FACE YOUR FEARS: READ HORROR NOVELS

"When we read a horror novel, it activates the brain’s fear response, releasing adrenaline and other stress hormones that put us on high alert, allowing us to experience a thrill without being in real danger."

- Heather Rose Artushin, Psychology Today

In FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND'S first issue in 1958, editor Forrest J Ackerman wrote the lead article entitled, "Monsters Are Good For You", in which he explained the long history of monsters and tales of horror in classical literature. He included several opinions from psychiatrists that supported the idea that reading or watching horror stories was not only harmless, but healthy. He wrote: "That emotional health and mental stability may be improved by subjecting oneself to safe shocks is the conclusion shared by a number of psychiatrists and anthropologists."

In the October 1965 issue, Ackerman published a letter he received from a mother in defense of monsters (and of course, the magazine she sent it to) that echoed much of what had been mentioned in the first issue's editorial some years before.

Boy, if only I could have gotten my Mom to read these!

In a recent post on the PSYCHOLOGY TODAY website, Heather Rose Artushin is basically saying the same thing about reading horror novels over 60 years later. She even gives it a name: "benign masochisim" (!).

Reprinted here are the three aforementioned articles that should free you from any misgivings when reading your next horror story and prove that monsters really are good for you!

FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #1 (February 1958)

FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND #35 (October 1965)

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY

How Reading Horror Novels Unveils the Human Psyche

By Heather Rose Artushin, LISW-CP | October 14, 2025 | PsychologyToday.com

When we read a horror novel, it activates the brain’s fear response, releasing adrenaline and other stress hormones that put us on high alert, allowing us to experience a thrill without being in real danger. Known as benign masochism, reading can provide a safe way to satisfy our curiosity about the more disturbing aspects of human nature (Yang & Zhang, 2021).

Author Quan Barry’s latest, The Unveiling, is a literary horror novel following a group of tourists-turned-disaster survivors on an Antarctica cruise over Christmas Eve, exploring themes of abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America’s racial legacy.

Barry shared her perspective on how books like The Unveiling can act as a mirror for the human psyche, and a way to live vicariously through the characters’ harrowing experiences.

Q: Share a bit about your background and what inspired you to write The Unveiling.

Quan Barry (QB): All of my novels are radically different from each other, though they’re all firmly rooted in very specific landscapes. In 2004, I was fortunate to travel to Antarctica on the Akademik Iofee, a former Soviet expeditionary ice vessel. During that 12-day trip to the Antarctic peninsula, I went kayaking and learned a great deal about the natural history of the continent. Consequently, almost 20 years later when the social justice protests broke out in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, I realized that Antarctica would be the perfect setting for the Lord of the Flies-esque survival tale I had been envisioning for quite some time—by placing my characters at the bottom of the world, the only physical and inner resources they would have to draw on would be whatever they already possessed, and whatever demons they encountered would be the ones they carried within.

Q: The Unveiling is set on a remote island along the Antarctic Peninsula. What about this unique setting made it the perfect place to explore themes like abandonment, guilt, and survival in the shadow of America’s racial legacy?

QB: Unlike the “New World” or other similar spaces, Antarctica is the only landmass ever discovered by humans; obviously no one was living there before the first explorers arrived. In my eyes, this makes it an ideal laboratory—if you drop a bunch of people on an uninhabited island, they’ll have to build from scratch a whole new way of relating to the world and each other, and what they already carry inside themselves will intentionally or even unintentionally form the basis of this new existence.

I think the emptiness of Antarctica functions as a mirror not just because snow and ice are physically reflective, but because a landscape that’s essentially a void means you yourself have to project meaning onto it. The desert can have the same effect on the human psyche—its utter starkness is where the desert prophets went in order to experience visions. Technically, Antarctica is a desert because it gets less than seven inches of snow a year, so in some ways, Antarctica is acting like the wilderness in which Christ underwent his various temptations.

Q: How does enduring such a disaster reveal deep-seated truths about Striker and the other characters in the story? Do you think life’s most difficult experiences reveal important truths about ourselves?

QB: When you’re staring down the possibility of death, it has a way of helping you drop all the important stuff in your life—in other words, death is the ultimate cleanse. I think adversity can help us know ourselves more deeply, but I also think it can have the opposite effect and cause us to delude ourselves more thoroughly.

Q: Research suggests that we enjoy the thrill of fear when we read horror novels, without the danger, from the safety of our psychological “protective frame” (Yang & Zhang, 2021). What do you think draws readers to thrillers and horror novels?

QB: The word vicarious comes from a Latin word vicis, meaning a substitution or exchange. The world and its experiences are so vast we can’t taste them all, so one of the pleasures of literature is to put us as close to the fire as possible while allowing us to remain unburned. The same is true of romance novels—we want to feel the adrenaline rush of new love but with all the mundane stuff cut out, plus we may not be on the market for a new partner but we still want the feeling of being swept off our feet.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from spending time with The Unveiling?

QB: In my opinion, one of the creepiest short stories ever written is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil. I’m from the north shore of Boston, so I totally dig Hawthorne’s criticisms of puritanism and the ways we judge one another, all of which feel very contemporary to me. I don’t want to give anything away, but that particular short story is a master class in making you question your own life and who you truly are when you’re not wearing the mask we all put on in polite society. Ultimately, I hope The Unveiling might have a similar effect on readers.