Horror movies are profound – no, seriously, they are. They help us appreciate and get to know ourselves. They also help us get to know each other by supporting feelings of community, which makes our brains happy.

According to Dr. Steven Schlozman, child psychiatrist and author of The Zombie Autopsies, the average age in the United States to watch your first horror film is about 11 years old. Although, that may arguably be revised downward.

So how do horror movies scare us? Horror uses a concept called metacognition,  an adaptive response learned at an early age. Metacognition is the ability to recognize when things are off or when something doesn’t fit a previously known pattern, thus signaling the possibility of danger. This feeling of danger then elicits the evolutionary fight or flight response, characterized by increased respiratory rate, sweating, and an elevated heartbeat. We interpret those physiological changes as fear.

But for all the fear and screaming, horror is derivative. It borrows from reality, making us part of the club, creating a sense of community. These familial connections mean happiness to human brains.

Horror poses questions in displacement. We can ask questions in the campy horror genre that we can not ask anywhere else. Horror permits discussion of far-reaching societal issues such as “what do we do when science fails us,” or “when fear overtakes our ability to be reasonable, and we become violent.” Horror also allows us to explore the broader societal issues of ‘isms,’ such as racism, that plague society.

Let’s look at some classic horror films and their underlying themes.

The 1970s produced a plethora of groundbreaking horror. Rosemary’s Baby (1968) explored several different themes. Roman Polanski’s use of realism accentuates society’s increasing loss of control highlighted by segregation, the 1960s and the Vietnam War, loss of privacy, and femininity amid the burgeoning feminist movement.

Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) created a new type of horror. In a stylized discussion of mob justice, Wes Craven used displacement and the horror of nightmares to pose the morality of justice and revenge. Nightmare on Elm Street presented the story of a slain child murderer’s spirit who seeks vengeance on those responsible for his untimely death by invading their children’s dreams.