Why Horror Belongs in the Classroom

Why would you, as a university lecturer, want to scare the daylights out of your students?

I can think of two good reasons. First, horror can be an excellent Trojan horse of learning. Stories of vampires, zombies, and horrors from beyond the grave engage attention while inviting psychological and aesthetic analysis. Second, voluntary encounters with manageable fear may help people practice regulating difficult emotions. That's part of the appeal of recreational fear.

A Course in Recreational Fear

For years, I have been teaching an undergraduate elective course called Recreational Fear: Scientific, Historical, and Aesthetic Perspectives. The course introduces students to the field’s foundations, methods, and latest findings, and prepares them to write a bachelor’s project at the intersection of English Studies and recreational fear. They can also join our Recreational Fear Lab as research assistants during field studies at Dystopia Haunted House. It’s a win-win: Students get experience with empirical data collection, and we get valuable help.

The course moves from basic research on fear and anxiety to recreational fear and its potential therapeutic effects, with horror as the main case study. I have the students read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary—possibly the scariest book in existence, but also an incredibly psychologically rich novel (Clasen, 2020)—as well as watch a scary movie and play some horror video games.

Paleo Horror by the Bonfire

For the fall 2026 edition of the course, I organized a field trip to the darkest heart of Jutland. The destination was a remote woodland campsite, where I had hired one of Denmark's scariest horror writers, Michael Kamp, to entertain my students with a frightening tale. We had a bonfire going and pizza waiting. After eating, the students gathered around the fire and spent 30 minutes utterly rapt in Kamp's story.

The point was to let students experience horror entertainment the way our ancestors experienced it for thousands of years—in a group, with a blazing fire in front of them and the oppressive darkness at their backs, imaginations running at top capacity. No screens, no distractions, just story. It was an experience in "paleo horror," as my boss put it, and an enormous success. It also provided material for discussions of horror's deep history, its social dimensions, and the differences between oral, written, and audiovisual storytelling.

Movie Night, With Sensors

The following week was movie week, with a focus on the 2026 movie Obsession. Bear, a twentysomething with an unrequited crush on his friend Nikki, uses dark magic to make her love him more than anything in the world. That quickly turns very dark: Nikki will stop at nothing to pursue her unnatural obsession.

The dozen or so students who attended the screening wore heart-rate monitors and completed questionnaires about their expected and actual fear and enjoyment. Two days later, we met to look at the physiological results and discuss the movie.

The students found the film somewhat less frightening than expected. In other research, we have found that some people, particularly those less comfortable with uncertainty, overestimate how negatively they will feel during a horror experience (FitzGibbon et al., 2025). Still, these students engaged enthusiastically with the film’s most powerful scenes and themes. One scene in particular—which involves a car window and an extremely well-orchestrated jump scare—really got their hearts racing. Within seconds, the class average rose by 13 beats per minute, the largest rise of the film. Individual students' heart rates jumped by between 9 and 51 beats per minute.

When Dread Makes You Freeze

Intriguingly, other scenes we identified as deeply frightening barely registered in heart rates. When the possessed Nikki stands in the darkness in the corner of Bear's bedroom, for instance, the accelerometers built into the monitors suggest that students moved exceptionally little. That minute was one of the two with the least recorded movement in the whole film. The other was another quiet, dark scene with Nikki as the eerie threat.

How can we make sense of these responses? The jump scare presents an imminent threat, and the body mobilizes—hence the racing hearts and the literal jump in the seats. A slow-burn, dread-inspiring scene may engage a different defensive response. An animal that spots a predator at a distance freezes: It goes still, its senses sharpen, and its heart tends to slow rather than speed up (Roelofs, 2017). That may be the difference between the two kinds of horror scenes: One, the jump scare, triggers an acute startle response; the other may evoke freezing-like vigilance.

The Trojan Horse at Work

Triangulating physiological measures and subjective impressions provided excellent material for classroom discussion—not just about the film, but about such larger academic issues as what different kinds of evidence can and cannot tell us. Physiological and behavioral measures may be objective in a way that self-report measures are not, but subjective reports can add richness and texture beyond what a heart rate monitor can capture. And the two did not always agree: How strongly a student’s heart reacted to the car-window scare said little about how much fear that student reported. The discussions also allowed us to connect cinematic analysis with psychological response, for instance, by analyzing particularly effective scenes to figure out how the filmmakers created suspense, dread, and horror.

And Obsession uses an unrealistic premise to address very real fears. My students felt that its themes were relevant to their own concerns: consent, bodily autonomy, the MeToo movement, and the incel phenomenon. Bear gets what he wants by overriding what Nikki wants, in a truly terrifying way. For some students, he came to embody the fear that a monster may hide inside someone who looks perfectly normal.

These excursions into horror—and into the science of horror—proved fun as well as instructive. That’s the Trojan horse at work: Students probably signed up expecting some entertaining material, but before they knew what hit them, they had tested their limits, peeked into the darkness, and learned something about fear, anxiety, and the power of supernatural horror to address real-world issues. They had not just felt fear; they had learned how to investigate it—and perhaps a little about how to cope with it, too.

My thanks to the students for their enthusiasm, curiosity, and thoughtful discussions, to Michael Kamp for the fireside story, and to Peter Mortensen for greenlighting the excursion.

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