Fixated on Fear: Scary TV Shows and Why We Can’t Get Enough of Them

We love to be scared. We love the adrenaline rush we get from being thoroughly freaked out, and seeing our fears reflected on screen is an addiction that is becoming more and more prominent in our culture. We’ve even become infatuated with the idea of falling in love with monsters (or, rather, having them fall in love with us lowly mortals).

Television offers an interesting assortment of horror genre series’ to fill your plates and suit anyone’s tastes.

For lovers of romantic angst who maybe just want a little twist to their romances, you’ve got your standard supernatural dramas: The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, Bitten.

For Anime fans, you’ve got shows like Soul Eater and Black Butler (both come highly recommended, by the way, if you’re looking to dip your toes into something new and different).

For 90s kids, there are the classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Goosebumps…(the 90s were a pretty good time for television in general, lemme tell you).

Then there are the shows that are actually meant to scare the living hell out of you. The ones like American Horror Story  (you might even include Supernatural in this section — the earlier seasons, I mean, before it got watered down).

Of course, we can’t forget the ever popular Zombie genre: The Walking Dead, The CW’s iZombie, Z Nation — we freaking love our zombies. Ours is the generation of zombie fixation.

And, starting this summer, slashers are coming to the small screen with the arrival of shows like MTV’s Scream (which premiered June 30) and Fox’s Scream Queens — which will premiere this fall on September 22.

So, what is it that we love so much about these twisted tales? What is our obsession with the undead? Why are we so fixated on our own mortality?

For me, I know I am drawn to extreme situations. I gravitate toward anything pertaining to survival in the most basic and brutal sense. I love trying to imagine what I would do, wondering if I would survive, how badass I would be (and, lemme tell you, coming from the girl who can’t even squish bugs in a Kleenex because she doesn’t like feeling them go “crunch”, I don’t think I’d be all that badass) — but maybe then the real question I like to ask myself is: would I be able to rise to the occasion? Could I thrive in a post-apocalyptic, dog-eat-dog world? And, most importantly: who would I want on my zombie survival team?

Truth is, reality can be a bitch.

Perhaps the appeal of these shows is in their primitive roots — a world with nothing of monetary value, where your worth is measured by your ability to survive, to persevere, rather than by what you own and how much money you make. A world where you don’t have to think about your future in terms of a solid education resulting in crippling student loan debt, a steady job that you merely tolerate just so you can have the steady income you’ll need to qualify for a mortgage, to pay bills, and all that boring, tedious stuff that comes with our mundane, everyday existence — in these worlds, you just have to worry about surviving the day.

There’s a certain freedom in that — a severely messed up, desperate sense of freedom, of course, but who doesn’t long to be free of debt, of dead end jobs that we hate (and, let’s be honest with ourselves: the staggering amount of people stuck working boring, benign jobs that they loathe is incredibly depressing). Who doesn’t yearn for excitement and adventure? Who doesn’t want to let their inner thrill seeker out to play?

We all want to escape.  What better way is there to escape than to lose yourself in a world where everyday people like you and I are challenged to become heroes?

Or, hell, maybe some of us just want to sit and watch a bunch of poor bastards who have it worse than us struggle to get by. No judgement, I promise — we’re all friends here.

Television provides us with that escape that we’re craving, even if it is only for an hour a week. When you’re scared, you’re not thinking about anything else. When you’re watching these shows with these characters you love being put in perilous situations, all you care about in that moment is whether or not Daryl is going to survive the season.

It consumes you, it takes you right out of the life that is draining you dry and gives you a high to ride for at least a little while until you feel ready to come back down to the real world and face another day.

In my research for writing this piece (yeah, guys — your girl did her homework on this one), I found an article that the Huffington Post did on why we love to scare ourselves that sums it up perfectly.

Long story short? Being scared feels good.

So, by all means, fellow horror lovers: get cozy and settle in for a fright filled hour of gore, mayhem, and anxiety. You work hard! You deserve a break.

All aforementioned shows (aside from those seasons currently on air, which can be seen on their respective networks) can currently be viewed on Netflix.