All too often, you’ve probably heard people talk about how it’s hard to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t something out of a disaster movie we’ve all seen — that the way in which the world shut down so abruptly for such a long period of time and forced us to rethink nearly every aspect of our own lives, while we aren’t really doing much else. With the prolonged quarantine, a popular topic of conversation might be “What are you streaming?” as many people binge watch TV shows and movies on Netflix and Hulu to pass the time. Surprisingly, movies like “Outbreak” and “Contagion,” which both explore a situation similar to the one we’re in, are among the top streaming titles.
Like many other people, I wondered why they would want to dwell on plots that are so similar to what we’re living through right now instead of something that would take their mind off any feelings of anxiety they might be having toward the pandemic. It turns out that a group of researchers from the University of Chicago, Pennsylvania State University, and Aarhus University were also curious and conducted a study on this matter. Their findings suggest that people exposed to apocalyptic themed disaster movies could be more resilient when confronted with similar situations in the real world.
They questioned several volunteers for the study about movies they had seen and their own experiences with the pandemic. In their study, the researchers decided to look at the disaster movie genre in a different way: what if people were seeing them as preparation for when similar disasters struck in real life? The researchers began their study when they noticed that the 2011 film “Contagion” was consistently being streamed on Netflix when the COVID pandemic was at its height, and turned to Prolific, an online resource for finding study participants that also allows researchers to interact with them online. 126 individuals were interviewed for the study, and each one was paid for their time and effort.
The participants were questioned on their own feelings about the coronavirus epidemic and what they had been binge watching. Those who reported watching more “prepper” movies like “Outbreak” and “Contagion” showed higher levels of resilience: they were less anxious about when society would reopen and less likely to believe in conspiracy theories about the pandemic. People who reported watching generic horror movies reported higher levels of coping during the beginning of the pandemic as well.
Horror films have already been known to excite regions of the brain that process auditory and visual perception, a natural occurrence that happens due to our own perception of anxiety. It’s a sensation that evokes our earlier evolutionary history in prehistoric times — when we peered into the jungles late at night to watch out for predators that might be lurking in the dark. For most of the centuries humans have lived, we’ve had brains that anticipate danger and prepare us for a response. Horror movies have managed to exploit this ability to increase our enjoyment.
Stories that focus on a pandemic similar to the one we are living in also emphasize a horror that is intangible — and there are two distinct types that people respond to.
This latter distinction reflects two types of fear that people experience. The creeping foreboding dread that occurs when one feels that something isn’t quite right, and the instinctive response we have to the sudden appearance of a monster that make us jump out of our skin,” says Professor Lauri Nummenmaa, a neurologist at the University of Turku Finland who conducted a similar study, with an emphasis on the visual impact of horror films.
In ancient Greece, audiences were drawn to seeing epic tragedies like the story of Oedipus unfolding on the stage. The best of these stories, typically showing the unfortunate downfall of a noble warrior, would arouse feelings of fear and pity from the crowds. It wasn’t just a critical standpoint.
Aristotle actually prescribed this in one of the oldest tomes to discuss the successful ingredients of dramatic writing, his volume titled “Poetics.” Aristotle believed that by triggering these emotions onstage, the playwright could successfully purge these feelings from society, that seeing the evil Oedipus suffers from would compel theatergoers to act more carefully in the future.
In films like “Outbreak” and “Contagion,” we see heroes triumph at the end — diseases either become contained or are successfully overcome by cures, and there is a promise that by the end of the movie, the world will be in balance, even if a little different from the one we remembered.
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