Why Are We Drawn to Morbid Art?
Content note: This article discusses death, violence and disturbing imagery.
Paintings of the grotesque and sculptures of ruined bodies can be hard to look at, yet many of us look anyway, and some of us go looking. Psychology has several explanations, and most of them point toward the way the mind learns from what disturbs it.
By Jack Malacat
What does it say about you if you enjoy looking at something disturbing? Maybe it’s a sculpture of a mangled body, or a painting grotesque enough that it should send you toward the exit, and you find yourself stepping closer instead. Most people understand the difference between witnessing real suffering and encountering it in a gallery. The attraction can still feel suspicious, because the subject is violent and the experience is somehow pleasurable anyway.
Psychologists have a name for at least part of this impulse. Coltan Scrivner, who has spent years studying it, defines morbid curiosity as the motivation to seek out information about dangerous or threatening phenomena. His Morbid Curiosity Scale measures that interest in four areas: the minds of dangerous people, interpersonal violence, body violation, and paranormal danger. Seen this way, the urge to look is a kind of information-gathering, a way of studying a threat from a position where it can’t reach you. Wanting to understand a danger and wishing it on someone are separate motivations, and the research treats them separately.
Death usually gets the credit for making something morbid, though much of what holds our attention is the process around it, an injury or the slow evidence of decay. A skull is an ending. A wound is a question. Even a still image can set the mind working on what happened before the frame was taken and what the person inside it went through.
Suzanne Oosterwijk tested this pull in a set of experiments published in 2017. Participants saw brief cues and chose which images they wanted to view, and they regularly picked scenes of death, violence or harm. The most telling detail is which disturbing images they preferred. Social scenes, such as a war scene with people in it, were chosen more often than neutral images and more often than isolated close-ups of physical injury or an attacking shark. Gore on its own never beat a neutral picture, though people still chose it about a third of the time. What drew them most was harm with a situation around it, something that could be read as a story.
One way to understand that result is as an information gap. A disturbing scene gives us enough to know something happened and withholds most of the rest, including who was responsible and whether the same thing could reach us. Oosterwijk and her colleagues later described choosing a negative image as a kind of conflict, in which people want the information without expecting to enjoy it. When they scanned participants making those choices, the decision engaged brain regions associated with reward and with ordinary curiosity.
What the image leaves out does a great deal of the work.
Safety changes the experience considerably. When a threat is real, the body prepares to act and there is little room to dwell on the feeling. Art removes that pressure. Psychologist Paul Rozin coined the term benign masochism for the enjoyment of experiences that feel aversive at first but that we know are ultimately safe, and frightening films are among his examples. A 2020 field study inside a Danish haunted attraction found a similar pattern with fear itself: visitors enjoyed the experience most at moderate levels of fright, with too little proving dull and too much becoming unpleasant. Morbid art seems to operate in that middle range, where we can approach a danger at a distance we control.
The horror is let into the room on the condition that it stays behind glass.
Once the first jolt fades, a different kind of attention often takes over, and we begin to notice how the thing was made. Gernot Gerger and his colleagues tested this by showing people the same images labeled either as artworks or as press photographs. Negative artworks were liked more when they were framed as art, while viewers’ negative reactions, disgust and fear among them, barely changed. Recoil and admiration can run side by side, which may help explain why a gruesome sculpture can hold someone in front of it for so long.
An ordinary mind also produces a surprising amount of dark material on its own. In a 1978 study, Stanley Rachman and Padmal de Silva found that unwanted intrusive thoughts, similar in content to clinical obsessions, were common among people with no psychiatric diagnosis. The clinical cases differed mainly in how often the thoughts came and how much distress they caused. Researchers studying obsessive-compulsive disorder later described thought-action fusion, the belief that having an unacceptable thought is morally close to acting on it, or that thinking about something can make it happen. Enjoying a grotesque image can stir a milder version of the same worry. The research gives little reason to treat that enjoyment as a confession, since much of what the mind produces is exploration of places its owner would never choose to go.
I’ve watched this play out around a table with Serial Killer, the card game I created. Players joke about grisly deaths and build ridiculous scenarios, laughing at ideas that would be horrifying anywhere else. What makes that possible is a shared frame, in which everyone understands that the game has rules and that the fiction stops at its edges. Humor researchers Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren describe a related idea in benign violation theory, which proposes that something becomes funny when it feels wrong and also feels distant or harmless enough to be acceptable. A game makes that permission unusually explicit, so for a few minutes people can handle terrible ideas without anyone mistaking them for beliefs.
The internet gave morbid interests a place to gather, and that visibility can make them look more sinister than they are. John Suler’s work on the online disinhibition effect describes how anonymity and distance can make people more willing to reveal things they would keep private offline. Suler also warns against reading online behavior as the unmasking of a hidden “true self,” and the anonymity effect itself is less dramatic than it sounds: a 2019 meta-analysis found only a modest link between anonymity and self-disclosure, with wide variation between studies. Research on morbid curiosity does point to some shared traits. Scrivner’s work links it to a rebellious streak and to lower disgust toward reminders of death, but those associations fall well short of describing a personality type. An anatomical artist and a horror fan may arrive at the same disturbing image for completely different reasons, and someone fascinated by criminal psychology may be after something else again.
Enjoying morbid art probably says less about you than the opening question implies. Curiosity can pull a person toward danger, and the safety of art lets them stay long enough to notice how it was made. Imagination can visit places that real choices never will. Morbid art offers a controlled way to examine things that would be unbearable in life, with the freedom to leave whenever we want, and what usually keeps us there is the story around the death, the part the image only ever shows us in pieces.
About the author
Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.
Sources and Further Reading
Scrivner, Coltan. (2021). “The Psychology of Morbid Curiosity: Development and Initial Validation of the Morbid Curiosity Scale.” Personality and Individual Differences, 183, 111139. Develops the 24-item Morbid Curiosity Scale, which measures morbid curiosity across four domains: minds of dangerous people, interpersonal violence, body violation, and paranormal danger.
Oosterwijk, Suzanne. (2017). “Choosing the Negative: A Behavioral Demonstration of Morbid Curiosity.” PLOS ONE, 12(7), e0178399. Across three studies, participants voluntarily chose to view negative images, and chose social scenes of death, violence or harm more often than both neutral images and decontextualized images of physical harm or natural threat.
Oosterwijk, Suzanne, Lukas Snoek, Jurriaan Tekoppele, Lara H. Engelbert, and H. Steven Scholte. (2020). “Choosing to View Morbid Information Involves Reward Circuitry.” Scientific Reports, 10, 15291. An fMRI study finding that choosing to view negative social images engaged brain regions associated with reward and ordinary curiosity, and describing that choice as a conflict between wanting information and not expecting to enjoy it.
About the author
Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.
Rozin, Paul, Lily Guillot, Katrina Fincher, Alexander Rozin, and Eli Tsukayama. (2013). “Glad to Be Sad, and Other Examples of Benign Masochism.” Judgment and Decision Making, 8(4), 439–447. Explores benign masochism: the enjoyment of experiences that initially feel unpleasant or aversive when the person knows they are ultimately safe.
Andersen, Marc Malmdorf, Uffe Schjoedt, Henry Price, Fernando E. Rosas, Coltan Scrivner, and Mathias Clasen. (2020). “Playing With Fear: A Field Study in Recreational Horror.” Psychological Science, 31(12), 1497–1510. A field study conducted inside a haunted attraction that found an inverted-U relationship between fear and enjoyment, with enjoyment peaking at intermediate levels of fear.
Gerger, Gernot, Helmut Leder, and Alexandra Kremer. (2014). “Context Effects on Emotional and Aesthetic Evaluations of Artworks and IAPS Pictures.” Acta Psychologica, 151, 174–183. Compares reactions to images labeled as artworks or press photographs. Negative artworks were liked more in an art context, while negative emotional reactions stayed largely the same.
Rachman, Stanley, and Padmal de Silva. (1978). “Abnormal and Normal Obsessions.” Behaviour Research and Therapy, 16(4), 233–248. A foundational study showing that intrusive, obsession-like thoughts also occur in nonclinical populations, while differing from clinical obsessions in frequency, intensity, duration, and consequences.
Shafran, Roz, Dana S. Thordarson, and Stanley Rachman. (1996). “Thought-Action Fusion in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.” Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 10(5), 379–391. Examines thought-action fusion, including the belief that having an unacceptable thought can be morally equivalent to carrying out the action or can make an event more likely to happen.
McGraw, A. Peter, and Caleb Warren. (2010). “Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny.” Psychological Science, 21(8), 1141–1149. Introduces benign violation theory, proposing that humor can emerge when something feels wrong or transgressive while also being understood as acceptable, harmless, or psychologically distant.
Suler, John. (2004). “The Online Disinhibition Effect.” CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326. Explores why people may disclose more or behave differently online, while cautioning against treating online behavior as the simple revelation of a hidden “true self.”
Clark-Gordon, Cathlin V., Nicholas D. Bowman, Alan K. Goodboy, and Alyssa Wright. (2019). “Anonymity and Online Self-Disclosure: A Meta-Analysis.” Communication Reports, 32(2), 98–111. A meta-analysis examining anonymity and online self-disclosure, finding a modest positive relationship between the two with substantial variation across studies.