By Valerie Hsieh

The screams start before you see anything. The air is heavy with fog and paranoid anticipation, and somewhere in the dark, a chain rattles. As you and your friends inch forward through the haunted maze, your pulse quickens—not just yours, it turns out, but theirs too. In that moment of shared terror, something remarkable happens: your hearts begin to beat in sync.

That eerie synchrony isn’t just poetic coincidence. It’s the subject of a new study by Prof. Mathias Clasen and colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark, who wired up more than 300 visitors to a haunted house attraction to study what they call recreational fear, or the paradoxical enjoyment of being scared when you know you’re safe. Published in Emotion earlier this year, the team’s findings reveal that our physiological responses to fear don’t merely reflect individual biology; they link us together. Groups of friends who entered the haunted house together literally had more synchronized heartbeats than strangers did, and that synchrony grew stronger the closer those friends were emotionally.

“Something that might be unique here is that for humans, recreational fear is almost always social,” Clasen said during a recent panel discussion with neuroscientist Dr. Leslie Sibener, moderated by Quanta Magazine editor-in-chief Samir Patel. “And the social dimension is something we don’t understand very well, but we have found that people, when they seek out recreational fear with people that they are emotionally close to, those people’s physiologies synchronize—their hearts start beating in the same way through this whole experience.”

The idea that fear can bring us closer runs counter to what psychology textbooks usually tell us.

“If you look up fear in the psychology textbook, you’ll see it described as a negative emotion,” Clasen said. “And I think that’s part of the truth—yes, fear feels bad, that’s the whole point, because fear is supposed to motivate us away from things that could be dangerous… But the thing about fear is, though, it’s not only a negative emotion. Sometimes we deliberately seek out fear.”

That voluntary encounter with fear, he suggests, may be what makes it such a rich laboratory for understanding emotional regulation. When we immerse ourselves in safe but frightening situations—whether in a haunted house, a horror film, or a suspenseful novel—we’re not just thrilling ourselves for fun. We’re also rehearsing the cognitive and physiological skills that help us cope with real-world stress.

“The kinds of fear regulation strategies you employ when you watch a scary movie, whether cognitive, behavioral, or social, are the same strategies you would use to cope with a stressful situation in real life,” Clasen said. “And so maybe when you watch scary movies, because you use those strategies, you train your ability to employ them [and] get better at coping. That’s what we found. We found that horror movie fans had fewer psychological problems.”

In other words, the same adrenaline that makes your heart race during a jump scare might also strengthen your resilience when real fear strikes. The Emotion study supports this notion: participants who hovered in what researchers called a “Goldilocks zone” of fear—not too little, not too much—reported the most enjoyment and the greatest sense of emotional control.

Sibener, a postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University whose work explores the neuroscience of memory, sees a parallel between fear and how we store life’s most vivid experiences.

“Episodic memories in your brain are really unique in that [the brain] takes in all of this multisensory stimulus from the external world and pulls that together,” Sibener said. “It takes the visual input, the auditory input, the smells… and it will combine all of that into this really rich representation of an event that happened in your life. And some of these episodic memories will be extremely salient, and those are things that maybe you’ll remember for a lifetime.”

That might explain why certain fears stick with us. Emotionally charged experiences, especially those shared with others, are encoded more deeply in memory, a convergence of physiological arousal and social connection. Clasen sees this as part of the adaptive value of recreational fear: it helps us learn not only about the world, but about ourselves.

“When we read fiction, there might be fantastical monsters from other dimensions, but there’s always an element of psychological and sociological realism,” he said. “That’s where the learning takes place. And we develop a sense of what’s called interoceptive skill, which is the decoding of the body’s signals… People with anxiety problems tend to be pretty bad at interoception. But you can actually train your ability, for example, by regularly exposing yourself to fear-inducing situations that also have elements of pleasure.”

That delicate blend of fear and pleasure might be the real secret behind our fascination with horror. It’s not the monsters we’re training for—it’s our own bodies. By confronting fear safely, we fine-tune our internal instruments, strengthening both self-awareness and social bonds.

“While fear and memory are two different things, they both are concepts that we’re intimately familiar with, yet maybe can’t define clearly,” Patel reflected during the conversation. “Both, in addition to being ideas tied to emotion, have some kind of physiological reality associated with them.”

The science of fear, then, may be less about why we run from the monster—and more about why, every October, we keep walking right back in.