resilience amid war conflict and economic crisis among university students in Lebanon: a cross-sectional study,” was authored by Rawad Affan, Marilyn Yammine, Mia Karam, Matthia Abboud, and Shafika Assaad.