Indianapolis ? Many teens, and some a bit older, will be spending this Halloween weekend visiting a creepy, ghoul-filled haunted house, or watching a gory horror flick. They’ll say they love to shiver in fear and scream in terror.

Or do they? Researchers say it’s actually the adrenaline rush — and the wave of relief once the fright is over — that makes being scared so much fun.

Glenn Sparks, a Purdue University professor, said the euphoria people feel when the credits roll or they finally leave a house of horrors is what keeps them coming back — even if they absolutely hated the experience.

“People come away from these movies oftentimes feeling really happy and relieved that the horror is over,” said Sparks, who studies people’s attraction to the macabre.

“They remember that they felt good and so they say, ‘Oh yeah, I like scary movies.’ But it’s not that they really like being scared. They just felt good afterward.”

Sparks said that natural, adrenaline-induced high often lingered long enough to supplant moviegoers’ memories of cringing in their seats with a favorable recollection of the experience.

For men and boys, in particular, Sparks said, the attraction of horror movies, haunted houses and other unsettling experiences is the ability to conquer something that seems threatening, even though it poses no real harm. “Fear is really the emotion that comes about when you end up concluding that your own well-being is threatened,” he said. “That’s what fear is.”

“People place themselves in the situation that the characters are in the film — they think about the possibility that something like this could happen to them.”