Horror can be therapeutic. That’s the point of a recent article in Psychology Today, where Robert T. Muller Ph.D. posits that horror allows us to “vicariously experience negative emotions in a controlled environment which may be useful for managing anxiety.”
Or, as a team of researchers at Aarhus University put it in a recent study:
Fiction allows the audience to explore an imagined version of the world at very little cost. Through fiction, people can learn how to escape dangerous predators, navigate novel social situations, and practice their mind-reading and emotion regulation skills.
Similar thoughts have occurred to me while reading the stories in The Best of Cemetery Dance II, a massive collection of over 50 stories representing the best from … [read more at The 21st-Century Scop].