Chances are on Halloween you might have gone through a ritual, and watched a scary movie - or you've done everything possible to avoid it.
Not everyone likes to willingly get their pants scared off - but for others, horror provides an adrenaline rush like no other.
Newshub asked various Wellingtonians what their favourite horror movies were, with answers ranging from classics like The Shining and The Thing, to modern nailbiters The Descent and Orphan, to, well, Scary Movie.
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Horror movies continue to draw people in - last year IT made $700 million at the box office worldwide, and this year the new Halloween has already grossed $128 million in less than two weeks since opening in the US.
So why do audiences part with their cash and time, just to get scared?
"It's just like adrenaline junkies. That idea of the chemicals in your bodies. That fear, that fright, that 'aaah'!" says Brady Kuech.
"The emotion you get from it, the excitement. It's not every day you can just get frightened. Well, you can..." says Georgia van den Eykel.
"There's goosebumps. It makes the hairs on the back of our neck stand up. That's actually where the word 'horror' comes from. It means 'to bristle, the hairs on our neck,'" explains Dr Tim Groves, a senior film lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington.
But Dr Groves says it also goes beyond adrenaline. Horror movies are actually, in their own weird way, safe.
"You've got a license to be scared," he says.
"There's something about it being a safe environment for you to experience all of the things that you wouldn't normally want to do in real life."
Dr Groves says horror films reflect the values of their time - The Exorcist made the most of 1970s superstitions, while Saw highlights torture in the American War on Terror.
"Horror draws on the newspaper headlines of everyday life. And what it does is it pushes the boundaries, and takes something to its logical conclusion."
Because of that, the standards of what audiences find scary have evolved over time, meaning they can get desensitized. So, film-makers keep having to up the ante.
"When we look back at the Dracula film today, from 1931, we sort of think it's not scary anymore. In fact it almost seems funny," says Dr Groves.
So if the idea of going to see The Nun terrifies you - don't worry, in a few years something much worse will come along.
Newshub.
