2023 was another fine year for the lab. A high point was the immensely successful Third Annual Aarhus Workshop on Recreational Fear, which was held on August 9. The acclaimed author Joe Hill gave an amazing keynote on the art and craft and value of scaring people with words. You can watch Joe’s keynote, along with most of the other brilliant presentations, on our YouTube channel.

Joe Hill giving his keynote “Living in Fear: The Art of Horror” at the well-attended Third Annual Aarhus Workshop on Recreational Fear.

We were also engaged in a range of outreach activities. Thankfully, the public still seems to be very interested in our work, and apart from a whole bunch of public lectures throughout and beyond the country, we had an interactive outreach booth at the Danish Science Day, where guests could try a VR horror game and have their fear levels measured, and a similar booth at the national Fantasy Festival where we also gave guests the chance to measure their morbid curiosity and figure out what type of horror fan they were. We love these opportunities for outreach, for sharing with the public some of our research findings and engaging folks in our work. We are also getting a good amount of media interest in our research, with recent coverage in media such as Wall Street Journal, Discover Magazine, Salon, Daily Express, Bloomberg, Le Monde, ITV, El Pais, BBC World Service, Yahoo News, and BPS PsycCrunch as well as engaging in a fun collaboration with legendary amusement park Liseberg in Sweden, in the shape of the “Peak Fear Experiment.”

The lab’s booth at the annual Science Day in April 2023, getting ready for horror-hungry guests with a cameo appearance by Mr. Piggy.

We’ve also shared new research with the scientific community, with a bunch of publications in 2023. For instance, we published a paper on the relationship between mental workload and jump scare intensity, we published a paper on the psychology of creepiness, we published a book chapter on horror movies from a predictive processing perspective, we published a paper on the voice of evil, and we published a paper on Stephen King’s writing style. We expect to publish several new research papers in 2024 – stay tuned for more.

Halloween is always a high point of the year for us, not least since that’s when we do our annual haunted house study. Ever since 2016, we’ve done a haunted house study on-site at Denmark's scariest haunt: Dystopia Haunted House in Vejle. In previous years, we have looked at the strategies people use to manage their fear, we’ve looked at how different kinds of horror fans benefit from playing with fear, and we have looked at the relationship between fear and enjoyment. Much of our previous research has focused on psychological benefits of recreational fear, but this year we initiated a new collaboration with brilliant colleagues from Aarhus University Hospital to look at potential physical benefits of playing with fear. Is it good for the immune system to be chased by a chainsaw-wielding maniac in a haunted house?

Most of the FEAREAL team from the January 2024 debrief event.

This research project, which is the brainchild of Louise Bønnelykke-Behrndtz, is called FEAREAL. We got a generous seed grant from our friends at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, to conduct a pilot – but a pretty substantial pilot which involved ten nights of data collection, almost 60 research assistants … and a lot of blood, quite literally speaking. We can’t say much about the outcome of the project yet, but stay tuned for more information.

Much of our empirical research is largely driven by volunteer assistants and lab interns, and in 2023 we were fortunate to attract several awesome interns – Sabrin Khalil of Aarhus University in the spring of 2023; Antonina Jasztal and Dominika Męcina from Jan Kuchanowski University of Kielce, Poland, also in the spring; Sofie Vittrup, Sofie Thinggaard, and Peter Westergaard of Aarhus University in the fall of 2023, and finally Armin Stefanović of University of Szeged, Hungary, in the fall. It’s been a genuine pleasure to work with such an amazing group of young, driven, helpful interns.

Some of our amazing lab interns – Sofie Vittrup, Sofie Thinggaard, and Peter Westergaard (photo bombed by Mr. Piggy, not an intern). At Fantasy Festival in Esbjerg, Denmark.

We were also fortunate to host many guests and new lab friends at our semi-regular lab meetings. We have, for instance, had excellent presentations by Ken Swan from the University of Florida (and proprietor of Gainesville Fear Garden), the horror magician Dave Alnwick, Naja Dyrendom Graugaard of Aarhus University (on scary stories in Greenlandic culture), Luise Merkert of University of Munich (on religion, family, and horror movies), Madison LaSaga of the Neurofog Lab at Memorial University in Newfoundland (on memory control, intrusive thoughts, and horror), Frank Dyrehauge Thøgersen of Copenhagen University and the Danish Armed Forces (on anxiety resistance and inoculation in military personnel), Ingela Visuri of Dalarna University (on LARP, autism, and fearful fun), and Emily Niemeyer from Whole Child Behavioral Support on selective mutism and recreational fear. We love these guest presentations and are always open to suggestions, so if you’d like to present ideas or research at a lab meeting, do get in touch.

Frank Dyrehauge Thøgersen presenting his fascinating research at a lab meeting.

In the fall semester of 2023, we ran a BA project elective course for students at Aarhus University's English Department called “Recreational Fear: Scientific, Historical, and Aesthetic Perspectives.” The course, which ran for the first time in 2021 (co-taught by Mathias Clasen and Mihaela Taranu, with guest presentations from other lab members), was a huge success and fully booked. The students produced some highly interesting exam papers on everything from Lovecraftian terror and analog horror to the psychology of true crime, the mental health benefits of recreational fear, and the cognitive basis of creepiness and the uncanny. If you’re interested in seeing the syllabus for the course, you can shoot Mathias Clasen an email.

Finally, as we’re already a ways into 2024, we’d like to thank our friends, collaborators, and partners for a scary, fun, and productive 2023. Thanks to the Independent Research Fund Denmark for our inaugural grant, thanks to the IMC for a generous seed grant, thanks to our spooky and amazing partners at Dystopia Entertainment for yet another season of recreational fear research – and thanks to all the friends and collaborators of the lab, past, present, and future. We now know more about the peculiar and pervasive phenomenon of recreational fear than ever before, but the more we learn, the more we realize we still have to learn. Like we say: Stay tuned.