Morbid Curiosity Meets Romance with Dr. Coltan Scrivner

Short Description

Are readers of dark romance or bodice rippers more morbidly curious than those who read sweet romcoms? Is the allure of horror and scary romance similar. Dr. Coltan Scrivner joins Shelf Love to discuss his new book, “Morbidly Curious,” and its insights on why people are drawn to scary media. The conversation delves into how understanding morbid curiosity can provide new perspectives on romance readers, the stereotypes surrounding both horror and romance fans, and the psychological underpinnings of consuming these genres. Dr. Scrivner shares his research on formidability dynamics within horror, how horror media impacts its audience, and the surprising therapeutic benefits they may offer.

Tags

horror and romance, book discussion, scholarly

Show Notes

Are readers of dark romance or bodice rippers more morbidly curious than those who read sweet romcoms? Is the allure of horror and scary romance similar. Dr. Coltan Scrivner joins Shelf Love to discuss his new book, “Morbidly Curious,” and its insights on why people are drawn to scary media. The conversation delves into how understanding morbid curiosity can provide new perspectives on romance readers, the stereotypes surrounding both horror and romance fans, and the psychological underpinnings of consuming these genres. Dr. Scrivner shares his research on formidability dynamics within horror, how horror media impacts its audience, and the surprising therapeutic benefits they may offer.

Guest: Dr. Coltan Scrivner

Website | Substack | Book

Transcript

Andrea Martucci: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to Shelf Love, a podcast about romance novels and how they reflect, explore, challenge, and shape desire.

I'm your host, Andrea Martucci, and on this episode I'm joined by Dr. Coltan Scrivner to discuss Morbidly Curious, the topic and the title of his new book about why we can't look away from scary things, and how his research may have some interesting insights into studying romance readers.

Coltan, thanks so much for being here.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Happy to be on. Thank you for having me.

Andrea Martucci: I will eventually get to why I invited somebody who studies horror media onto a romance novel podcast. But before we get there, what's your origin story? How did you end up as a psychologist studying morbid curiosity?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I was in grad school and I was interested in a lot of different things. I was broadly interested in human behavior and why humans do the things that they do. Unfortunately, that's too broad for a dissertation. You do have to narrow that down. And at one point, I don't remember the exact aha [00:01:00] moment it was, but I do remember, I, I started thinking about these paradoxes that humans have.

And there's a lot of them, there's a lot of things that humans do that are a little strange. But one of them was that humans almost universally shun violence. But there are certain circumstances where violence is not only okay but celebrated. And that was really intriguing to me.

And so I started out studying how people make sense of violence when it's entertainment versus when it's an immoral act. And so I started out studying that, doing some eye tracking studies. So I would give people images of violence that were sanctioned or not sanctioned violence and see where they looked and try to have them talk about it as they're looking at it to make sense of what they were thinking.

And then I got into this sort of second line of research with haunted houses or haunted attractions during Halloween because I started thinking well, violence is scary. And I guess humans do scare themselves for fun. I like horror movies, tons of people like Halloween and horror movies.

And so I thought maybe there's some overlap [00:02:00] there. And so I ended up in Denmark one year doing this haunted house study asking why and how people play with fear. So how do you have fun when you're being scared? We did the study and I came back and I was now in my, I guess my second year of my PhD and I remember, I was talking to my advisor and he was saying, do you have any ideas for what you wanna focus on?

And I said I have these two big projects, this one on violence and why people are sometimes interested in it. And I have this one on fear and why people can sometimes get enjoyment out of fear. And he said that sounds like morbid curiosity. And I said, yeah, I guess it does. And so I, you know, I then did my due diligence and went and scoured the academic literature for something like that.

I had done it separately, for violence and for fear and there wasn't a lot. And when I did the search for morbid curiosity, there was even less. And so it was just this nice combination of something I was really interested in, had been doing a bit of work on, and that for some reason, no other psychologist was really doing anything on theoretically or [00:03:00] empirically.

So it was a perfect topic.

Andrea Martucci: And it's such a great term as well. Did you say thank you to that advisor in your book acknowledgements? 'Cause it's a great title.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. I did thank him in the book acknowledgements. I of course thanked him later on for kind of, I guess I had all of this swirling and he's like, well, that sounds like this, right? Yeah, it was nice. That was an aha moment oh yeah, I guess it is.

And yeah, it just so happened again that even though it was something that, I can sit at an airport bar and talk to someone about what I do and they understand it and have thoughts about it, or I can talk to an academic about it and they understand it and have thoughts about it.

So it's something that pretty much every, it's like if you were to talk to someone about love, right? If I researched a love, you can pretty much talk about that with anyone. It doesn't matter what their background is, and they have some interesting thoughts about it. And the same is true of morbid curiosity.

And it just shocked me that psychologists just didn't seem that interested in it for one reason or another.

Andrea Martucci: When you sit down at a bar like at an airport bar and somebody says, oh, what do you do? And you say, I study morbid curiosity. [00:04:00] I'm gonna draw a corollary here with romance. They're gonna form certain assumptions in their mind about you. I'm curious what the stereotypes are that you encounter most frequently.

I'm guessing people are like, oh, did you pull the wings off of butterflies when you were a child?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. I haven't had, I haven't had any any of those, thankfully, or maybe they, they thought those things and didn't say them, but, no I actually do a lot of different things, and so that is like the hardest question for me to answer for people I don't know is what do you do?

Because I'm a scientist. I do research on morbid curiosity. I'm a writer. I am a film festival director. I, own a shop here in town. I own a bed and breakfast.

Andrea Martucci: Hold on. You have to, say, it's called the "boodega".

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: The boodega. Yeah. I opened a mysterious themed convenience store. Basically I wanted to open a spooky shop, but I needed it to make money.

And so it's a spooky shop that sells beer and cigarettes and snacks. Yeah, and I own a Victorian bed and breakfast here in town, so I do a lot of different stuff, but I guess like [00:05:00] my identity right is I usually tell people, I don't use the term, I usually say I, I'm a psychologist and I study why we are interested in fear and things that sometimes disturb us or disgust us. And then usually they form their own. They're like, oh, like horror movies, or true crime, or I love, usually they'll say oh, I love True Crime, or, oh, I love horror movies. Or, oh, I hate horror movies. But yeah, usually I try to give a descriptor rather than a title, to try to prevent that, because people do get confused, they're like, what do you mean you, you study morbid curiosity.

What does that mean about you?

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. Coltan, have you ever read a romance novel?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I can't say that I have,

I guess I've read, in high school probably I don't, is Pride and Prejudice considered a romance novel?

Andrea Martucci: We can call it an ur romance

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. It's like a borderline one. Okay.

Andrea Martucci: Yes philosophically one but maybe not in the

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: But not a true, I haven't read like a true true romance novel. No, I don't think

Andrea Martucci: Okay. Alright, so I'm gonna give you a test right now. If you had to imagine how an average member [00:06:00] of American society perceives a romance reader, how would you answer that question? Who are, who is a romance reader? According to the

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: According to this is, yeah, this is like Family Feud. What do people say about romance readers?

Andrea Martucci: Yes.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I would probably think that the average person would think that a romance reader is an older woman, maybe in her sixties, who's married,

Andrea Martucci: Okay. And then what other characteristics like about

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: soft empathetic, probably maybe a mother, probably a mother, maybe a grandmother. Very conscientious. I would think that they are quiet, maybe introverted.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. So like high in warmth?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm trying to think yeah, like my grandmother, that's who I, like very warm, caring, empathetic.

Again, may maybe a little introverted

Andrea Martucci: How skilled do you think they are at [00:07:00] uh, I don't know. Skilled work.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: like trade work.

Andrea Martucci: or I don't know, anything valuable to society.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Ah, yeah. My, my intuition would be that's not their, yeah, that's not their first. They're probably like, if I, again, were to stereotype this, imagine this, I'm thinking like, okay, probably someone who because they're older, they may have stayed at home when they were of working age. If they're not of working age.

Probably like productive in the home, but maybe not to other people. More productive to their family than to other people.

Andrea Martucci: Right. Okay. Are you familiar with the Stereotype Content Model? This is like Amy Cuddy and, Sue Fiske. Susan

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Susan Fiske?

Andrea Martucci: Susan Fiske, yes. Okay. This is, so this is Susan Fiske and Amy Cuddy and other academics who worked on this, but it's essentially this two by two grid of warmth and competence. So like high or low warmth, competence, and then categorizing stereotypes based on, so warmth. So like how empathetic and emotionally supportive, et cetera are you, versus competence more productive type [00:08:00] things.

And everything you said just now. You basically just described the paternalistic stereotype to a T, right? So high warmth, low competence, older, a woman, a mother, all of these things. And all those things obviously are just associated with women, but like helpful women as opposed to lesbian feminists who "are not productive members of society" who would be in a different quadrant. And I'm again being super stereotypical here.

So I think it's very interesting, if we think about the stereotype of romance readers, how we imagine the romance reader. It's so closely tied to like gender and role in society and I'm curious with horror fans so maybe let's talk about like horror movie fans, right?

Because let's separate it a little bit from

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah. Readers have a little bit different demographics sometimes than than film fans. And it is interesting, when we think of romance, we probably do think of novels. And when we think of horror, we probably do think of movies or something more [00:09:00] visceral maybe. I don't know.

Andrea Martucci: Although of course, there's like Stephen King.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: then, horror. Yeah. It's like very genre. Yeah. Yeah. I think most people in society, probably, maybe it's 'cause most people don't read, but most people I think of horror as a film first genre and romance. I'm not sure, but I would imagine maybe a book first.

I, I would think of it as a book

Andrea Martucci: I think so. Yeah. Okay. So if you think of an average horror movie fan how would an average member of American society describe them, do you think?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I actually I've done a study on this so I know how they describe them

Andrea Martucci: Perfect.

Tell me.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Because I had that same question. Because when I started researching this, I wanted to know that very question. What do people think about them? Because collective ideas about a group are sometimes accurate, right?

And sometimes they're really not. Sometimes the perception is accurate, but the cause is not, or the, the perception is accurate from one angle, but not from other angles. And so I was curious about that. And, most of what I was finding were like film critics, particularly famous film critics like [00:10:00] Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert

Andrea Martucci: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: really thought like horror movie fans were depraved and hated women.

And all these like, terrible things they thought really bad things about them. And part of that is maybe because, they grew up in the, or they were popular during the like early slasher era. These were like cheaper violent films. But in any case, they had these intuitions about horror fans that they were violent and depraved and shouldn't be around other people. That's almost a word for word quote from Gene Siskel.

And then, I think this was like two or three years ago when the new, one of the new saw movies came out, there's New York Post critic that said almost the same thing. And I thought, oh my God, this is like still around. Like people still think this and they're telling other people this.

So I did this study where it was super simple and I did it mostly because if I was gonna study this, I needed to confirm okay, do other people, do real people in the world really think this, not just Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert. And so what I did is I created a bunch of randomized user [00:11:00] profiles.

If you were to look at a, I dunno, a LinkedIn page or a Facebook page from 2005. So basically it had a name, it had an age, a gender, and a favorite horror movie genre, and that's all it was. And they were just randomly generated ages, between like 21 and 50. I just picked the most 20 common male and female names in the last 20 years or something.

And then obviously man or a woman. And then I think five to 10 popular, well-known genres: horror, romance was one of them, comedy, action adventure, so on and so forth. Randomized them up, had a bunch of different ones, presented them to a couple of hundred people and just said, Hey, these are profiles of people from another study I'm doing. We're curious how people think about other people based on what they present, like you would see in a dating profile or something. How do you make sense of people? And so we want you to tell us what do you think about their personality? If you were to guess, like what kind of personality would 33-year-old Ben who likes horror movies have?[00:12:00]

And so we would have them rate them on things like compassion and empathy and extroversion and openness to experience. All these different traits people might be familiar with. What I found was that people who saw a horror movie fan in the profile, they were much more likely to rate them as less empathetic, less compassionate, less kind.

And I always give people a fill in the blank, tell me more at the end of surveys. And some people would just straight up tell you I thought horror fans wouldn't be very kind, or I thought they wouldn't be very empathetic. There was an interesting caveat to that, which was I also asked people who were taking the survey, what's your favorite genre?

That movie, and people who said they were horror fans did not rate horror fans as less kind, less empathetic, and less compassionate. So if I'm a horror fan, I'm taking this survey, I see a profile come up and it's a horror fan. I don't have these same intuitions about horror fans that everyone else has.

I rate them just as kind as an empathetic and everything else as anyone else. Part of that [00:13:00] is probably some ingroup bias. You tend to think people like you are like you, people who like things like you are like you.

Andrea Martucci: I'm not depraved,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah, I'm not depraved. So probably a 33-year-old Ben, the horror fan is not depraved. Some of that's ingroup bias, but some of it is they also just hang out with and know horror fans better than other people. So yeah, that was the first kind of trek into that area because I wanted to do these studies on empathy and horror fandom and as a scientist, I was like, I need empirical proof that people think horror fans are depraved. And if they don't think that great. Like I would prefer if people didn't think that, right? Yeah. But they did. And so then I, then I went off and did these studies showing that horror fans actually don't have lower empathy, lower levels of compassion no matter how you measure it.

And in fact, they have higher levels of perspective taking, which makes sense. If you watch a lot of movies or read a lot of books to enjoy that, you need to be pretty good at taking the perspective of someone who's not you,

Andrea Martucci: Right. You mentioned at the beginning that a lot of other academics hadn't really delved into this before. And so similar [00:14:00] with romance academia,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I can only think Maryanne Fisher, and she's if I were to think who is the romance expert in psychology? That would be who - she's in psychology. She's in Canada, up northeast somewhere.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. I'm gonna look her up after, St. Mary's is that

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: St. Mary's. Yeah, that sounds right.

Andrea Martucci: Evolutionary foundations of human

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: she studied, she studies like mating and love in fiction.

Andrea Martucci: okay. Do you know

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: fantastic.

Andrea Martucci: who is it? I'm thinking of there's isn't there like another famous Fisher? I think she recently passed away.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Oh, yeah. You're thinking of Helen Fisher?

Andrea Martucci: Helen Fisher. Yeah. Any relationship?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I don't think

Andrea Martucci: Very similar topics actually, anyways. So there's the study of interpersonal love and then there's the study of popular romance fiction, and then obviously there's overlaps there, right? Like to what extent does popular romance fiction engage with the things happening with you know, interpersonal relationships and how they're evolving over time

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: To what extent do our stories match our realities?

Andrea Martucci: [00:15:00] Exactly right. But I think something that's really a shame in particular, in popular romance fiction studies is that, I'm sorry, I don't wanna say a shame. It's a gap. A lot of the scholars who come into the area start with more of a literature or humanities background

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Same with horror.

Andrea Martucci: right. And then a little bit of like media studies or cultural studies. But very rarely do you get psychology or social psychology or,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: again, I don't know why psychologists are not interested in this,

Andrea Martucci: I,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: because I, so I got my, I had my academic advisor at UChicago, who is, he studied monkeys. But, I was I was trained as a biologist. I was trained as a humans are animals. Let's think about them as animals first, and a particular kind of animals second.

But he was on my committee and my secondary advisor in some ways was a literature scholar, because that's who was studying horror from this perspective and like, why we like scary stories.

Andrea Martucci: So it's like a very text-based as opposed to thinking about like the people who do [00:16:00] it. And so I'm a marketer, right? Like I, that is like my day job. And so a lot of marketing is about human psychology. And so for me, when I come into studying these books, I'm often much more curious about

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: The consumer.

Andrea Martucci: the audience. Yes. Who are they? Why do they like this? What are they getting out of it? How do you optimize the product to appeal to those emotional triggers as much as possible? So I personally have taken much more of like self-study approach to as much as possible like, you know, templates for doing romance research.

And so I picked up your book as an advanced reader copy. And I don't really consider myself as a horror fan. I definitely listen to My Favorite Murder. I definitely do the true crime thing. But generally I'm like, oh, I don't wanna watch Saw I don't wanna do any of this but I'm always interested in psychological approaches to media and so I started reading your book and I was like, [00:17:00] oh my God, there are so many ideas here about, obviously you're studying horror fans, but like that you could apply these same methodologies to ro and obviously some of your studies already overlap. I think it was like with like romance movies, which I would say are different enough that some of the takeaways I was like, I would be really curious if you brought that into the book world.

But I think it's fascinating that these genres are so massively popular and all of the media attention about them is these superficial sensationalist takes, which is just a media problem

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah.

Andrea Martucci: But there's so much. Empty space. Yeah. That there's so much that is like unstudied about these things that most people spend a lot of their free time on.

And I feel like when I delve into these studies, there's these very general frameworks, right? What was the personality framework you used for the study you just described?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: So the Big Five is probably, it's like I use that as a [00:18:00] control in a lot of my studies. So the Big Five would be the five personality traits that seem to explain a lot of our behaviors and tendencies. So the acronym you can use to remember it is "ocean."

So O is openness to experience. C is conscientiousness, E is extroversion or extroversion. Introversion. A is agreeableness and N is neuroticism. So that's , a good base, like if Big Five doesn't explain it, you might have something interesting because it explains a lot of our behaviors.

Andrea Martucci: And so in your study you were looking for statistically significant differences in any of those factors for people who are interested in horror versus other genres.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Or even if I'm looking at say other traits, what kind of traits do horror movie fans have? If you control for the Big Five, what does this look like? Or behaviors or yeah. It's not it's often in comparison to other genres, but sometimes it's just, I wanna know something about horror fans and, I want to control for, if I control for their personality, do we still see these effects come through?

So is [00:19:00] there something unique, about watching a horror movie, regardless of who you are as a person that can affect your behavior?

Andrea Martucci: So not just causal, like people like horror because they are more extroverted

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. That's one question. One like interesting group of questions. Yeah.

And then the second group is what do horror movie fans do? How does being a horror movie fan affect you? If it does.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah, when I was writing the structure of questions I wanted to ask you, it was like stereotypes who do we think these consumers are? And then structurally what actually makes something horror, for example, or what is the actual thing? And then impact. So how does consuming this circle back and impact those people.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. That's a good piecemeal way to take it. Yeah. That's how I approach it. Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. So we've talked about stereotypes, right? So there's definitely this idea about horror fans. You studied them. Actually, they're not a bunch of depraved weirdos,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. No more depraved than anyone else

Andrea Martucci: No more depraved than anybody else.

By the way, I took your [00:20:00] test. I took your morbid curiosity test. I'm extremely morbidly curious.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: And it surprises some people because I think, and I mentioned this in the book, like I use horror fans as this prototypical example because they are the most common large group of morbidly curious people. And every horror fan certainly is morbidly curious, but there are plenty of people who are non horror fans who still score high in morbid curiosity.

They just don't prefer the audio visual extreme version of that. But yeah. I'm curious, did you score high in minds of dangerous people, I assume since you said you liked true crime.

Andrea Martucci: Let's see Minds of Dangerous people. I was 4.67,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Mm-hmm. And these are all out of out of five points. Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: So population average, 3.93 on that. So I was above

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: you're like two standard deviations above the Yeah. Top five or 10%, right?

Andrea Martucci: My paranormal score was 4.33. Population average, 3.43. That seems

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: That's about a, yeah, maybe one standard deviation or so, yeah, maybe one and a half

Andrea Martucci: Okay. Compared to the other ones. Generally lower in body violation, [00:21:00] bodily injury score. So I was 3.5, but that's still

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: above the average, I think.

Andrea Martucci: That's still higher than average. And then my violence score, 4.33. Population average, 3.18.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Interesting. Okay. Did the violence one surprise you?

Andrea Martucci: Yes.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: because that tends to be one of the more dimorphic ones, so there's actually not a lot of difference between men and women let's say in average morbid curiosity. So like total score, like what was your total score on?

Andrea Martucci: It was 4.21.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Okay. Yeah, so that's above average for the population, but when I look at men and women's average morbid curiosity scores, they tend to not really be that different. Usually they're not significantly different at all.

But there are some slight differences in the sub categories, which makes sense, right? That taps into different things. Women tend to be not only more interested in people, but also just better at understanding people. And so they tend to be a bit higher in like minds of dangerous people because that, a lot of that has to do with thinking about the way people think, right? [00:22:00] Same thing with the paranormal. There's a lot of empath type stuff going on. Sometimes it's a bit female skewed. Violence almost always, or I would say always is male skewed. So it's interesting that you score a bit higher in violence. Did that surprise you?

Andrea Martucci: It did. And so I said at the beginning, I don't usually like horror movies, but I did watch some in anticipation of our conversation

so,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: What did you watch?

Andrea Martucci: Okay. I watched Us,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Okay. That's a good one.

Andrea Martucci: Which I was like, I don't wanna watch this. And then I watched it. I was like, oh, that was really good. It was, yeah. And I liked his previous one Get Out.

Yeah. I had watched

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: That's a, I would say that's like a, to, we can talk about this later, but to me Get Out is a thriller a bit, it's like borderline, it's like kind of a horror thriller. Yeah. But it has a lot of thriller elements, elements of a thriller movie.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. Okay. And then I watched the one you just wrote about on Substack Until Dawn.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Okay. So that's interesting. Did you like it?

Andrea Martucci: Wait, did I like it? I think I ended up liking [00:23:00] it.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: I wouldn't call it Until Dawn, like a traditional, classic horror movie? 'cause it's got a lot of weird elements. It's got violence, it's got the paranormal, it's got it does have this strange mix of things and it's based on a video game. Usually movies that are based on video games are not good.

This one was fine. It was interesting enough. They did a good job with the idea that you can die and come back and keep having to do that. That's a hard thing to, to portray correctly.

Andrea Martucci: I think so. I watched it with my husband and he does like Letterboxed reviews, and one his friends said, I think this would be a really scary movie for children.

And I was like,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: You're like, it was scary to

Andrea Martucci: That was, that's what I went in with. I was like I don't know how I'm gonna feel about this.

I will say, I don't like the jump scares. I do a lot of things to control the experience where I'm kind of like, I don't wanna look at I started a sewing project. I'm just gonna, I'll just pay attention to this, but I'll just be back here. Yeah I don't love the jump scares.

I think that I am a dark coper.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: [00:24:00] where as soon as I started to understand the themes of the movie, I got much more comfortable with the movie. So I was like, oh, it's about not leaving your friends behind, but also not letting somebody drag you down with them with do you know what I mean?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: a lot of interpersonal stuff in Until Dawn. There's a lot of like obvious interpersonal dilemmas that show up,

Andrea Martucci: yes.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Which is probably interesting to someone who's like a marketer interested in people interested even in romance, there's a lot of interpersonal, it's almost all interpersonal dilemma.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. My comment was, I feel like we haven't built enough of a foundation about the relationship between, not all five of them, but like the core group of friends where I was like, there's so much emphasis on we don't leave each other behind and we stick together. I was like, what is the emotional basis for this?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: And one of them was like a boyfriend that was like

Andrea Martucci: Like he was new. right? But the rest of [00:25:00] them, I was like, why? I was like, what? And my husband's like, it was a video game. I was like, I know, but this is a movie. Like

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: But it's probably 'cause you're a reader, right? And then books you do get into, you have a chance to get into that like background. A good writer will give you the background for that in a book. Whereas in a movie, it's like you have two hours at the most to get the story told. I think with books you can and again, good writers often do go more into the background and like really get you invested and then they hook you better in a book.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. And obviously different formats like one of my scholar friends, Dr. Jayashree Kamble, who has more of a cultural studies foundation. She has this theory about romance adaptations where it's the difference between showing and telling feelings.

So yeah, like a romance novel will show feelings, tell action. A movie will show action, tell feelings.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yep. Which is bizarre because you would think that in audio visual format, you should be showing

Andrea Martucci: yes.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: feelings. It'd be easy to show the feelings because that's what we are [00:26:00] like, if we're talking about humans as evolved creatures, like we're evolved to look at another person, listen to another person, and then understand their feelings.

And so you would think that movies would be great at that. But I guess when you have more room on a page, you can describe how people are feeling in a way that it, that feels like you're showing them.

Andrea Martucci: Yes. Yeah. And if you've seen the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie, I think that movie does a really good job of using film to show the internal feelings and emotions, like the hand thing and the, when they're dancing, they feel like they're the only two in the room, and the movie

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Mm-hmm. TV shows are good at that, because TV shows have a broader, even if you have one season, you've got eight episodes or eight hours, which is, maybe roughly about the length of a book to get through a story, and so you can explore backgrounds and feelings much more in depth than you can with a movie.

Andrea Martucci: So again I'm not super in depth in terms of my knowledge of horror movies, but I was like, I don't think I like horror, but I [00:27:00] did watch those and then I was remembering that I literally was one of those people who watched Contagion in like May 2020. And I ta I talked about it on the podcast I literally was like, why am I watching this and the realization I had on this very podcast was that part of it was this coping mechanism of the let me simulate this experience. And also there's a lot of these like hard emotions, but I'm intellectualizing them like okay I'm gonna stimulate this and then I'm gonna think deeply about what's happening, and then I don't have to actually examine the feelings of anxiety that I'm having about this global pandemic. And instead I can be like, these stupid drug companies are, you know what I mean? Like, you can kind of like focus more on like, oh, that person shouldn't have opened the door.

That's the problem. Instead of these big existential threats.

So I wanted to talk about the structure of horror and in your book you were talking about how do we make this like [00:28:00] immersive, like what are the elements of horror that make it immersive to literally just pull your attention in so that you can pull your mind away from maybe other things that are going on.

And then you've actually studied some of those structural elements that make it salient, engaging, and immersive. So I'd love for you to talk more about some of the studies you've done in this area.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Humans generally and animals generally have a threat bias. We're attuned to things that are potentially threatening. That's like the core of all the work I do. And it's obvious when we think about it. Yeah, I guess we are if I were outside and I had two things happening, like a threatening thing on my right and anything else on my left, I'm gonna turn and look at the threatening thing.

And that makes sense because you should know about something dangerous if it's around you. That goes through all formats that goes through real life. If you see something, it goes through media, like books and film and TV shows. As long as you can craft a compelling threat it doesn't matter what format it's in, it's gonna draw your attention better than other things.

That's why [00:29:00] anxiety is so difficult to shake in the first place, right? If you start feeling anxious or afraid about something, when people tell you just don't think about it or go do something that is relaxing, you can go do the relaxing thing, but it's difficult to have that actually outcompete the anxious thoughts because we're literally wired to pay attention to the anxious thoughts.

That's what anxiety is for is it's meant to overpower other things we're doing so that we pay attention to the threat.

I had this idea that maybe horror, which is intended to produce feelings of fear and anxiety in a safe way could be kind of like fighting fire with fire. Like maybe you can use that to compete with those feelings of anxiety you're having in the real world. So let's say I have a, I dunno, something scary coming up in a few weeks. If it's a job interview or, I'm unsure about a relationship or whatever. You can use media that is frightening. this works better actually if you tend to be afraid of [00:30:00] horror movies.

So if you tend to be a bit of a scaredy cat, this actually works better. You can use media to recapture your attention because otherwise you're sitting in this cycle of rumination and you're just ruminating about this thing that might happen, and it's really hard to actually break that cycle. But horror movies seem to be pretty good at actually breaking into that cycle and kind of giving you this off ramp.

Let's say, okay, I'm feeling anxious, I turn on a scary movie, turn on Until Dawn. I'm watching it. I'm sucked into the movie now because there's a great story about these people. I'm trying to figure out why they like each other so much and why they're in this place. And, but on top of all that, like something eerie is happening. So I really have to pay attention to what's going on in the story. What's the threat? Like, how did they find themselves in this situation? So now I'm still feeling anxious.

I haven't solved that problem. I'm just feeling anxious about a movie now.

But of course, the great thing about a movie, at least most movies, is that they're about 90 minutes to two hours and they tend to have an arc and they tend to have a resolution of some kind where the threat goes away.

At the very least after the movie [00:31:00] finishes, the threat visually goes away, right? So you're anxious about the movie. The movie ends, the threat goes away. You're not getting signals of a threat around you. Now, your body can actually turn on the, you've heard of fight or flight. There's a rest and digest counter to that.

So there's the sympathetic nervous system, which makes you ready for fight or flight. It's the gas pedal. And there's the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest or break pedal for arousal. So your parasympathetic nervous system will be cued to turn on because the threat's gone. Now I should rest and conserve calories and relax. And so it can actually help end that cycle because you can't really be actively anxious about two things at once.

Even if you're the most anxious person in the world, it's really hard to actually hold two different anxious thoughts in your mind at the same time, unless you tie them together somehow.

But it's difficult to be anxious about a test I have in a week and the interview I have in a week at the same time. I can alternate between them, but I can't really be actively consumed by both. And [00:32:00] so what a movie does, is whatever the thing is that's occupying your attention, it pulls you out of that, focuses you- and a book can do this really well too, maybe even better. But it does require, books require a bit more effort, to conjure up. You gotta, you have to get into the book, read it, 20 or 30 pages before you're really sucked in. You have to put a little bit of effort in. But it can immerse you better in some ways.

But it sucks you into the story. You're consumed by that. Then there's a resolution. By that time you're not thinking, ideally, about the other threatening thing.

And there's some research showing that horror is good at this, or at least scary play is good at this. Some research at haunted houses with EEGs that measure brainwave activity.

So like in one study, participants came in, they put on an EEG helmet that measured brainwaves when they did certain things, when they ruminated about bad experiences they'd had before. Then they went through this haunted attraction, this Halloween haunted attraction. They came out, they did the same thing again.

And what the researchers found was that after the haunted house, after they had went through this scary play, 30 to [00:33:00] 40 minute scary play experience, people didn't have as much activity, it was, I think specifically like the gamma waves, which are associated with arousal. So the gamma waves in their brain were actually less reactive to rumination about a negative event in their life.

And so even when they would try to think about it, it would affect them less. So there does seem to be this almost calming effect or almost like an inoculation, like a vaccine, even if temporary to intrusive thoughts and negative thoughts. And you hear horror fans talk about this all the time.

This is how I got into this line of research is reading op-eds and magazines and Reddit threads of people, horror fans saying, hey, I accidentally stumbled across this cure for my anxiety. And it's, it's horror, right? And nobody was talking about, no academics were talking about that at all.

So that was super fascinating to me because this is something that people in that community, some of them had identified. And then when I started thinking about it, I was like it could work like this and this. And so that's how I got into that. [00:34:00] That topic was actually from people in the community mentioning that this seems to work.

Andrea Martucci: Okay, so I think there's some interesting parallels, I think, to romance here, where structurally romance novels always end with a happily ever after, and that's often known as an HEA or there's an HFN, happy for now.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah.

Andrea Martucci: And a lot of people say, oh, romance novels are my therapy, or they help me deal with anxiety.

It's that resolution that completes the cycle like you're talking about where I can't resolve the anxiety around my interview next week until after that interview.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Or even worse if it's generalized anxiety and you don't even know what you're anxious about, right? So there's no steps you can even take to make it go away, even if there was something that you were truly anxious about.

Andrea Martucci: Right. So it allows you to go be immersed with something that feels salient to you and then you get super engaged. You're putting yourselves in the shoes of the protagonist, or at least you feel like you're part of the [00:35:00] experience.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: And you're imagining, what would I do if I was in this situation? What would I,

Andrea Martucci: exactly. Are you familiar with Narrative Transportation Theory?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Probably not by title. So I was not trained as a psychologist at all. I do psychology work. No. I have no training in psychology. So I do psychology work. I hang out with psychologists, but I was trained as an anthropologist and biologists and undergrad.

I did forensics training in my masters and then behavior biology in my PhD. So I think about humans as creatures, right? So I'm familiar with biological theories and names, but a lot of the psychological theory names, if I can be blunt, I think that they're just, they're flimsy.

Like they're not based on anything. They're just Hey, we see this thing happening. Let's call it this. But then there's no question of why do they do this? Why does this happen?

And so I'm not super familiar with with some psychological theories. Narrative, transportation theory. Based on the name, I can guess what that's about. But please I would actually love for you to tell me.

Andrea Martucci: It's, I think this is Melanie C Green.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: And I know the psychologists, and I know their work, but I don't [00:36:00] always know. I don't always know the names of their theories or, yeah. Anyways.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. And actually I want to engage with the point you made about like the flimsiness. So it's essentially the idea that when you become immersed into a narrative that is, and there's, like a framework here, but that's like salient and emotionally engaging and all of these things that you are actually transported mentally into that world.

And then when you leave that world, you have been changed at least a little bit in the sense that you have gone through that experience. So it's like you have experienced the world that you just inhabited and you come back and you have retained the lessons of that experience, right? And so I think in terms of trying to understand why people like these stories. That is the, maybe the, trying to explain this over in this world of science that you're studying [00:37:00] with brainwaves and brain chemicals.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I think psychological studies are important and good. I think when people read studies about FMRI, which measures where blood goes in the brain to see what's, what parts of the brain are active, right?

When people read that or you read in the media, "a brain study was done..." I'm actually super critical of FMRI, I think it doesn't tell us very, it doesn't tell us very much at all because we don't actually know what those regions of the brain are for. We assume that when blood goes to that region, oxygen's going to that region's active. But we don't have a Rosetta Stone of what that region of the brain does.

We learn what that region of the brain does by studying blood that goes to it. But then we make an assumption that it's only for that, or maybe it's for that and something else. So I'm actually really critical of certain, like hard science measures not because they're bad measures, but because we way over interpret them.

But yeah I think this idea so when you read a story, you are changed by it because you've mentally experienced it. Sure. I buy that. I don't know that it needs its own [00:38:00] theory. That's

just like, you know, if I, if I think about something, I'm changed because I've thought about something.

Yeah I suppose so. That's what thinking is for. That's what mental time travel and mental simulation is for, is preparation for these things. Right. Like, imagining, what am I gonna do in 10 minutes? Or imagining what would I do if I was in this situation, because I'm gonna be in that situation later.

Yeah, of course. That's you should be changed by that. If not, then thinking is not very useful.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. And I think what always gets complicated about these studies is what I'm interested in as part of that is I'm like, okay, cool. That makes sense. That process makes sense. And it's again, it's like also essentially explained by the study you did, right? I was anxious about something. This pulled me into a different set of state, and then I experienced, like I was pulled in because it was dramatic and salient, whatever. I experienced it. And then I received some resolution, which then left me feeling better, let's say changed. Yeah. Whenever these theories, it's like they're trying to then break down structurally what has to be present to enable you to [00:39:00] get into that state? And it's always so complicated, right? Because it's like, are you in the right place in time in your life? What kind of person are you, what are the elements of the story itself that either must be present or must appeal to you in particular?

And and so obviously it gets like very complex and very complicated, but at the end of the day here, I feel like structurally it's that cycle. It's that something has to happen, it has to be stressful, and then it has to resolve.

And that is fundamentally romance, novels, right?

But it's interesting where you maybe wouldn't think romance and horror have that much in common other than the fact that they're both like genres under the umbrella of like adventure stories, romance writ large. Okay, cool. Great. They have that in common, but oh, horror is scary. Romance is about ooey gooey emotional feelings. And then I think people are really surprised when a lot of romance novels deal with like really [00:40:00] stressful, violent toxic relationship dynamics.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. There's, there's no, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I would imagine there are no romance novels where the protagonist meets the love of their life and they live happily ever after. There's no

Andrea Martucci: people try it, and they're the most, and they're the most boring books on earth.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Because that's not what we're interested in simulating.

We're interested in simulating things that we're morbidly curious. We're interested in simulating things that could go wrong. Now, things that could go wrong could be an interaction with some sort of predator or monster or killer, but it could also be like inviting someone into my life to be like, partners with them for life and they end up being toxic and awful, which is something that happens all the time to people. So of course we would want to simulate that. And of course we're gonna make it as extreme as possible because when we're reading a book, we're in this safe position where we can explore those like really dark, toxic, awful situations.

So like if we think we're prepared for the worst situation possible, then we can probably get [00:41:00] through something less than that, that we might experience with someone we meet, on Tinder or at a bar or whatever.

Yeah, it makes sense to me that's, of course, it would be dark and toxic and awful things that happen.

Andrea Martucci: And okay, so here's my connection points as I was reading your book, I was like, okay. In the 1970s in particular, gothic romance novels were really popular. And there's this really great essay called Somebody's Trying to Kill Me, and I Think it's My Husband by Joanna Russ.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Okay. I haven't heard of it, but I like it already.

Andrea Martucci: it's, it's essentially like exploring this idea that in gothic romance novels, the tension is, I think I love this man, but he also might be trying to kill me. And, and, And obviously it's drawing from like gothic tradition. But then it, it has this like weird overlap with romance where it's like, oh, but actually it turns out that all these scary things that this guy we're doing are explained by how much he loves me and.

Okay, so there's like gothic romances, which are kind of part of the tradition of today's romances. There's bodice rippers from like late [00:42:00] seventies, early eighties, where, there's literal rape where, the book opens where the hero's like, oh, I thought you were a sex worker, so I raped you, and oops, I got you pregnant. Now we have to get married, and now we're gonna fall in love. And then today we have something called dark romance, which is, you either have mafia or serial killers, stalkers. Yeah.

Like very dangerous. And whatever. There's permutations of this all throughout time in the genre and every single iteration of this, there is the kind of cultural backlash oh, what is wrong with these pathetic women who want to read these things. They're victims. This is the opiate of the masses. Like they're consuming these really harmful narratives, blah, blah, blah.

But when you consider it from the perspective of people who experience gendered violence, their big scary monster is society's expectations that they're gonna partner with a man.

And men in their experience are [00:43:00] like unknowable. They don't know what's going on in their head. They don't know why they do bad things to women or to other people. And so the whole story is essentially dealing with that anxiety and being like, oh, but what if he's doing these things 'cause he loves me, and what if I respond in this way to get him to protect me instead of hunting me?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah, historically, that would've been such --you have to talk to Marianne Fisher. She would be, she's much more knowledgeable about these things than I am with this particular genre. Historically that would've been the typical experience of a lot of women, which is if you live in a dangerous place, it is really good to partner with someone who is dangerous because they can protect you, but you have to make sure they're on your side and not try that they're your husband and not trying to kill you.

But you don't want someone who's not dangerous because then you're just as susceptible to the danger around you as you were before. What you want is someone who is maybe a violent, dangerous person, just not to you. [00:44:00] And that's some of the allure of the bad boy. The allure of and Marianna studied this too, like what are the most common male protagonists in romance novels?

And they're like very specific. Like she has, she's done empirical studies, like what is the most, like top five most common? And I don't recall what they were, you could probably guess them if you're, a romance

Andrea Martucci: billionaire,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: But billionaire who has a dark side, right? Like a billionaire, has a dark side, cowboy comes up often because they do their own thing and don't have a moral compass as much as some other people. But yeah, she's done these great studies looking at protagonists and what they are and the kinds of situations that women are interested in learning about. Largely women, there are probably men who read romance novels, but I would imagine it's mostly women.

Andrea Martucci: Yeah. Probably 80 plus percent women, and I think it's like that gendered violence aspect where I think that the people who are probably most interested in romance have some reason to be concerned about gendered violence. Like it could be 'cause they're queer, it could be because they [00:45:00] are a cis man who in particular feels that toxic masculinity is harming them, right?

It's somebody who finds that salient. And so there's always these things like, why don't more men read romance? I'm like, because it's not relevant.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: It's not the threat to them. That's not the thing that they're, yeah. And I think, I know you mentioned perceptions people have about romance fans. Have you ever looked at actual personality traits of romance fans?

Are the perceptions accurate or inaccurate, I guess is what,

Andrea Martucci: Okay. So I haven't delved into that. However, demographically there's all these studies where it's here's like the profile of the average romance reader. It's just the average woman. Like, Do you know what I mean? Like in terms of like age and education, marital status, all of

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. But I do wonder if personality differences show up, because I could imagine that, so like for example, with horror fans a lot of them are anxious. A lot of them actually have high levels of anxiety, and so they think about these terrible things that could happen.

And so seeing a simulation of that can be nice because they can actually see how it plays out. I would [00:46:00] imagine that if some of the perceptions of romance fans that they are maybe like warm and caring and maybe a little too forgiving, if those are true, that's exactly the kind of person who should worry about someone who's going to take advantage of them in a relationship.

That's the kind of threat that they might face. And so it makes sense that they're also interested in exploring that through simulations.

Andrea Martucci: Right. In your book, you were talking about formidability and the power disparity, and I was super interested in that because I think that. the power dynamics are the core of a good romance novel, and often it's gendered power dynamics. So could you talk a little bit more about what you found with formidability in, in horror movies?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. This is actually where my research has gone more recently. I wanted a way to define the horror genre like anyone else who's interested in film or media generally. And if you ask people like, what makes a horror movie, most of them will say well, it's scary.

And it's [00:47:00] that's an okay definition, but what's scary to me may not be scary to you. Probably isn't. What's scary to me today was probably not scary to me when I was a kid, or won't be scary to me in 20 years. It's different, changes.

And some people will say it's if the writer, director. Wanted it to be scary. They're intending for it to be scary. I think that's a better definition. But at the same time if a writer intends something to be scary and they write it wrong, that doesn't make it a horror movie or a horror novel.

Andrea Martucci: Intention versus impact.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. So it's not intention, it's not impact.

It's some, it's somewhere between that. So of course I went to the structure. I thought, okay, it's probably something, but the structure of it, and because I'm not a literature scholar, I didn't think about maybe the narrative arc so much. Because I'm a biologist, I study like creatures. I thought about the individuals and like their relationship to one another, and immediately I thought, oh in every horror film I can think of, the antagonist, the villain is much more powerful. Like stronger, more [00:48:00] predatory than the protagonist. Every single one, the protagonist is vulnerable.

Now, there are times in the story where the protagonist gets lucky, discovers a disadvantage, gains an ally, does other things that increase their formidability. And when I say formidability here, I'm using like a sort of the sciencey term of the word, but you can probably imagine what it means. It means that you can essentially bend others to your will because you are stronger than them, larger than them, have more allies than them.

All these different things that allow you to essentially exert power over another person. And so I went and I thought, okay, what about these other films? What do they have? So I thought about action films. Action films have very formidable protagonist, very formidable antagonist, superhero, super villain.

I had not thought about romance 'cause I hadn't read many. But now that I'm thinking about it, probably it's one of the only other genres where you have formidable antagonist and more helpless, maybe protagonist but no other genres aside from horror and maybe romance, are like that. And what that does is it creates a really good dynamic for [00:49:00] what do I do when I'm in danger, when I'm powerless?

Andrea Martucci: Did you see the movie Prey?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Oh yeah. I loved Prey.

Andrea Martucci: I loved Prey. So when I was reading about your studies on formidability, you were also talking about the original Predator with Arnold Schwartzenegger, where he's like a badass. And so you had to have this super badass alien predator.

And so then I was thinking about Prey where I was like, oh, it's really interesting what that movie is doing with that in mind because it's the same Predator as in the Arnold Schwarzenegger one, but the protagonist is considered to be weaker than literally every other.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: She's a young girl.

Andrea Martucci: She's a young girl. Not only is she a girl, a woman, but she's younger. She doesn't have the same training as all the other predators in her in her tribe

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: She's, yeah, she's not the prototypical warrior in her society. Like the guy she hangs out with who dies at the beginning

Andrea Martucci: right. so. So do you think using your theories on horror versus like [00:50:00] thriller or sorry, what would you call the first predator with Arnold

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: would call, it's more of an action movie because you have this team of some of the most powerful humans possible, first being hunted and then hunting this thing that is the ultimate predator.

Andrea Martucci: So what would you call Prey? How would you classify the genre?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Prey is more horror for sure. Yeah. It's definitely more horror. Now it bends toward action maybe in some parts, like when she becomes better, right? When she becomes more powerful, she becomes more formidable and it changes, the tone changes. But I would say, so I actually did a large scale study on this where we looked at, we used AI essentially to look at plots of different movies, hundreds of different movies.

And what we found was that horror movies do in fact have strong antagonist, very weak protagonist. And we actually had them ranked. I would have to go back and look at, I wonder if Prey is on there, but I would imagine that it's ranked as more horror than any of the other Predator films.

And Predator was an interesting one to me because if you were to imagine what makes [00:51:00] a horror movie, okay, let's say it's a strong bad guy, right? Really powerful, awful predator. The movie Predator is like the prototypical, has the prototypical horror villain. He is literally a predator, right? He's the ultimate predator.

But in the original Predator and some of the ones that followed it, they're really more like action movies. So why is that? If you have this perfect horror villain and you have this perfect monster, why does it feel like an action movie? It feels like an action movie because the protagonists aren't helpless.

They're hunted a little bit at first, but they quickly, because they're so formidable to start with and they are tactical, it becomes more of a cat and mouse game or kind of a more of an action thriller type thing.

Andrea Martucci: They make a plan.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. And they have the formidability to carry out that plan.

Andrea Martucci: I know we are running short on time and the last thing before we close is I want to talk about the impact of watching horror. Obviously it turns you into a depraved bad person. Reading romance turns you into [00:52:00] a lovestruck, pathetic person who has way too high expectations for romantic partners, et cetera.

What's the actual data that you have show about the impact of consuming horror in this case? On the people who consume it?

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: The data that I have doesn't show much at all. That it doesn't seem to, you would think it would make you maybe desensitized to violence and less sympathetic. And again I've done studies looking for that, trying to find that. And I don't find that, I don't find that horror fans score lower on empathy measures. In behavioral tasks, they don't give less money to those who are less fortunate to them. No matter how I measure it I don't see them acting or behaving in ways that are perceived as bad in society. They act and look just like everyone else.

They do seem to be a bit higher in anxiety, but I would anticipate that is because they are anxious people, they're seeking out simulations of threats, thus, they sometimes become horror movie fans rather than the other way around.[00:53:00]

Now, can it skew your perceptions? Yeah, probably. That's true of almost anything. If I'm really morbidly curious and I only consume bad news, it's all I can do, one effect of that is you're gonna think the world is probably a more dangerous place than it is. So yeah, it can skew your perceptions. It could maybe make you, if you're morbidly curious, you're also more interested in conspiracies, which makes sense because a conspiracy is about other people trying to harm you or trying to do something to deceive you or overtake you. And that would've been adaptive to have an interest in that throughout time, right?

If Julius Caesar was a bit more morbidly curious, he might not have been assassinated, right? And so it, it's a good thing to have. But in our modern world where we're very safe, but have access to infinite stories and news about awful things that are happening, it can shape the way you think about the world.

So you just have to like, keep it in check. You have to remind yourself like, Hey, this is a movie. Hey, this is news, but it's happening, 5,000 miles away to nobody that I know. Doesn't mean it's not important to pay attention to. [00:54:00] It just means that you have to remind yourself, again because we're creatures that evolved to look around the world and those are the things that matter to us and happen to us. Now we can look at screens and see things happening that are telling our mind that this is happening to us, but really it's happening really far away, or it happened in the past, or it's a fiction movie and it's happening, in a world that doesn't exist.

Andrea Martucci: Mm-hmm.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: But again, I think that's true of a lot of genres, a lot of stories, a lot of anything. There's you can have too much of anything is a bad thing. And the same is true of morbid curiosity or interest in horror movies. The same is probably true of interest in romance. If you only consume romance and don't check yourself and remind yourself like, oh, these are stories.

Yeah. Can it warp the way that you imagine relationships might be? Maybe, because most of what you're consuming is this more narrow set of what relationships could look like, right?

So yeah, I think that's true of anything. I think that's true of any genre. There's probably nothing specific to [00:55:00] horror that is bad about it. Nothing specific, I would imagine to romance either, that's bad about it.

Andrea Martucci: And I think that even if I'll say like I, 90% of the books I read are romance, right? I read a hundred books a year, but I'm a human in the world.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. yeah. You also exist that, that's the thing, like as long as you also exist in the world, so if you just, if you were super introverted, you sat inside, weren't married, didn't have kids or something, and you just consumed one type of media about the way the world could exist, that's gonna, it's gonna affect the way you think the world exists because you're not out in the world doing real things with real people.

Andrea Martucci: and most people who consume a particular type of media have so many other points of reference that even if I was more X than the average person, how do you actually draw a causational effect there, right?

Like

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah. you would

Andrea Martucci: impossible to isolate.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: It is, you would have to do some kind of study and psychologists for a long time did these, like priming studies where they show you a little piece of something and see how your behavior changes. And none of those studies have held up, which makes sense.

If our personality and behavior truly changed [00:56:00] from the smallest effects like that, we would be a chaotic creatures, right? We're pretty stable. Like we're remarkably stable. It's actually hard to change someone's personality. It's difficult. That's why people go to therapy because it's difficult to change habits you have, if it was that easy therapists would be out of a job, right?

Andrea Martucci: That's true.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah I think that it's difficult to show the causation because you would have to do some kind of okay, you only watch horror movies for the next year and let's see what it does to you. You only watch romance movies for the next year and you would have to be matched on personality so that we could control for that, so yeah, causation studies are gonna be really hard, but I'm skeptical that, unless that's the only thing you do is sit around and consume stories of these fictional places and worlds and interactions and don't have interactions in the real world, that's the only way it could change something about you.

So yes, narrative transportation, you read a thing, it transforms you. Sure it, it can transform you, right? It gives you an option, gives you, it gives you something to think about. A new path you can take if you're presented with [00:57:00] something like that. But, if we changed who we were every time we watched a movie or read a book again, that would be a, that would be a very chaotic world.

I would be pretty anti reading I think, I'd be pretty anti movies, pretty anti reading because, that's the fear of people, that you're gonna watch a scary, violent movie and you're gonna become violent, or you're gonna play a violent video game and now you're gonna become violent.

You're gonna read a bunch of romance novels about angry billionaires, and now you're gonna have expectations that are outta this world, maybe, so there did some people, maybe like some people are more suggestible than others. Some people consume that and don't, and are introverted, don't go out into the world and interact with people maybe.

But I think that it's like with someone who's like a serial killer, right? We always look for explanations, like, why did the serial killer do this? And we pinpoint things that like, oh because they had a rough childhood. Millions of people, billions of people have rough childhoods that doesn't make them serial killers, right? So we look for the easy answers.

We look for these things that like, oh, if you watch this violent movie, you're gonna become [00:58:00] violent. If you read this romance novel, you're never gonna find a partner and be in a happy relationship because now you expect something different. But people aren't like that. People are stable, right? They just like to explore different possibilities so that they feel prepared for them.

Andrea Martucci: Okay. Coltan, this has been super fascinating, super interesting. Now every time a journalist reaches out and they're like, why do people like Dark Romance? I'm gonna send them to you. Um,

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: And I, same for romance. I'll send them to you.

Andrea Martucci: Perfect. Okay. So first of all, you have a book coming out, Morbidly Curious, which is coming out October 7th, 2025.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: A month from today from when we're recording

Andrea Martucci: One month from today. Yes. So can you say more about the book, obviously we talked about a lot of the things that are in the book today. Other places people can find you online. I think you have a book tour coming up as well.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah. Yeah. The book is coming out October 7th. You don't need any kind of special background to read the book. It's not an academic book. It's a popular science book. You don't have to be a horror fan for it to say something important to you. It's I think I say in the prologue like this is written [00:59:00] kind of for everyone because it's like you're either someone who's pretty morbidly curious and you wanna understand that, or your friend or brother or sister, whoever it is, and you're trying to understand them better. So it's an exploration of all these, like Yes, the research I've done, yes, the studies I've done but also, all these ideas that I've had about this that I haven't had a chance to explore, a lot of that is in the book and you won't really find it anywhere else yet.

My substack morbidlycuriousthoughts.com, I do write about some of it on there, but there's stuff in the book that's not on the Substack. There's stuff in the Substack that's not in the book. There's stuff in both of those that aren't in my academic articles. So there's there's definitely some new stuff in there.

I go into the different kinds of morbid curiosity and what they might be beneficial for and why we feel the way we feel about them. I talk about dreams, I talk about kids and whether or not you should let your kids enjoy scary things.

And then I have a book tour coming up. It'll be about a month and a half. Starting on the seventh. So I live in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. It's launching here at a famous haunted hotel where I actually open the book. I open the [01:00:00] book with the Crescent Hotel, and I'm doing the launch at the Crescent Hotel, which is fun.

And then I'll be in Savannah. I'll be in North Carolina for a couple of dates. Memphis, Kentucky. I'll be here for a week in Eureka because I've got my film festival and zombie crawl, another Halloween things I do here. And then I go to LA for about a week, and then Chicago for about a week.

And then I've got a New York City date later in November, like November 12th. And then an Oklahoma City one

Andrea Martucci: Ooh, is the New York one new? Because I didn't see any in the northeast

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah. Yeah, it's I just added it, the Twisted Spine, which is the new horror bookstore. I think it's in Brooklyn. And I think I might add a Philly date. I'm still waiting on confirmation, but yeah, I'll be at the Twisted Spine November 12th.

They actually just opened yesterday or day before. It's a brand new horror bookstore. Horror dark. I, they probably have Dark Romance too. It's like kind of a dark bookstore.

Andrea Martucci: Oh, that's so funny. Okay well, data listeners there's been a big rise in romance bookstores, other area of study, big rise in horror bookstores. That's so fun. Okay, [01:01:00] Coltan, thank you so much. And your website is Coltan Scrivner.com

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: yeah, just my name.com.

Andrea Martucci: and all your info is there. Thank you again for doing this.

Thanks. Thanks for coming on a romance novel podcast to talk about your book about horror.

Dr. Coltan Scrivner: Yeah, no, I was one of the more fun conversations I've had. I was super interested in it because again, this is something that I had never really considered. So it was cool to see a lot of the overlaps.

Andrea Martucci: Hey, thanks for spending time with me today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate or review on your favorite podcast app or tell a friend. Check out Shelflovepodcast.com for transcripts and other resources. If you want regular written updates from Shelf Love, you can increasingly find me over at Substack.

Read occasional updates and short essays about romance at shelflovepodcast.Substack.com. Thank you to Shelf Love's $20 a month Patreon supporters: Gail, Copper Dog Books, and Frederick Smith. Have a great day. [01:02:00]