October 13, 2025 • 50 mins
Grab your heart rate monitor and your Halloween candy because today we’re getting a broader understanding of why we like being scared and the science behind fear itself. How can something that works almost as a survival mechanism also feel kind of good in the right situation? Are we sadists or are we helping ourselves survive?
Sources:
IFL Science, Fear
https://youtube.com/shorts/_2W...
Why We Love to Be Scared, PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/a...
The Science of Fear, Northwestern Medicine
https://youtu.be/K1ITDysPHpc?s...
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/broads-next-door--5803223/support.
Sources:
IFL Science, Fear
https://youtube.com/shorts/_2W...
Why We Love to Be Scared, PBS
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/a...
The Science of Fear, Northwestern Medicine
https://youtu.be/K1ITDysPHpc?s...
Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/broads-next-door--5803223/support.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The It causes a stress reaction in your body that's
needed for many people to.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Run away as fast as possible.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
But if worse comes, the worse fight when needed, which
is also known as a fight or flight response. Acute
stress or fear can cause an increase in a heartbeat,
and it is due to a rise of stress hormones Cortisol. Adrenaline,
a normal adrenaline for heart beating faster helps the push
for blood around and we directs glucose around the body,
(00:27):
preparing the muscles for fight or flight by giving them energy.
Sometimes people may scream. Screaming is a vocalization of intense emotion.
People scream for all source of reasons, sometimes from joy
and pleasure to sadness and grief as well as fear.
Screaming activates thea mcdilla. This is the nuclears part of
the brain that helps heighten awareness.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Hello, neighbors, lovers, friends, on anyone who has ever paid
money to be chased through a corn fie by a
man with a chainsaw. I'm Danielliscrama and this is Broad's
next door. Grab your heart rate monitor and your Halloween candy,
because today we're getting a broader understanding of why we
like being scared and the science behind fear itself. How
(01:18):
can something that works almost as a survival mechanism also
feel kind of good.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
In the right situation?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Are we say this or are we helping ourselves survive? Hi? Hello,
how is everyone? I hope you're doing well. I hope
you're not currently trapped in a haunted maze or watching
a horror movie with the lights off and no blanket
(01:47):
to hide under. Because this episode is all about fear,
not the kind that paralyzes us in real life, but
the kind we seek out. And there's plenty of the
first one there right now. So it's interesting to me
that even this year, the last few years post COVID,
we've been seeking out horror more than ever when real
(02:08):
life horror has been ample and plenty. I myself am
incredibly anxious right now.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is Sunday.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I have full Sunday scaries. I leave for Kansas City
in like a week. I'm so overwhelmed. I'm just doom
spiraling all of these scenarios. And once I finished recording this,
I'm also going to go watch Zodiac as my way
of winding down and further research for an episode, But
(02:36):
it's still going to be my escape for the evening,
my break from finding out that the Department for Special
Education was just gutted and there are troops in Portland
and every other horror. I'm still turning to my scary
shows and serial killer documentaries. And it really made me wander,
(03:00):
what's happening here in my brain? Not that kind of
real life fear, but the fear we look for, the
kind we buy tickets for, the kind that makes us
scream and then laugh and then scream again. Why do
we choose it? Why am I choosing it?
Speaker 4 (03:17):
What does it do for us?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
And why is being scared in a controlled environment kind
of fun? Sometimes we avoid fear at all costs. Fear
can really get a bad rap, or it's something we're
supposed to take extremely seriously. In real life, if we're
being followed, being trapped, being vulnerable, it's all feels terrible.
(03:41):
It's not something any of us want. But in a
controlled environment, fear feels really different. It's this chemical cocktail adrenaline,
dopamine and drphins. It's like your body is saying something's
wrong and your brain's going But we're in a movie
theater babe, We're fine. Our brain apparently even knows the
(04:03):
difference between a forced fear like the horror movie on
the screen and a real fear like being followed when
we're walking home. More on this from Northwestern Medicine Science
of fear.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Fear is our survival response. It comes from the part
of the brain called the amygdala. Its job is basically.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
To keep us safe.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
My name is.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Doctor Zach Sacora, and I'm a clinical psychologist with Northwestern Medicine.
So there is a difference in the biological response of
fear in someone who's actually in a life threatening situation
as compared to somebody who is in a staged feared experience,
say like at a haunted house or in a movie,
(04:49):
or even roller coasters. People know that these really aren't
dangerous life threatening situations, so the thrill and the rush
that comes from that urience ends up being pleasurable. Their
brains produce more of a chemical called dopamine, and dopamine
is a pleasure chemical that's released in the brain. The
(05:11):
person who is in the actual life threatening situation, their
biological response, their fight or flight response, is going to
be much more intense and last much longer. Than an
individual who's in a staged fear experience. It's important to
remember that fear is a natural and biological condition that
(05:35):
we all have, and it's actually important that we have
it because it keeps us safe. So the advice I
would give to people going out on Halloween in search
of those thrills and spooky moments is first and foremost,
have fun. That's what this is all about. Be educated
on what you're getting into so that you can be
(05:56):
aware of how that might impact you on an emotional
Levelicularly if you might struggle with anxiety, it's important to
be aware of that so that you can take care
of your mental health too.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I yes, our mental health, and there's something about fear
where it doesn't just seem like our individual mental health,
but also a collective thing. Here is another brief video
from Growth Science. Is fear contagious.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
When you're frightened, your heart starts to pound, you break
into a sweat, and your muscles tense so you can
quickly take action. This is a classic fear response, a
mechanism to protect you from something you perceive as life threatening.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
But this response may not only affect you, it.
Speaker 6 (06:51):
Could unwittingly affect your whole community, because, as scientists have discovered,
fear may actually be contained.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I'm anna, and this is gross science.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
This is like why I'm so interested in experiences of
mass hysteria, because it really does feel like fear is
this catching thing, like something that someone Once I see
that someone else is afraid, my fear completely changes, and
not in the fun, avoiding life kind of way.
Speaker 6 (07:27):
If I told you to think of something contagious, you'd
probably imagine a type of bacteria or virus. But diseases
aren't the only things that can spread from person to
person through contact and the animal kingdom. Bodily secretions like
sweat and tears give up signals called pheromones. These pheromones
(07:48):
can communicate information to other members of your species, and
there are a few different types.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
One type is the alarm pheromone.
Speaker 6 (07:57):
When a social animal like an ant or a be
encounters the threat, it releases alarm pheromones, which quickly alert
the whole colony to the impending danger and trigger a
collective response. And ants and bees aren't alone.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Humans might do this too. When we're scared, we release.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
Chemicals in our sweat called chemo signals that may be contagious.
When other people smell them, they may get scared or
stressed too. In one small study, scientists collected sweat from
people's armpits after they ran on a treadmill and also
after they skydived for the first time, which would be
a pretty scary experience for most people. When other people
(08:39):
sniffed the treadmill sweat, nothing remarkable happened.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
However, when they sniffed.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
The skydiving sweat, part of their brains called the anaxdua,
which is related to emotion processing, was more active.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Now, this is a fear of mind being in an
experiment where I have to smell people's sweat.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
That means that we may not own be communicating through
our speech or body language, but also through our body odor.
And the implications of this are a little unnerving, especially
when you realize that today we can be stressed by
things that don't cause bodily harm at all, like work
(09:18):
or dating or the news, and potentially pass that stress
to the people close to us. That said body odor
isn't the only way fear and anxiety spread God, it's
our social beings, and we tend to mimic the feelings
of those around US. This is called emotional contagion, and
it can spread either positive or negative emotions through a group.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So, for instance, if you.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
See your friend smiling, you're more likely to smile too,
and vice versa. And now, thanks to the digital age,
we can rapidly transmit these feelings on.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
A global scale.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
Certain emotions spread further and faster than others, though. For example,
one study of found that the most emailed New York
Times articles in a three month period were ones that
evoke what are called high arousal emotions like awe, anger,
and anxiety.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
To understand the impact of this, take.
Speaker 6 (10:13):
The Ebola scare in America from twenty thirteen to twenty sixteen,
the largest ebola epidemic ever swept across West Africa, causing
over eleven thousand deaths. This was a terrible human tragedy
and it deserved to be covered extensively by the media.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
But it felt like that was like a million years ago.
That literally feels like a million years ago to me,
like so many scary things have happened since then.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
The way it was covered may have caused the widespread
panic that erupted in the US. Despite the relatively low
thread Ebola posed to Americans Today, researchers are designing algorithms
based on the Twitter data from the Ebola panic so
that public officials can improve the communication of emergency in
form me in ways that are less likely to cause
(11:02):
mass hysteria.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
This might be.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
Done by using language that evokes less anger and anxiety,
and this would be beneficial for lots of reasons. Fear
and stress guide our lives in hugely important ways, from
potentially influencing our political opinions to contributing.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
To our risks of heart disease.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
But what if it's too late and you've already caught
some negative emotions like fear, or anger or sadness.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Well.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
In an article in New York Magazine, researcher Siegel Barsaid,
who has studied emotional contagion for two decades, suggests three
simple ways to cure yourself from catching feelings. First, create
a distraction from the source of contagion. This could mean
shutting off your Twitter feed when it's upsetting you. Second,
(11:49):
project your own positive emotions back. If you're chatting with
an anxious friend, maybe they'll catch.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
At this point, that's just what I call toxic positivity,
where it's like, Oh, I want to ignore everything that's happening.
But what about when we spread fear to each other
in a different kind of way? Like if I told
you the top scariest horror movies according to science, would
that make you feel panicked? Or would that make you
(12:17):
want to watch them? I know what it does for me.
It makes me want to see them all, not just
to judge them, but to see if they're really that scary.
For six years now, there's been a study the Science
of Scare, and it has tracked audiences resting, heart rate,
the spikes, and when something startling happens. It also takes
(12:39):
into account the average heart rate to ensure slower burns
also get monitored in the study and from that they
release their list every year. So let's see what they
have for twenty twenty five. At number ten, we have
Talked to Me, which was released in twenty twenty three.
(13:01):
Number nine The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which came out
in two thousand and five. At number eight, we have Smile,
released in twenty twenty two. Number seven for the first
time on the list is Smile two, which came out
last year. Number six is Hereditary, which was released in
twenty eighteen. Number five the first Conjuring movie, which came
(13:24):
out in twenty thirteen. Number four Insidious, which came out
in twenty eleven, got twenty eleven already number three Skinnimer rank,
which I could not make it through this film. I've
tried to watch it twice and I just completely zone out.
And that came out in twenty twenty two. Number two
is Host which takes place all over like a Zoom
(13:46):
meeting that came out in twenty twenty, so I think
the zoom element and COVID played a big part. And
number one is Sinister, which came out in twenty twelve,
and that surprised me. It surprised me to like the
exer cyst is not on the top ten list, But
maybe that is because we are a modern audience, and
(14:08):
maybe it's because heart rate isn't the only way to
measure if we're feeling scared. Psychologist doctor Margie Kerr, who
literally wrote a book called scream Chilling Adventures in the
Science of Fear, says this, when we're scared in our
safe space, our brains still release all those feel good
chemicals dopamine and dorphins, put without the actual changer, so
(14:31):
you get the thrill without the trauma. It's like skydiving
for your nervous system. You jump out of the plane,
but you've got a parachute, and for some of us,
that feels good. This is a twenty seventeen article from
PBS News, The Science of Right Why we Love to
be scared? By Linda sob Fear may be as old
as life on earth. It is a fundamental, deeply wired
(14:54):
reaction evolved over the history of biology to protect organisms
against person deep threats to the integrity of their existence,
or maybe as simple as a cringe of an antenna
and a snail that is touched, or as complex as
existential anxiety and a human. Whether we love or hate
to experience fear, it's hard to deny that we certainly
(15:15):
revere it, devoting an entire holiday to the celebration of fear.
Thinking about the circuitry of the brain and human psychology,
some of the main chemicals that contribute to the fight
or flight response are also involved in other people's emotional states,
such as happiness and excitement, So it makes sense that
the high arousal state we experience during a scare may
(15:37):
also be experienced in a more positive light. But what
makes the difference between getting a rush and feeling completely terrorized?
When our thinking brain gives feedback to our emotional brain
and we perceive ourselves as being in a safe space,
we can then quickly shift the way we experience that
high arosal state, going from one of fear to one
(15:59):
of enjoyment or excitement. When you enter a haunted house
during Halloween season, for example, anticipating a ghoul jumping out
at you and knowing it isn't really a threat, you
were able to quickly relabel the experience. Contrast, if you
were walking in a dark alley at night and a
stranger began chasing you, both your emotional and thinking areas
(16:19):
of the brain would be in agreement that the situation
is dangerous and it's time to flee. But how does
your brain do this? Fear reaction starts in the brain
and spreads through the body to make adjustments for the
best defense or flight reaction. The fear response starts in
a region of the brain called the amygdala. This almond
shaped set of nuclei in the temporal lobe of the
(16:41):
brain is dedicated to detecting the emotional salience of the
stimuli how much something stands out to us. For example,
the amygdala activates whenever we see a human face with
an emotion. This reaction is more pronounced with anger and fear.
A threat stimulus, such as the sight of a predator,
triggers a fear respond in the amygdala, which activates areas
(17:02):
involved in preparation for motor functions involved in fight or flight.
It also triggers release of stressed home warns and sympathetic
nervous system. This leads to bodily changes that prepare us
to be more efficient in a danger. The brain becomes
hyper alert, pupils dilate, the bronch i dilate, and breeding accelerates.
(17:24):
Heart rate and blood pressure rise, blood foam and stream
of glucose to the skeletal muscles increase. Organs not vital
in survival, such as the gastro intestinal system slow down.
A part of the brain called the hippocampus is closely
connected with the amygdala. The hippocampus and prefundal cortex help
the brain interpret the perceived threat. They are involved in
(17:46):
a higher level processing of context, which helps a person
know whether a perceived threat is real. For instance, seeing
a lion in the wild can trigger a strong fear reaction,
but the response to a view of the same line
it is zo is more of curiosity and thinking that
the lion is cute. This is because the hippocampus and
the frontal cortex process contextual information and inhibitory pathways dampen
(18:11):
the amygdala fear response and its downstream results. Basically, our
thinking circuitry of brain reassures our emotional areas that we
are in fact okay, not those of us with acute
anxiety PBS. We have to remind ourselves that we're not
being hunted for sport. So how do we learn the difference?
(18:31):
Similar to other animals, we very often learn fear through
personal experiences, such as being attacked by an aggressive dog. However,
the evolutionary, unique, and fascinating way of learning in humans
is through instruction. We learn from the spoken words or
written notes. If a sign says the dog is dangerous,
proximity to the dog will trigger a fear response. We
(18:54):
learn safety in a similar fashion experiencing a domesticated dog,
observing other people's safely interact with that dog, or reading
a sign that the dog is friendly so why do
some people enjoy being scared? Fear creates distraction, which can
be a positive experience. When something scary happens in that moment,
(19:15):
we are on high alert and not preoccupied with other
things that might be on our mind, getting in trouble
at work, worrying about a big test the next day,
which brings us to the here and now. Furthermore, when
we experience these frightening things with the people in our lives,
we often find that emotions can be contagious in a
positive way. We are social creatures able to learn from
(19:36):
one another, So when you look over to your friend
at the haunted house and she's quickly gone from screaming
to laughing, socially, you're able to pick up on our
emotional state, which can positively influence your own. While each
of these factors, contexts, distractions, social learning have potential to
influence the way we experience fear, a common theme that
connects all of them is our sense of control. When
(19:59):
we are able to rect recognize what is and isn't
a real threat, relabel and experience, and enjoy the thrill
of that moment, we are ultimately at a place where
we feel in control. That perception of control is vital
to how we experience and respond to fear. When we
overcome the initial fight or flight rush, we are often
(20:19):
left feeling satisfied, reassured of our safety, and more confident
in our ability to confront the things that initially scared us.
So why do some people not enjoy being scared? Any
imbalance between excitement caused by fear and the animal brain
and the sense of control in the contextual human brain
(20:40):
may cause too much or not enough excitement. If the
individual experiences and perceives what's happening is too real, an
extreme fear response can overcome the sense of control over
the situation. This may happen even in those who do
love scary experiences. They may enjoy Freddy Krueger movies but
(21:01):
be too terrified by the Exorcist as it feels too
real and fear response is not modulated by the cortical brain.
On the other hand, if the experience is not triggering
enough to the emotional brain or it's too unreal to
thinking the cognitive brain, the experience can end up feeling boring.
So if the emotional brain is too terrified and the
(21:23):
cognitive brain helpless or if the emotional brain is bored
and the cognitive brain is too suppressing, scary movies and
experiences may not be fun. And I've felt that deeply
with my research this month, because some things I'm researching
I enjoy so much, like ghost Hitchhikers and the Winchester House.
(21:45):
But then there are certain things like the Serial Killers,
where I start to get sincerely upset because I know
it's a true thing that happened and these people existed,
And then I have a really hard time calming myself down.
And there's more. Some studies show that experiencing fear can
(22:05):
actually help us regulate emotions. That after our big scare,
people feel more grounded, more live, even more in control
of themselves, which kind of makes total sense.
Speaker 6 (22:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
You scream, you release its primal. It's like this purging thing.
So in a world of very real, very chronic anxiety, war,
climate change, existential dread, artificial fear is the only kind
that ends after ninety minutes and credits. Basically, we're screaming,
so we don't cry. Fear is cathartic. There's something almost
(22:39):
cleansing about being scared in the right context. It's no
accident that horror surge is in popularity during turbulent times.
Look at the nineteen seventies, the Exorcist, Texas, Chainsaw Massacre,
Carrie Jaws. They all came out in a post Vietnam,
post tit LaBianca murders, post Watergate America, and now post
(23:02):
COVID miss mid mass extinction, Era of AI and apocalypse
government shutdown. Horror's booming again because fear gives us release.
It gives us permission to feel things were not allowed
to admit, terror, rage, grief, even disgust. Horror is the
(23:24):
one genre that doesn't lie to us about what the
world is, said author Grady Hendrix. It tells us the
world is a cruel place, the terrible things happen, but
it also says you can survive them. This is emotional
survival training. You go through the wringer, you feel the panic,
the dread, the racing heart, the sob in your throat.
(23:46):
But then you come out, Okay, you made it. You
made it through the movie or the haunted house or
the ghost story. You didn't die. You're still you, maybe
even braver. And that way being scared is deeply especially
for people like say women who've had real life experiences
where they weren't safe, or weren't believed, or weren't allowed
(24:09):
to scream. Horror lets us scream anyway. Trauma is often
about helplessness, said doctor Kerr. Horror flips the script. It
lets you face danger and survive. I'll link to our
book because I really enjoyed it, and that's why so
many survivors are drawn to horror. That's why so many
(24:31):
women love a Final Girl. I put out a whole
episode on them. I was thinking about re releasing it,
but I think I re released it in July, but
maybe I'll put it out again anyway as a bonus episode.
But the Final Girl trope is so interested to me.
Why do we need them? Why do we like them
so much? Is it because we're tired of being polite
in the face of danger? Do we want to be
(24:53):
Sidney Prescott with a phone in one hand and a
knife in the other. No, probably not, I don't think so.
But we do want to watch her win. Even when
Carrie is lighting it all on fire, destroying her prom
like people destroyed her. You have to have a moment
of good for her. And it's no coincidence that many
(25:14):
women are huge fans of horror, So why do women
love horror? Let's talk a little bit more about fear, femininity,
and the final Girl. It's easy to say women love
horror because we're used to being afraid, but it's much
more than that. This is from a Psychology Today article
why the true crime audience is predominantly Female by Scott A. Bond, PhD.
(25:39):
And these are observations from his serial Killer Psychology World Tour.
I recently toured the United States with my theatrical road show,
The Psychology of Serial Killers and Why They Captivate Us,
produced by Right Angle Entertainment. I performed in fourteen cities
in eighteen days. Quite an exciting WorldWind adventure. It it
(26:02):
forded me a wonderful opportunity to get direct feedback from
live audiences on my unique proprietary perspective on serial killers
and true crime that I have been writing and lecturing
about for some time. If you are involved in the
true crime world, it is taken for granted that the
audience of true crime TV shows and podcasts is about
(26:23):
eighty eighty percent female in composition. I've had this confirmed
by network programming executives who focus exclusively on true crime.
This truth was emphathetically proven to me on my tour,
as night after night and city after city, my audience
was consistently eighty percent women of all ages, including mothers
(26:45):
and daughters, who were in high spirits and now to
have fun having a girl's night out together. So this
begs the question why is the true crime audience predominantly female?
Based on my experience in research, women's fascination with true
crime is driven by their empathetic nature. In particular, women
empathize with the victims and true crime stories who more
(27:06):
often than not compromise other women. Female fans identify with
and can easily imagine themselves in the role of the
victim in frightening true crime tales. The old religious adage
there before the grace of God go I applies here.
I'm not agreeing with this, just so you know, but
(27:27):
I'll save my opinions till the end of his tour. However,
the empathy that females fans manifest is not limited to
the victims. It is my observation that women strongly empathize
with and seek to understand the motivation of their perpetrators,
especially male perpetrators, and true crime stories. I believe this
(27:48):
has a desire to do with to feel safe and secure.
There you go, Bud, there you go. You're getting it
a little bit. Many female true crime fans have told
me that their greatest fears being attacked by an unknown assailant.
Mine is being attacked by someone I know. In particular,
single women have told me that they look to true
crime TV shows and podcasts for tips on how to
(28:09):
protect themselves from attacks by strangers, as well as how
to detect sociopathic red flags and the personalities and demeanors
of single men they encounter. No woman wants to date
or marry the next Ted Bundy, who killed at least
thirty women. On a more superficial level, true crime programming
offers escapism and thrills to its female audience. In terms
(28:33):
of pure entertainment value and its effect on the audience.
How different is a Jeffrey Dahmer documentary from a fictional
serial killer movie like Saw?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Very little?
Speaker 3 (28:44):
In my opinion, and this is why I call them
both forms of popcorn entertainment. My guy, Okay, I'm interrupting
him again, because watching Saw and watching Jeffrey Jeffrey Dahmer
documentary who pour acid into living men and hate them
and targeted minority guys is very, very different to me
(29:10):
than what's his name on the tricycle jigsaw. One of
those is much more horrifying to me than the other. Worse. Dahmer,
unlike the serial killer and saw a murdered seventeen real
innocent young man in the most herri horrible fashion. The
actions of Dahmer, including cannibalism, are almost incomprehensible to the
(29:30):
average person, and therefore in still confusion and tremendous fear.
No shit. I believe another aspect of the public's fascination
with true crime involves a burning desire and powerful need
to understand why someone like Dahmer did such growth tesque
things to innocent people. Perhaps at a subconscious level. True
(29:50):
crime fans believe that if they can somehow understand Dahmer's
motivations and desires, then he and his ilk are not
so terrifying after all. I believe this is particularly true
for female true crime friends. I don't know what this
guy talked about with his audience, Do you agree with
any of that? I personally think that psychology today and
(30:14):
mister serial killer tour missed the mark. I think part
of it is fascination. I think that we can very
much distinguish between the fiction and hearing these horrible stories,
but maybe not. Maybe that's why The ed Gen Monster
Show is the number one show on Netflix right now,
(30:36):
because it blurs those lines. I still haven't been able
to finish it. I haven't been able to get past
two episodes of it because for me, knowing that there's
truth to those things but they're being exaggerated, it kind
of twists my brain in a way that I don't like.
It's not escapism horror. For me, It's still true, true,
(30:58):
but then I'm kind of trying to pull on what
peaces are true and what pieces aren't. And I didn't
feel that same way about Dahmer, which I just hated
the menandas Brothers one I liked. It's just American horror story.
I liked a lot of those seasons because it was
just fiction. So when it gets blurred too much, then
(31:24):
I personally get in this uncomfortable space and then there's
straight up fictional horror horror, lets us be afraid and
then lets us win. This is not the same way
I feel when I binge watch I survived. It's not
real life. It's often vampires and demons, or a ghost house,
(31:44):
a zombie that reminds me of an ex boyfriend. In
real life, women are trained to be cautious. Don't walk alone,
don't wear that, don't leave your drink unattended. We're told
the fears our responsibility, our punishment for existing in public.
And if something does happen, well, what were we doing
out so late anyway? What were we wearing? Why were
(32:06):
we trusting someone? But with fiction, I mean, you can
be Buffy the vampire Slayer, you can be the girls
from Yellowjackets, And with horror we get to flip that script.
The final girl is the one who lives. Film theorist
Carol J. Clover famously wrote, she is the survivor, the
one who fights back, the one who remembers. Women love
(32:30):
horror because we see ourselves in it, and not just
as the victim, as protagonists. We're not just screaming in
the woods. We're grabbing the axe. We're not just running barefoot.
We're turning around and saying, all right, that's enough of
that motherfucker. The final Girl trope exists because horror at
its best recognizes that women no fear intimately and are
(32:53):
still standing. And sometimes horror gets really honest about the world,
what the world acts. Feels like we are stoked, we
are a gaslet. We do get punished for sex or
beauty or daring to take up space. Sometimes that monster
is our boyfriend or our dad, or our boss or
a judge with a smile, and seeing that played out
(33:15):
on screen, seeing it all validated and externalized and beaten,
it's not just cathartic. It's like a holy experience. Women
have always loved horror, said filmmaker care And Cassama, because
we've always lived it. We also love watching other women
survive it. Think of Lori Strode, Nancy Thompson, Ripley, Sally
(33:39):
hartsty Aarin from Your Next, Maxine from X. They're not superheroes.
They're girls who had to grow up real fast and
real bloody. We can identify with them, We can feel
like that could be us. We'll talk a lot about
real monsters this month from Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Richard Chase,
(34:01):
the Vampire of Sacramento, but we'll also talk about the
women who face them, escape them, fight them, and tell
their own stories. Because horror isn't just about what we fear,
it's about what we do with it. Fear gets a
bad rap, It's something we're told to conquer, to suppress,
to rise above. But what if fear isn't weakness at all?
(34:24):
What if fear is how we know we're still here?
All month long, we'll be taking fear apart and holding
its pieces up to the light. From cursed movies Rosemary's Baby, Poltergeist,
The Exorcist, to crawling through tunnels of real haunted hospitals, Cropsy,
Danver State, Waverly Hills. We'll touch the edges of real
(34:48):
life horror with serial killers and mythic terror with the
Mothman and Sonny Bean, And we'll keep asking questions, why
do we like being scared? What happens when women race
from history? What happens when children aren't believed, what happens
when a home makes us sick? Is it scarier when
horror is real? And what happens when the monsters aren't
(35:11):
under our bed but sitting behind a desk, or running
our country or staring back at us in the mirror.
We still have to talk about haunted hitchhakers, bloodstained prom queens, more,
evil clowns, serial killers who became movie stars, and the
spiritual residue of places like Winchester Mystery House, the Cecil
(35:31):
Hotel and the Bridgewater Triangle. We'll be crossing timelines and
blurring lines, summoning ghosts and trying to make peace with them.
But through it all, fear will never really be the enemy,
because fear teaches us where that edge is. Fear reminds
us we have something to lose and occasionally something to enjoy.
(35:55):
And choosing to confront that fear in a movie theater
or doc room or right here with me, that's an
act of rebellion too. It's radical, thrilling survival. Horror is
not a symptom of our fear, Arthur author Mark Fisher
once wrote, it is a response to our repest knowledge
(36:16):
that something is wrong with the world. And I think
we can all feel that something is deeply, deeply wrong
with the world right now. And maybe that's it. Maybe
we love horror not because we're broken, but because we
know something, we feel something, and we want to do something,
and sometimes you need a break, You just need a
(36:36):
break from the real life horror to say I'm going
to scare the shit out of myself by choice. We
know how many women have vanished and how many ghosts
go ignored. We know the real monsters never come with
warning music. We know what it's like to feel powerless,
and we come back to fear, not to be punished,
but to take that power back, to walk into the
(36:57):
haunted house one more time, just to prove we can.
To not turn the movie off because we know the
story isn't true, And when it gets to be too much,
take a break, watch something funny, binge, watch a season
of Real Housewives, call your representatives, tap back in protests.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Mix it up.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
You know, we all need some kind of balance right now.
Whether you're gonna be dressing as a vampire or a
Victorian ghost or your most powerful self, may your October
be filled with laughter, chills, candy, and the delicious kind
of fear. Let it be strange and let it be
a little scary, because you're not alone in the dark.
(37:40):
We're all here together, and we're just getting started. We
all feel absolutely insane sometimes, and I think right now
that's a completely completely normal response. So if you need
to watch every Halloween movie to calm yourself down, don't
judge yourself for that. If you binge a twenty part
(38:01):
true crime podcast, don't judge yourself for that either, but
also don't make yourself sick with it. I've kind of
been walking that line when I was doing my John
Wayne Gacy research. I made myself so upset. Even doing
my poultered Ice episode talking about what happened to Dominique Dunn,
which you'll be hearing this week, it just it was
(38:23):
so overwhelming for me. It was just so much. Now
I'm onto the Zodiac and it's so frustrating too that
these horrible things happened and he was never caught, that
he could still be alive. Even so, that balance part,
I'm definitely working on myself. Deciding to do thirty one
(38:44):
scary movies and scary movies scary episodes in thirty one
days is bigger than I imagined it would be. So
please bear with me on that because I've been scaring
the hell out of myself. I'm leaving in like a
whek and staying with someone who works like late into
(39:04):
the night, and I'm scared about being alone in the
house by myself. And when I'm in those situations, I
do get really start to get like irrational, Like I'll
hear a noise and I usually don't think like, oh,
that's an intruder. I'm like, oh, that's a ghost sometimes
and sometimes I think both, like maybe it's a ghost murderer,
which I at forty years old, I should I should
(39:27):
know better, but sometimes I don't. Do you like being scared,
I'm assuming to an extent you do if you're listening
to these episodes. I've had some people tell me they're
totally tapping out for the month because they just can't
deal with it, and I get that too. I get
a lot of people who say real life is scary enough,
(39:47):
and I absolutely get that, but in the same way,
that's why I like the distraction horror. But let me
know your thoughts. Keep sending me your scary stories. I
love reading them. Some of them are so good that
they sound made up. And then I'll put them all
in an episode at the end of the month and
we'll do listeners stories. If you have subjects you want
(40:11):
to hear for this month episode ideas, send those over too,
Because I have a lot of stuff planned, but there's
like twenty something days left still, so a lot of
space to still cover other things. And I think some
of the stuff I picked is just too heavy. I
think maybe I picked too many serial killers, and I'm
just really gonna upset myself if I do them all.
(40:34):
Finished reading the mind Hunter book, I read btk's daughter's
book about having a father as a serial killer. There
was also a documentary she put out on Netflix. It
didn't have too much new stuff into it. If you've
seen her on twenty twenty or on PBS or any
of the circuit she did when she was doing her
book tour in twenty nineteen, interesting, I guess frustrated with her,
(41:01):
I think for still having a relationship with her dad,
which I shouldn't judge, but my god, I've cut my
father off so many times for so much less. But yeah,
having a father is a serial killer. That is like
something I can't and don't want to imagine. Her book
was a pretty good read, though, BTK is I don't
(41:25):
know if I'm going to do him or not. I
originally planned to, and his shit is just so upsetting,
and then he confesses in this super matter of fact manner,
talking about it like he was doing laundry and chores,
And that's what's really horrifying. To me, I think even
more so than Zodiac and being Unsolved, which Zodiac killed
(41:48):
way less people. But john Wayne Casey was another one
that I just put ended up putting him in my
Clowns episode instead of giving him his old standalone episode,
just because it's so it's so messed up. It's so
messed up, Ted Bundy, I don't know if I'll do
that or not. I did start doing research. Maybe I'll
(42:10):
do that, like through an and rule angle in her book,
The Stranger Beside Me, see like I need to. I'm
already getting where I need to put like a buffer
in distance between these things and kind of reframe them
because it gets to me. It really gets to me
in a way that binge watching one hundred horror movies wouldn't.
(42:30):
It's really hard for me to separate the true stuff
from or I mean, maybe not separate isn't the right word.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
It's really hard for me to process.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
The true stuff compared to some even like a slasher
movie where the same kind of thing is happening on screen,
but I can tell myself then that this never happened,
this is made up, This isn't a true a true
thing or my personal favorite is all like hauntings and
possessions and ghost story and creepy artifacts and haunted houses
(43:03):
and things like that, because then it's just much easier
to enjoy it and tell myself, well, this isn't true
until I'm home alone, and then I'm like, there's absolutely
a ghost here with me. But it's still a very
very different kind of terror, and I think that that's
what this episode was all about. But I am just
rambling now trying to process my own fears, and I
(43:26):
will spare you of that. If you're in Kansas City
and you want to hang out, let me know, working
on making more friends over there, doing like a barbecue series.
So really going to be doing a jump from horror
once we hit November, but my brain is going to
need it. If you're here in Portland where I am now,
(43:50):
it is a weird vibe.
Speaker 4 (43:51):
It is a weird vibe.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Anyone protesting on the eighteenth for the No Kings protest
stay safe? Those are like the real horrors with ice
and everything happening. So it's just what a cluster fuck
of a time to be alive right now. Send me
your thoughts, send me your notes, let me very much
(44:13):
talk to you tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening
to another episode of Broad's sex Ador. I am already
losing my voice. I feel like I've been really under
(44:33):
the weather the last few days. At first I thought
I just bummed myself out doing research. Now I think
I may have caught something. I have to pack. I'm
very anxious. I have a couple of doctor appointments this week,
which I'm not looking forward to, but I need to go.
And I also feel like I just keep running away
from my life. I've spent more time away from Portland
(44:56):
than in Portland since June, which is this is just
something I kind of do sometimes, but I don't know,
just feeling kind of uncomfortable in general, if that makes sense.
It's like a weird anxiet anything, and just this constant
(45:17):
feeling of always being between two places. So I'll be
in Kansas City for a while, like I keep mentioning,
I'm not even sure how long.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Then I want to go see my mom in Florida
for their Thanksgiving or Christmas some of the holidays.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
I just feel like it gets hard being so far
away from everybody. I have people here too, but then
I'm just so far away from so many of the
people that I love, and the older I get, like,
the less adaptive.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
To it that I am.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I've basically been doing that since I was eighteen, leaving
the state or leaving the country, but now that I'm older,
it gets feels just a little harder.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
It gets harder to do.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
I feel like all of my friends are spread out
across the whole country, and where it used to kind
of be like this fun thing to go visit everybody,
now I just feel like I kind of want everyone
all in one place, and it feels like having no
roots and being totally disconnected and disjointed and feeling like
I should own a house and have a family and
(46:27):
all of these things that I don't have. Is that
that sound extremely pathetic or is that relatable at all?
Speaker 4 (46:36):
It's just been weighing heavy on me.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
It's really been bumming me out, and I don't know.
Speaker 4 (46:42):
I'm really nervous. I'm nervous about the world. I'm nervous
about the podcast. I'm nervous about what's going to happen
with everything.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
And I may love being scared when it comes to horror,
but when it comes to generalized anxiety and panic to
I'm definitely definitely not a fan, So thank you for
sticking with me.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
Thank you if you still listening this far, and if you.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Haven't left a review or rated the podcast five stars
or done.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
All of those things.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
I have to remember to start saying this at the
beginning of the podcast, I always forget.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
Please do that.
Speaker 3 (47:21):
If you enjoyed this episode, or any of these episode,
please send them to a friend.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
It really really helps me out.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
I can you tell my brain is just all over
the place right now. I'm doing like the shaky leg
thing and swallowing too much and feeling generally insane. So yeah,
doing all this horror movie research is gonna just be
great for me mentally. But once I commit to something
(47:49):
like I'm gonna do thirty one episodes and I'm in
thirty one days, I just have to do it. Like
I'm so stupidly stubborn. Send me your scared stories, send
me your podcast ideas, if you want to come on.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
For a guest episode.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Having guests actually really helps me out, and I love
talking to other people about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
It gets hard just talking to myself.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
That's why I like to use a lot of clips
and articles, so it's not just my opinion with everything.
But you can find me online at Daniella Screama, at
Broad's next Door on all the things. I'm still going
to make a Facebook group.
Speaker 4 (48:31):
I keep forgetting to do that. I have to firmly
put it on.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
My list because I'd love a space where you all
can just kind of gather. I know a lot of
people are off Facebook. I don't think there's a way
to do that on Instagram, which is where most of
my followers are. I do have a TikTok, I only
have like five hundred followers there. I can never make
TikTok work, so Instagram is my main base. I read
(48:55):
all of my dms on there. I check my personal
account more than Broad's, which I need to get get
better at. I'm just locked into my personal account more.
I keep up with a little bit more, but I'll
work on that. You can also email me at broadsnextdoor
dot com or broad'snext to Door at gmail dot com.
(49:17):
I'm gonna try and get more stuff on the Patreon,
but don't subscribe to that yet because I have not
updated it for a while, and I will let you
know when I do. I have built this whole podcast
studio to do video episodes, and it's so hard. It
is just like a whole other animal to do video.
So having some regrets there, having some regrets deep in
(49:40):
my regrets, deep in my feelings, deep in my thoughts
and everything else. I love you very much. I will
talk to you tomorrow. I will be back to you
with Curse Movies Poltergeist, which is going to be split
into two parts because my research and my writing ended
up being ten million years and words long.
Speaker 4 (50:01):
And I'll talk to you soon. Bye,
The It causes a stress reaction in your body that's
needed for many people to.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Run away as fast as possible.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
But if worse comes, the worse fight when needed, which
is also known as a fight or flight response. Acute
stress or fear can cause an increase in a heartbeat,
and it is due to a rise of stress hormones Cortisol. Adrenaline,
a normal adrenaline for heart beating faster helps the push
for blood around and we directs glucose around the body,
(00:27):
preparing the muscles for fight or flight by giving them energy.
Sometimes people may scream. Screaming is a vocalization of intense emotion.
People scream for all source of reasons, sometimes from joy
and pleasure to sadness and grief as well as fear.
Screaming activates thea mcdilla. This is the nuclears part of
the brain that helps heighten awareness.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
Hello, neighbors, lovers, friends, on anyone who has ever paid
money to be chased through a corn fie by a
man with a chainsaw. I'm Danielliscrama and this is Broad's
next door. Grab your heart rate monitor and your Halloween candy,
because today we're getting a broader understanding of why we
like being scared and the science behind fear itself. How
(01:18):
can something that works almost as a survival mechanism also
feel kind of good.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
In the right situation?
Speaker 3 (01:26):
Are we say this or are we helping ourselves survive? Hi? Hello,
how is everyone? I hope you're doing well. I hope
you're not currently trapped in a haunted maze or watching
a horror movie with the lights off and no blanket
(01:47):
to hide under. Because this episode is all about fear,
not the kind that paralyzes us in real life, but
the kind we seek out. And there's plenty of the
first one there right now. So it's interesting to me
that even this year, the last few years post COVID,
we've been seeking out horror more than ever when real
(02:08):
life horror has been ample and plenty. I myself am
incredibly anxious right now.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
It is Sunday.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I have full Sunday scaries. I leave for Kansas City
in like a week. I'm so overwhelmed. I'm just doom
spiraling all of these scenarios. And once I finished recording this,
I'm also going to go watch Zodiac as my way
of winding down and further research for an episode, But
(02:36):
it's still going to be my escape for the evening,
my break from finding out that the Department for Special
Education was just gutted and there are troops in Portland
and every other horror. I'm still turning to my scary
shows and serial killer documentaries. And it really made me wander,
(03:00):
what's happening here in my brain? Not that kind of
real life fear, but the fear we look for, the
kind we buy tickets for, the kind that makes us
scream and then laugh and then scream again. Why do
we choose it? Why am I choosing it?
Speaker 4 (03:17):
What does it do for us?
Speaker 3 (03:19):
And why is being scared in a controlled environment kind
of fun? Sometimes we avoid fear at all costs. Fear
can really get a bad rap, or it's something we're
supposed to take extremely seriously. In real life, if we're
being followed, being trapped, being vulnerable, it's all feels terrible.
(03:41):
It's not something any of us want. But in a
controlled environment, fear feels really different. It's this chemical cocktail adrenaline,
dopamine and drphins. It's like your body is saying something's
wrong and your brain's going But we're in a movie
theater babe, We're fine. Our brain apparently even knows the
(04:03):
difference between a forced fear like the horror movie on
the screen and a real fear like being followed when
we're walking home. More on this from Northwestern Medicine Science
of fear.
Speaker 5 (04:16):
Fear is our survival response. It comes from the part
of the brain called the amygdala. Its job is basically.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
To keep us safe.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
My name is.
Speaker 5 (04:26):
Doctor Zach Sacora, and I'm a clinical psychologist with Northwestern Medicine.
So there is a difference in the biological response of
fear in someone who's actually in a life threatening situation
as compared to somebody who is in a staged feared experience,
say like at a haunted house or in a movie,
(04:49):
or even roller coasters. People know that these really aren't
dangerous life threatening situations, so the thrill and the rush
that comes from that urience ends up being pleasurable. Their
brains produce more of a chemical called dopamine, and dopamine
is a pleasure chemical that's released in the brain. The
(05:11):
person who is in the actual life threatening situation, their
biological response, their fight or flight response, is going to
be much more intense and last much longer. Than an
individual who's in a staged fear experience. It's important to
remember that fear is a natural and biological condition that
(05:35):
we all have, and it's actually important that we have
it because it keeps us safe. So the advice I
would give to people going out on Halloween in search
of those thrills and spooky moments is first and foremost,
have fun. That's what this is all about. Be educated
on what you're getting into so that you can be
(05:56):
aware of how that might impact you on an emotional
Levelicularly if you might struggle with anxiety, it's important to
be aware of that so that you can take care
of your mental health too.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I yes, our mental health, and there's something about fear
where it doesn't just seem like our individual mental health,
but also a collective thing. Here is another brief video
from Growth Science. Is fear contagious.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
When you're frightened, your heart starts to pound, you break
into a sweat, and your muscles tense so you can
quickly take action. This is a classic fear response, a
mechanism to protect you from something you perceive as life threatening.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
But this response may not only affect you, it.
Speaker 6 (06:51):
Could unwittingly affect your whole community, because, as scientists have discovered,
fear may actually be contained.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
I'm anna, and this is gross science.
Speaker 3 (07:05):
This is like why I'm so interested in experiences of
mass hysteria, because it really does feel like fear is
this catching thing, like something that someone Once I see
that someone else is afraid, my fear completely changes, and
not in the fun, avoiding life kind of way.
Speaker 6 (07:27):
If I told you to think of something contagious, you'd
probably imagine a type of bacteria or virus. But diseases
aren't the only things that can spread from person to
person through contact and the animal kingdom. Bodily secretions like
sweat and tears give up signals called pheromones. These pheromones
(07:48):
can communicate information to other members of your species, and
there are a few different types.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
One type is the alarm pheromone.
Speaker 6 (07:57):
When a social animal like an ant or a be
encounters the threat, it releases alarm pheromones, which quickly alert
the whole colony to the impending danger and trigger a
collective response. And ants and bees aren't alone.
Speaker 2 (08:11):
Humans might do this too. When we're scared, we release.
Speaker 6 (08:15):
Chemicals in our sweat called chemo signals that may be contagious.
When other people smell them, they may get scared or
stressed too. In one small study, scientists collected sweat from
people's armpits after they ran on a treadmill and also
after they skydived for the first time, which would be
a pretty scary experience for most people. When other people
(08:39):
sniffed the treadmill sweat, nothing remarkable happened.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
However, when they sniffed.
Speaker 6 (08:44):
The skydiving sweat, part of their brains called the anaxdua,
which is related to emotion processing, was more active.
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Now, this is a fear of mind being in an
experiment where I have to smell people's sweat.
Speaker 6 (08:58):
That means that we may not own be communicating through
our speech or body language, but also through our body odor.
And the implications of this are a little unnerving, especially
when you realize that today we can be stressed by
things that don't cause bodily harm at all, like work
(09:18):
or dating or the news, and potentially pass that stress
to the people close to us. That said body odor
isn't the only way fear and anxiety spread God, it's
our social beings, and we tend to mimic the feelings
of those around US. This is called emotional contagion, and
it can spread either positive or negative emotions through a group.
Speaker 2 (09:42):
So, for instance, if you.
Speaker 6 (09:43):
See your friend smiling, you're more likely to smile too,
and vice versa. And now, thanks to the digital age,
we can rapidly transmit these feelings on.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
A global scale.
Speaker 6 (09:54):
Certain emotions spread further and faster than others, though. For example,
one study of found that the most emailed New York
Times articles in a three month period were ones that
evoke what are called high arousal emotions like awe, anger,
and anxiety.
Speaker 2 (10:11):
To understand the impact of this, take.
Speaker 6 (10:13):
The Ebola scare in America from twenty thirteen to twenty sixteen,
the largest ebola epidemic ever swept across West Africa, causing
over eleven thousand deaths. This was a terrible human tragedy
and it deserved to be covered extensively by the media.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
But it felt like that was like a million years ago.
That literally feels like a million years ago to me,
like so many scary things have happened since then.
Speaker 6 (10:40):
The way it was covered may have caused the widespread
panic that erupted in the US. Despite the relatively low
thread Ebola posed to Americans Today, researchers are designing algorithms
based on the Twitter data from the Ebola panic so
that public officials can improve the communication of emergency in
form me in ways that are less likely to cause
(11:02):
mass hysteria.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
This might be.
Speaker 6 (11:04):
Done by using language that evokes less anger and anxiety,
and this would be beneficial for lots of reasons. Fear
and stress guide our lives in hugely important ways, from
potentially influencing our political opinions to contributing.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
To our risks of heart disease.
Speaker 6 (11:21):
But what if it's too late and you've already caught
some negative emotions like fear, or anger or sadness.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
Well.
Speaker 6 (11:28):
In an article in New York Magazine, researcher Siegel Barsaid,
who has studied emotional contagion for two decades, suggests three
simple ways to cure yourself from catching feelings. First, create
a distraction from the source of contagion. This could mean
shutting off your Twitter feed when it's upsetting you. Second,
(11:49):
project your own positive emotions back. If you're chatting with
an anxious friend, maybe they'll catch.
Speaker 3 (11:55):
At this point, that's just what I call toxic positivity,
where it's like, Oh, I want to ignore everything that's happening.
But what about when we spread fear to each other
in a different kind of way? Like if I told
you the top scariest horror movies according to science, would
that make you feel panicked? Or would that make you
(12:17):
want to watch them? I know what it does for me.
It makes me want to see them all, not just
to judge them, but to see if they're really that scary.
For six years now, there's been a study the Science
of Scare, and it has tracked audiences resting, heart rate,
the spikes, and when something startling happens. It also takes
(12:39):
into account the average heart rate to ensure slower burns
also get monitored in the study and from that they
release their list every year. So let's see what they
have for twenty twenty five. At number ten, we have
Talked to Me, which was released in twenty twenty three.
(13:01):
Number nine The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which came out
in two thousand and five. At number eight, we have Smile,
released in twenty twenty two. Number seven for the first
time on the list is Smile two, which came out
last year. Number six is Hereditary, which was released in
twenty eighteen. Number five the first Conjuring movie, which came
(13:24):
out in twenty thirteen. Number four Insidious, which came out
in twenty eleven, got twenty eleven already number three Skinnimer rank,
which I could not make it through this film. I've
tried to watch it twice and I just completely zone out.
And that came out in twenty twenty two. Number two
is Host which takes place all over like a Zoom
(13:46):
meeting that came out in twenty twenty, so I think
the zoom element and COVID played a big part. And
number one is Sinister, which came out in twenty twelve,
and that surprised me. It surprised me to like the
exer cyst is not on the top ten list, But
maybe that is because we are a modern audience, and
(14:08):
maybe it's because heart rate isn't the only way to
measure if we're feeling scared. Psychologist doctor Margie Kerr, who
literally wrote a book called scream Chilling Adventures in the
Science of Fear, says this, when we're scared in our
safe space, our brains still release all those feel good
chemicals dopamine and dorphins, put without the actual changer, so
(14:31):
you get the thrill without the trauma. It's like skydiving
for your nervous system. You jump out of the plane,
but you've got a parachute, and for some of us,
that feels good. This is a twenty seventeen article from
PBS News, The Science of Right Why we Love to
be scared? By Linda sob Fear may be as old
as life on earth. It is a fundamental, deeply wired
(14:54):
reaction evolved over the history of biology to protect organisms
against person deep threats to the integrity of their existence,
or maybe as simple as a cringe of an antenna
and a snail that is touched, or as complex as
existential anxiety and a human. Whether we love or hate
to experience fear, it's hard to deny that we certainly
(15:15):
revere it, devoting an entire holiday to the celebration of fear.
Thinking about the circuitry of the brain and human psychology,
some of the main chemicals that contribute to the fight
or flight response are also involved in other people's emotional states,
such as happiness and excitement, So it makes sense that
the high arousal state we experience during a scare may
(15:37):
also be experienced in a more positive light. But what
makes the difference between getting a rush and feeling completely terrorized?
When our thinking brain gives feedback to our emotional brain
and we perceive ourselves as being in a safe space,
we can then quickly shift the way we experience that
high arosal state, going from one of fear to one
(15:59):
of enjoyment or excitement. When you enter a haunted house
during Halloween season, for example, anticipating a ghoul jumping out
at you and knowing it isn't really a threat, you
were able to quickly relabel the experience. Contrast, if you
were walking in a dark alley at night and a
stranger began chasing you, both your emotional and thinking areas
(16:19):
of the brain would be in agreement that the situation
is dangerous and it's time to flee. But how does
your brain do this? Fear reaction starts in the brain
and spreads through the body to make adjustments for the
best defense or flight reaction. The fear response starts in
a region of the brain called the amygdala. This almond
shaped set of nuclei in the temporal lobe of the
(16:41):
brain is dedicated to detecting the emotional salience of the
stimuli how much something stands out to us. For example,
the amygdala activates whenever we see a human face with
an emotion. This reaction is more pronounced with anger and fear.
A threat stimulus, such as the sight of a predator,
triggers a fear respond in the amygdala, which activates areas
(17:02):
involved in preparation for motor functions involved in fight or flight.
It also triggers release of stressed home warns and sympathetic
nervous system. This leads to bodily changes that prepare us
to be more efficient in a danger. The brain becomes
hyper alert, pupils dilate, the bronch i dilate, and breeding accelerates.
(17:24):
Heart rate and blood pressure rise, blood foam and stream
of glucose to the skeletal muscles increase. Organs not vital
in survival, such as the gastro intestinal system slow down.
A part of the brain called the hippocampus is closely
connected with the amygdala. The hippocampus and prefundal cortex help
the brain interpret the perceived threat. They are involved in
(17:46):
a higher level processing of context, which helps a person
know whether a perceived threat is real. For instance, seeing
a lion in the wild can trigger a strong fear reaction,
but the response to a view of the same line
it is zo is more of curiosity and thinking that
the lion is cute. This is because the hippocampus and
the frontal cortex process contextual information and inhibitory pathways dampen
(18:11):
the amygdala fear response and its downstream results. Basically, our
thinking circuitry of brain reassures our emotional areas that we
are in fact okay, not those of us with acute
anxiety PBS. We have to remind ourselves that we're not
being hunted for sport. So how do we learn the difference?
(18:31):
Similar to other animals, we very often learn fear through
personal experiences, such as being attacked by an aggressive dog. However,
the evolutionary, unique, and fascinating way of learning in humans
is through instruction. We learn from the spoken words or
written notes. If a sign says the dog is dangerous,
proximity to the dog will trigger a fear response. We
(18:54):
learn safety in a similar fashion experiencing a domesticated dog,
observing other people's safely interact with that dog, or reading
a sign that the dog is friendly so why do
some people enjoy being scared? Fear creates distraction, which can
be a positive experience. When something scary happens in that moment,
(19:15):
we are on high alert and not preoccupied with other
things that might be on our mind, getting in trouble
at work, worrying about a big test the next day,
which brings us to the here and now. Furthermore, when
we experience these frightening things with the people in our lives,
we often find that emotions can be contagious in a
positive way. We are social creatures able to learn from
(19:36):
one another, So when you look over to your friend
at the haunted house and she's quickly gone from screaming
to laughing, socially, you're able to pick up on our
emotional state, which can positively influence your own. While each
of these factors, contexts, distractions, social learning have potential to
influence the way we experience fear, a common theme that
connects all of them is our sense of control. When
(19:59):
we are able to rect recognize what is and isn't
a real threat, relabel and experience, and enjoy the thrill
of that moment, we are ultimately at a place where
we feel in control. That perception of control is vital
to how we experience and respond to fear. When we
overcome the initial fight or flight rush, we are often
(20:19):
left feeling satisfied, reassured of our safety, and more confident
in our ability to confront the things that initially scared us.
So why do some people not enjoy being scared? Any
imbalance between excitement caused by fear and the animal brain
and the sense of control in the contextual human brain
(20:40):
may cause too much or not enough excitement. If the
individual experiences and perceives what's happening is too real, an
extreme fear response can overcome the sense of control over
the situation. This may happen even in those who do
love scary experiences. They may enjoy Freddy Krueger movies but
(21:01):
be too terrified by the Exorcist as it feels too
real and fear response is not modulated by the cortical brain.
On the other hand, if the experience is not triggering
enough to the emotional brain or it's too unreal to
thinking the cognitive brain, the experience can end up feeling boring.
So if the emotional brain is too terrified and the
(21:23):
cognitive brain helpless or if the emotional brain is bored
and the cognitive brain is too suppressing, scary movies and
experiences may not be fun. And I've felt that deeply
with my research this month, because some things I'm researching
I enjoy so much, like ghost Hitchhikers and the Winchester House.
(21:45):
But then there are certain things like the Serial Killers,
where I start to get sincerely upset because I know
it's a true thing that happened and these people existed,
And then I have a really hard time calming myself down.
And there's more. Some studies show that experiencing fear can
(22:05):
actually help us regulate emotions. That after our big scare,
people feel more grounded, more live, even more in control
of themselves, which kind of makes total sense.
Speaker 6 (22:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:16):
You scream, you release its primal. It's like this purging thing.
So in a world of very real, very chronic anxiety, war,
climate change, existential dread, artificial fear is the only kind
that ends after ninety minutes and credits. Basically, we're screaming,
so we don't cry. Fear is cathartic. There's something almost
(22:39):
cleansing about being scared in the right context. It's no
accident that horror surge is in popularity during turbulent times.
Look at the nineteen seventies, the Exorcist, Texas, Chainsaw Massacre,
Carrie Jaws. They all came out in a post Vietnam,
post tit LaBianca murders, post Watergate America, and now post
(23:02):
COVID miss mid mass extinction, Era of AI and apocalypse
government shutdown. Horror's booming again because fear gives us release.
It gives us permission to feel things were not allowed
to admit, terror, rage, grief, even disgust. Horror is the
(23:24):
one genre that doesn't lie to us about what the
world is, said author Grady Hendrix. It tells us the
world is a cruel place, the terrible things happen, but
it also says you can survive them. This is emotional
survival training. You go through the wringer, you feel the panic,
the dread, the racing heart, the sob in your throat.
(23:46):
But then you come out, Okay, you made it. You
made it through the movie or the haunted house or
the ghost story. You didn't die. You're still you, maybe
even braver. And that way being scared is deeply especially
for people like say women who've had real life experiences
where they weren't safe, or weren't believed, or weren't allowed
(24:09):
to scream. Horror lets us scream anyway. Trauma is often
about helplessness, said doctor Kerr. Horror flips the script. It
lets you face danger and survive. I'll link to our
book because I really enjoyed it, and that's why so
many survivors are drawn to horror. That's why so many
(24:31):
women love a Final Girl. I put out a whole
episode on them. I was thinking about re releasing it,
but I think I re released it in July, but
maybe I'll put it out again anyway as a bonus episode.
But the Final Girl trope is so interested to me.
Why do we need them? Why do we like them
so much? Is it because we're tired of being polite
in the face of danger? Do we want to be
(24:53):
Sidney Prescott with a phone in one hand and a
knife in the other. No, probably not, I don't think so.
But we do want to watch her win. Even when
Carrie is lighting it all on fire, destroying her prom
like people destroyed her. You have to have a moment
of good for her. And it's no coincidence that many
(25:14):
women are huge fans of horror, So why do women
love horror? Let's talk a little bit more about fear, femininity,
and the final Girl. It's easy to say women love
horror because we're used to being afraid, but it's much
more than that. This is from a Psychology Today article
why the true crime audience is predominantly Female by Scott A. Bond, PhD.
(25:39):
And these are observations from his serial Killer Psychology World Tour.
I recently toured the United States with my theatrical road show,
The Psychology of Serial Killers and Why They Captivate Us,
produced by Right Angle Entertainment. I performed in fourteen cities
in eighteen days. Quite an exciting WorldWind adventure. It it
(26:02):
forded me a wonderful opportunity to get direct feedback from
live audiences on my unique proprietary perspective on serial killers
and true crime that I have been writing and lecturing
about for some time. If you are involved in the
true crime world, it is taken for granted that the
audience of true crime TV shows and podcasts is about
(26:23):
eighty eighty percent female in composition. I've had this confirmed
by network programming executives who focus exclusively on true crime.
This truth was emphathetically proven to me on my tour,
as night after night and city after city, my audience
was consistently eighty percent women of all ages, including mothers
(26:45):
and daughters, who were in high spirits and now to
have fun having a girl's night out together. So this
begs the question why is the true crime audience predominantly female?
Based on my experience in research, women's fascination with true
crime is driven by their empathetic nature. In particular, women
empathize with the victims and true crime stories who more
(27:06):
often than not compromise other women. Female fans identify with
and can easily imagine themselves in the role of the
victim in frightening true crime tales. The old religious adage
there before the grace of God go I applies here.
I'm not agreeing with this, just so you know, but
(27:27):
I'll save my opinions till the end of his tour. However,
the empathy that females fans manifest is not limited to
the victims. It is my observation that women strongly empathize
with and seek to understand the motivation of their perpetrators,
especially male perpetrators, and true crime stories. I believe this
(27:48):
has a desire to do with to feel safe and secure.
There you go, Bud, there you go. You're getting it
a little bit. Many female true crime fans have told
me that their greatest fears being attacked by an unknown assailant.
Mine is being attacked by someone I know. In particular,
single women have told me that they look to true
crime TV shows and podcasts for tips on how to
(28:09):
protect themselves from attacks by strangers, as well as how
to detect sociopathic red flags and the personalities and demeanors
of single men they encounter. No woman wants to date
or marry the next Ted Bundy, who killed at least
thirty women. On a more superficial level, true crime programming
offers escapism and thrills to its female audience. In terms
(28:33):
of pure entertainment value and its effect on the audience.
How different is a Jeffrey Dahmer documentary from a fictional
serial killer movie like Saw?
Speaker 2 (28:43):
Very little?
Speaker 3 (28:44):
In my opinion, and this is why I call them
both forms of popcorn entertainment. My guy, Okay, I'm interrupting
him again, because watching Saw and watching Jeffrey Jeffrey Dahmer
documentary who pour acid into living men and hate them
and targeted minority guys is very, very different to me
(29:10):
than what's his name on the tricycle jigsaw. One of
those is much more horrifying to me than the other. Worse. Dahmer,
unlike the serial killer and saw a murdered seventeen real
innocent young man in the most herri horrible fashion. The
actions of Dahmer, including cannibalism, are almost incomprehensible to the
(29:30):
average person, and therefore in still confusion and tremendous fear.
No shit. I believe another aspect of the public's fascination
with true crime involves a burning desire and powerful need
to understand why someone like Dahmer did such growth tesque
things to innocent people. Perhaps at a subconscious level. True
(29:50):
crime fans believe that if they can somehow understand Dahmer's
motivations and desires, then he and his ilk are not
so terrifying after all. I believe this is particularly true
for female true crime friends. I don't know what this
guy talked about with his audience, Do you agree with
any of that? I personally think that psychology today and
(30:14):
mister serial killer tour missed the mark. I think part
of it is fascination. I think that we can very
much distinguish between the fiction and hearing these horrible stories,
but maybe not. Maybe that's why The ed Gen Monster
Show is the number one show on Netflix right now,
(30:36):
because it blurs those lines. I still haven't been able
to finish it. I haven't been able to get past
two episodes of it because for me, knowing that there's
truth to those things but they're being exaggerated, it kind
of twists my brain in a way that I don't like.
It's not escapism horror. For me, It's still true, true,
(30:58):
but then I'm kind of trying to pull on what
peaces are true and what pieces aren't. And I didn't
feel that same way about Dahmer, which I just hated
the menandas Brothers one I liked. It's just American horror story.
I liked a lot of those seasons because it was
just fiction. So when it gets blurred too much, then
(31:24):
I personally get in this uncomfortable space and then there's
straight up fictional horror horror, lets us be afraid and
then lets us win. This is not the same way
I feel when I binge watch I survived. It's not
real life. It's often vampires and demons, or a ghost house,
(31:44):
a zombie that reminds me of an ex boyfriend. In
real life, women are trained to be cautious. Don't walk alone,
don't wear that, don't leave your drink unattended. We're told
the fears our responsibility, our punishment for existing in public.
And if something does happen, well, what were we doing
out so late anyway? What were we wearing? Why were
(32:06):
we trusting someone? But with fiction, I mean, you can
be Buffy the vampire Slayer, you can be the girls
from Yellowjackets, And with horror we get to flip that script.
The final girl is the one who lives. Film theorist
Carol J. Clover famously wrote, she is the survivor, the
one who fights back, the one who remembers. Women love
(32:30):
horror because we see ourselves in it, and not just
as the victim, as protagonists. We're not just screaming in
the woods. We're grabbing the axe. We're not just running barefoot.
We're turning around and saying, all right, that's enough of
that motherfucker. The final Girl trope exists because horror at
its best recognizes that women no fear intimately and are
(32:53):
still standing. And sometimes horror gets really honest about the world,
what the world acts. Feels like we are stoked, we
are a gaslet. We do get punished for sex or
beauty or daring to take up space. Sometimes that monster
is our boyfriend or our dad, or our boss or
a judge with a smile, and seeing that played out
(33:15):
on screen, seeing it all validated and externalized and beaten,
it's not just cathartic. It's like a holy experience. Women
have always loved horror, said filmmaker care And Cassama, because
we've always lived it. We also love watching other women
survive it. Think of Lori Strode, Nancy Thompson, Ripley, Sally
(33:39):
hartsty Aarin from Your Next, Maxine from X. They're not superheroes.
They're girls who had to grow up real fast and
real bloody. We can identify with them, We can feel
like that could be us. We'll talk a lot about
real monsters this month from Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Richard Chase,
(34:01):
the Vampire of Sacramento, but we'll also talk about the
women who face them, escape them, fight them, and tell
their own stories. Because horror isn't just about what we fear,
it's about what we do with it. Fear gets a
bad rap, It's something we're told to conquer, to suppress,
to rise above. But what if fear isn't weakness at all?
(34:24):
What if fear is how we know we're still here?
All month long, we'll be taking fear apart and holding
its pieces up to the light. From cursed movies Rosemary's Baby, Poltergeist,
The Exorcist, to crawling through tunnels of real haunted hospitals, Cropsy,
Danver State, Waverly Hills. We'll touch the edges of real
(34:48):
life horror with serial killers and mythic terror with the
Mothman and Sonny Bean, And we'll keep asking questions, why
do we like being scared? What happens when women race
from history? What happens when children aren't believed, what happens
when a home makes us sick? Is it scarier when
horror is real? And what happens when the monsters aren't
(35:11):
under our bed but sitting behind a desk, or running
our country or staring back at us in the mirror.
We still have to talk about haunted hitchhakers, bloodstained prom queens, more,
evil clowns, serial killers who became movie stars, and the
spiritual residue of places like Winchester Mystery House, the Cecil
(35:31):
Hotel and the Bridgewater Triangle. We'll be crossing timelines and
blurring lines, summoning ghosts and trying to make peace with them.
But through it all, fear will never really be the enemy,
because fear teaches us where that edge is. Fear reminds
us we have something to lose and occasionally something to enjoy.
(35:55):
And choosing to confront that fear in a movie theater
or doc room or right here with me, that's an
act of rebellion too. It's radical, thrilling survival. Horror is
not a symptom of our fear, Arthur author Mark Fisher
once wrote, it is a response to our repest knowledge
(36:16):
that something is wrong with the world. And I think
we can all feel that something is deeply, deeply wrong
with the world right now. And maybe that's it. Maybe
we love horror not because we're broken, but because we
know something, we feel something, and we want to do something,
and sometimes you need a break, You just need a
(36:36):
break from the real life horror to say I'm going
to scare the shit out of myself by choice. We
know how many women have vanished and how many ghosts
go ignored. We know the real monsters never come with
warning music. We know what it's like to feel powerless,
and we come back to fear, not to be punished,
but to take that power back, to walk into the
(36:57):
haunted house one more time, just to prove we can.
To not turn the movie off because we know the
story isn't true, And when it gets to be too much,
take a break, watch something funny, binge, watch a season
of Real Housewives, call your representatives, tap back in protests.
Speaker 4 (37:16):
Mix it up.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
You know, we all need some kind of balance right now.
Whether you're gonna be dressing as a vampire or a
Victorian ghost or your most powerful self, may your October
be filled with laughter, chills, candy, and the delicious kind
of fear. Let it be strange and let it be
a little scary, because you're not alone in the dark.
(37:40):
We're all here together, and we're just getting started. We
all feel absolutely insane sometimes, and I think right now
that's a completely completely normal response. So if you need
to watch every Halloween movie to calm yourself down, don't
judge yourself for that. If you binge a twenty part
(38:01):
true crime podcast, don't judge yourself for that either, but
also don't make yourself sick with it. I've kind of
been walking that line when I was doing my John
Wayne Gacy research. I made myself so upset. Even doing
my poultered Ice episode talking about what happened to Dominique Dunn,
which you'll be hearing this week, it just it was
(38:23):
so overwhelming for me. It was just so much. Now
I'm onto the Zodiac and it's so frustrating too that
these horrible things happened and he was never caught, that
he could still be alive. Even so, that balance part,
I'm definitely working on myself. Deciding to do thirty one
(38:44):
scary movies and scary movies scary episodes in thirty one
days is bigger than I imagined it would be. So
please bear with me on that because I've been scaring
the hell out of myself. I'm leaving in like a
whek and staying with someone who works like late into
(39:04):
the night, and I'm scared about being alone in the
house by myself. And when I'm in those situations, I
do get really start to get like irrational, Like I'll
hear a noise and I usually don't think like, oh,
that's an intruder. I'm like, oh, that's a ghost sometimes
and sometimes I think both, like maybe it's a ghost murderer,
which I at forty years old, I should I should
(39:27):
know better, but sometimes I don't. Do you like being scared,
I'm assuming to an extent you do if you're listening
to these episodes. I've had some people tell me they're
totally tapping out for the month because they just can't
deal with it, and I get that too. I get
a lot of people who say real life is scary enough,
(39:47):
and I absolutely get that, but in the same way,
that's why I like the distraction horror. But let me
know your thoughts. Keep sending me your scary stories. I
love reading them. Some of them are so good that
they sound made up. And then I'll put them all
in an episode at the end of the month and
we'll do listeners stories. If you have subjects you want
(40:11):
to hear for this month episode ideas, send those over too,
Because I have a lot of stuff planned, but there's
like twenty something days left still, so a lot of
space to still cover other things. And I think some
of the stuff I picked is just too heavy. I
think maybe I picked too many serial killers, and I'm
just really gonna upset myself if I do them all.
(40:34):
Finished reading the mind Hunter book, I read btk's daughter's
book about having a father as a serial killer. There
was also a documentary she put out on Netflix. It
didn't have too much new stuff into it. If you've
seen her on twenty twenty or on PBS or any
of the circuit she did when she was doing her
book tour in twenty nineteen, interesting, I guess frustrated with her,
(41:01):
I think for still having a relationship with her dad,
which I shouldn't judge, but my god, I've cut my
father off so many times for so much less. But yeah,
having a father is a serial killer. That is like
something I can't and don't want to imagine. Her book
was a pretty good read, though, BTK is I don't
(41:25):
know if I'm going to do him or not. I
originally planned to, and his shit is just so upsetting,
and then he confesses in this super matter of fact manner,
talking about it like he was doing laundry and chores,
And that's what's really horrifying. To me, I think even
more so than Zodiac and being Unsolved, which Zodiac killed
(41:48):
way less people. But john Wayne Casey was another one
that I just put ended up putting him in my
Clowns episode instead of giving him his old standalone episode,
just because it's so it's so messed up. It's so
messed up, Ted Bundy, I don't know if I'll do
that or not. I did start doing research. Maybe I'll
(42:10):
do that, like through an and rule angle in her book,
The Stranger Beside Me, see like I need to. I'm
already getting where I need to put like a buffer
in distance between these things and kind of reframe them
because it gets to me. It really gets to me
in a way that binge watching one hundred horror movies wouldn't.
(42:30):
It's really hard for me to separate the true stuff
from or I mean, maybe not separate isn't the right word.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
It's really hard for me to process.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
The true stuff compared to some even like a slasher
movie where the same kind of thing is happening on screen,
but I can tell myself then that this never happened,
this is made up, This isn't a true a true
thing or my personal favorite is all like hauntings and
possessions and ghost story and creepy artifacts and haunted houses
(43:03):
and things like that, because then it's just much easier
to enjoy it and tell myself, well, this isn't true
until I'm home alone, and then I'm like, there's absolutely
a ghost here with me. But it's still a very
very different kind of terror, and I think that that's
what this episode was all about. But I am just
rambling now trying to process my own fears, and I
(43:26):
will spare you of that. If you're in Kansas City
and you want to hang out, let me know, working
on making more friends over there, doing like a barbecue series.
So really going to be doing a jump from horror
once we hit November, but my brain is going to
need it. If you're here in Portland where I am now,
(43:50):
it is a weird vibe.
Speaker 4 (43:51):
It is a weird vibe.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Anyone protesting on the eighteenth for the No Kings protest
stay safe? Those are like the real horrors with ice
and everything happening. So it's just what a cluster fuck
of a time to be alive right now. Send me
your thoughts, send me your notes, let me very much
(44:13):
talk to you tomorrow. Thank you so much for listening
to another episode of Broad's sex Ador. I am already
losing my voice. I feel like I've been really under
(44:33):
the weather the last few days. At first I thought
I just bummed myself out doing research. Now I think
I may have caught something. I have to pack. I'm
very anxious. I have a couple of doctor appointments this week,
which I'm not looking forward to, but I need to go.
And I also feel like I just keep running away
from my life. I've spent more time away from Portland
(44:56):
than in Portland since June, which is this is just
something I kind of do sometimes, but I don't know,
just feeling kind of uncomfortable in general, if that makes sense.
It's like a weird anxiet anything, and just this constant
(45:17):
feeling of always being between two places. So I'll be
in Kansas City for a while, like I keep mentioning,
I'm not even sure how long.
Speaker 4 (45:29):
Then I want to go see my mom in Florida
for their Thanksgiving or Christmas some of the holidays.
Speaker 3 (45:37):
I just feel like it gets hard being so far
away from everybody. I have people here too, but then
I'm just so far away from so many of the
people that I love, and the older I get, like,
the less adaptive.
Speaker 4 (45:50):
To it that I am.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I've basically been doing that since I was eighteen, leaving
the state or leaving the country, but now that I'm older,
it gets feels just a little harder.
Speaker 4 (46:00):
It gets harder to do.
Speaker 3 (46:03):
I feel like all of my friends are spread out
across the whole country, and where it used to kind
of be like this fun thing to go visit everybody,
now I just feel like I kind of want everyone
all in one place, and it feels like having no
roots and being totally disconnected and disjointed and feeling like
I should own a house and have a family and
(46:27):
all of these things that I don't have. Is that
that sound extremely pathetic or is that relatable at all?
Speaker 4 (46:36):
It's just been weighing heavy on me.
Speaker 3 (46:37):
It's really been bumming me out, and I don't know.
Speaker 4 (46:42):
I'm really nervous. I'm nervous about the world. I'm nervous
about the podcast. I'm nervous about what's going to happen
with everything.
Speaker 3 (46:51):
And I may love being scared when it comes to horror,
but when it comes to generalized anxiety and panic to
I'm definitely definitely not a fan, So thank you for
sticking with me.
Speaker 4 (47:06):
Thank you if you still listening this far, and if you.
Speaker 3 (47:10):
Haven't left a review or rated the podcast five stars
or done.
Speaker 4 (47:15):
All of those things.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
I have to remember to start saying this at the
beginning of the podcast, I always forget.
Speaker 4 (47:20):
Please do that.
Speaker 3 (47:21):
If you enjoyed this episode, or any of these episode,
please send them to a friend.
Speaker 4 (47:25):
It really really helps me out.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
I can you tell my brain is just all over
the place right now. I'm doing like the shaky leg
thing and swallowing too much and feeling generally insane. So yeah,
doing all this horror movie research is gonna just be
great for me mentally. But once I commit to something
(47:49):
like I'm gonna do thirty one episodes and I'm in
thirty one days, I just have to do it. Like
I'm so stupidly stubborn. Send me your scared stories, send
me your podcast ideas, if you want to come on.
Speaker 4 (48:04):
For a guest episode.
Speaker 3 (48:05):
Having guests actually really helps me out, and I love
talking to other people about this stuff.
Speaker 4 (48:12):
It gets hard just talking to myself.
Speaker 3 (48:13):
That's why I like to use a lot of clips
and articles, so it's not just my opinion with everything.
But you can find me online at Daniella Screama, at
Broad's next Door on all the things. I'm still going
to make a Facebook group.
Speaker 4 (48:31):
I keep forgetting to do that. I have to firmly
put it on.
Speaker 3 (48:34):
My list because I'd love a space where you all
can just kind of gather. I know a lot of
people are off Facebook. I don't think there's a way
to do that on Instagram, which is where most of
my followers are. I do have a TikTok, I only
have like five hundred followers there. I can never make
TikTok work, so Instagram is my main base. I read
(48:55):
all of my dms on there. I check my personal
account more than Broad's, which I need to get get
better at. I'm just locked into my personal account more.
I keep up with a little bit more, but I'll
work on that. You can also email me at broadsnextdoor
dot com or broad'snext to Door at gmail dot com.
(49:17):
I'm gonna try and get more stuff on the Patreon,
but don't subscribe to that yet because I have not
updated it for a while, and I will let you
know when I do. I have built this whole podcast
studio to do video episodes, and it's so hard. It
is just like a whole other animal to do video.
So having some regrets there, having some regrets deep in
(49:40):
my regrets, deep in my feelings, deep in my thoughts
and everything else. I love you very much. I will
talk to you tomorrow. I will be back to you
with Curse Movies Poltergeist, which is going to be split
into two parts because my research and my writing ended
up being ten million years and words long.
Speaker 4 (50:01):
And I'll talk to you soon. Bye,
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