(Lyrics from Michael Jackson's music video, Thriller, written by Rod Temperton and spoken by Vincent Price.)

Thriller is the top selling music video of all time. Thirty years after it appeared it still scares up universal adoration. YouTube is rife with clips of people imitating the video's funk-dancing by Michael Jackson and the chorus line of the undead. There are videos teaching us how to imitate the choreography, or showing endless videos of Thriller flash mobs at weddings, in public streets or in plane and train stations. Even Philippine prison inmates caught the Thriller spirit when they performed the Thriller dance and storyline in the prison yard. Their video went viral soon after the shocking death of Jackson in 2009.

Thriller is not really that scary. It's just a superbly produced music video extravaganza with a storyline about a 1950s high school coed being scared into hysteria by animated, funk-dancing corpses allied with her now-transformed, funk-dancing date. The video is a convoluted movie within a dream within a video...or something like that.

The success of Thriller addresses the counter-intuitive issue of why so many people love movie monsters, love to be scared and love to watch other people being scared silly. Modern Halloween's popularity is sort of a global, institutionalized sanctification of that pleasure. And, it is one of the few ancient, ritual celebrations that is enjoyed as much or more by adults than children. Why else would Americans be planning to spend, $6.9 billion this year for Halloween costumes and revelry?  (according to National Retail Federation).

Why the high from being tortured by artificially induced fear. Are humans a masochistic species? Or simply perverse?

On a general level, movie monsters, horror movies, spine tingling thrillers, provide food for our imagination's nourishment. We consciously, deliberately put away the rich fears of childhood as we acquire knowledge, and temper irrational fears with rational self-talk. We also fulfill the adultified expectations of our adult peers. In so doing, we relinquish many of our superstitions with more science-based explanations. There is a cost, however: Our world of imagination is diminished, tamed into blandness. Life in Technicolor slowly fades to Black and White.

Speaking analytically for the moment, childhood fears of monsters and the supernatural are never truly banished from our adult minds; they linger like archetypes in our subconscious. Horror movies and movie monsters allow us to revisit those fears from a safe remove. If it all gets too much, too real, too close, we can just shut our eyes, stop up our ears and mutter to ourselves "na, na, na, na, na." If that doesn't work we can grab hold of our date, even slump in our seat.  Or we can admit defeat, get up, and go get some popcorn.

Interestingly, none of these escape options are usually available in nightmares or nightmarish lucid dreaming, which are infinitely more terrifying and disturbing than horror movies and have more lingering afterimages. The latter are often more realistic, harder to escape, and offer none of the cues of make-believe or unreality that movies do, such as soundtracks, special effects, or being in a movie theater with other people.  In other words, nightmares are not Halloween-horror, fun experiences.  They're too real, like home invasions and earthquakes.

In our Hollywood renditions of horror, movie monsters also provide us with the opportunity to see and learn strategies of coping with real life monsters. (should we run into them, despite all probabilities to the contrary). It's a covert rehearsal for ... who knows.  Hell, monsters come in all sorts of psychological and physical incarnations. (I've known a few...)

I've conjured up five major factors accounting for the appeal of horror-as-entertainment:

1. Life Style
One of the major reasons we go to scary movies is to be scared. But we really want a safe scare, one where we're assured that, in an hour or two hours, we're going to walk out whole, no nail holes in our head, throat still in our neck and heart in our chest. Oh, yes, and our beloved head still on our body.

Moreover, if we have a relatively calm, uneventful lifestyle, we may seek out something that's going to be exciting for us because our nervous system requires periodic revving, just like a high performance engine.

2. Personality Factors: People differ in coping styles to threat: sensitizers vs. repressors, for example. Some like to approach or confront fearful things, others prefer to avoid or deny. The former are more positively excited by scary movies than are the latter.

3. Physiology. There are people who have a tremendous need for stimulation and excitement. They want to feel something, a buzz, like the need for speed canonized in Top Gun. It's life lived on the edge. It's thrill-seeking.

People also differ in their characteristic degree of reactivity (e.g., dull, mild, or intense) and thresholds of discomfort to scary or startling stimulation, real, imagined or fictionally presented.

Such stimulus reactivity differences may be based on heredity, learning, aging, adaptation to prevailing levels of fear and excitement, or combinations of these influences. Examples  are  war correspondents, war photographers, bomb squad volunteers, trapeze performers, mercenaries— people who like to put themselves in harm's way for the arousal jag.

I think, however, that the pivotal issue here may be that we go to horror movies (and ride roller coasters), not so much because we like to be afraid, but because we occasionally enjoy feeling really excited. We search out extraordinarily intense or novel experiences. Horror movies are one of the better, safer ways to embrace and savor such experiences (as are telling ghost stories around a campfire at midnight).

Research indicates that the more negative affect a person reports experiencing during horror films, the more likely they are to say that they enjoy the genre. Studies also suggest that the pleasure of scary movies comes from the relief that follows the heightened fear.