The best movie genre to watch on a first date, according to science
Ah, the first date at the cinema: love’s greatest hurdle.
It’s not important for a first date to go well. It’s just important that it doesn’t go disastrously. Anything that lands in between provides food for thought. Nothing helps to clear that proverbial plate of ‘thought food’ quite like a trip to the cinema, though.
You might have chatted online for an eternity and find yourself fairly certain you’re what William Shakespeare was thinking about when he wrote the romantic bit of Romeo and Juliette, but the second that this prospective partner reveals an egg sandwich as their chosen snack, it’s over.
Likewise, the second they remove their phone to text, it should be over, unless, of course, you’re both twats. If they claim they saw the twist coming in Fight Club, it might not necessarily be over, but you should keep your wits about you. Similarly, if they don’t share their popcorn, they’re either just shy or they’re potentially nightmares.
Yes, the pitfalls of movie-going are myriad. Some of them prove fortuitous in the long run, saving you from getting six months in, developing feelings, and then finding out the person you sawyer future with can’t even sit through the majesty of Heat without talking about some banal workplace bollocks or asking daft questions that imply you wrote the script.
But what if it does go well? What if they aren’t sociopaths? In this rare case, when you’re hankering for a second date, what is the best type of movie to have seen on the first? Well, according to science, it’s horror. That certainly wouldn’t have been my first thought. If someone had suggested a trip to see Hostel as an opening gambit back in my dating days, in a fit of terror, I’d have never texted them back ever again… until I’d had five pints.
But I’m no scientist, and Professor Javid Sadr says there’s definite logic to a safe but spooky first date. You see, being scared is literally an arousal response in scientific terms. And no genre is more guaranteed to trigger that arousal response than horror.
“Any time you’re feeling any kind of emotion strongly … there will always be some measurable bodily response,” Sadr told Inverse. “You’re not really experiencing an emotion unless there are some changes in your bodily processes, physiological processes.” So, horror will at least trigger something internal, and then that can be misattributed in some manner.
In essence, the theory is that if you wake up to an unsettling noise in the night, your body has already subconsciously kicked into gear before you’ve had a chance to consciously process the disturbance as potentially terrifying. So, you might be sat before Scream, half watching the film with first date nerves jangling, and the frisson of emotion stirred up by the scenes opens a window that allows you to attribute that emotion to the fabled dating show cliche of ‘a spark’.
“The extent to which you have an emotional response is really tied to having an arousal change,” Sadr explained to Megan Logan. “The extent to which you label it as anger versus happiness versus sexual arousal versus disgust is tied to what in the environment you can look at to help label and understand that emotion.”
In layman’s terms, it’s easy to see how this psychological spike can be preferable to two singletons being awkward and bored over a coffee asking about each other’s jobs. While in this setting, the fatigue of further work discussions might spill over into a sense that the date itself is draining, psychologists in 1971 said the inverse can be true, and people experience ‘The Excitation Transfer’ effect, whereby the thrill of the horror movie spills over into the thrill of the post-film debrief.
Alas, it must be noted to any creeps that are perhaps reading, this is not some sort of mind trick for a lathoria to ‘exploit’. A horror movie without respect and decency is a horrific experience, whether your date is a fan of the genre or not.
