Halloween is right around the corner. And this year, like so many years before, horror movies come out during the scariest season of the year to work Americans up into a good scare.

With a slew of new thriller movies released in October, moviegoers can expect plenty of blood, demons and gore.

I have just one question: In all the films where the main draw is blood, guts and killing, when exactly did American moviegoers lose their sense of sympathy for their fellow humans?

Horror movies like the “Saw” film-series and the recently released “Chain Letter” flick, which features high school students dying in morbid and gruesome ways, suggest viewers that enjoy watching this sort of thing have, in some sense, lost their humanity.

In a May 5, 2010 article that ran in The New York Times Magazine, Yale University psychology professor Paul Bloom wrote about the rather controversial concept of baby morality. In a study he conducted with a team of scientists at the university, he found that babies had an innate sense of right and wrong. Infants as young as six months old were able to tell the difference between a wrongdoer and a victim in a puppet show designed to distinguish which puppet behaved badly and which puppet was the victim. The babies overwhelmingly showed sympathy for the victimized puppet.

In addition to this study, Bloom said, “If you want to cause a rat distress, you can expose it to the screams of other rats. Human babies, notably, cry more to the cries of other babies than to tape recordings of their own crying, suggesting they are responding to their awareness of someone else’s pain.”

Considering that babies and rats are distressed by the sounds of another’s pain, the fact that many human adults enjoy the sights and sounds of someone being tortured in the movies they watch speaks to just how much humanity most humans lose by the time they’re old enough to watch horror films.

Primatologist Frans de Waal, as Bloom pointed out, observed that chimpanzees, when they see a fellow chimpanzee attacked, would attempt to comfort the victim by “putting an arm around her and [would] gently pat her back or groom her.”

In light of these studies, the notion that movies desensitize people becomes obsolete. People let themselves become desensitized by actively tolerating media that feature blood and guts as the main attraction. In turn, the producers of such media show no respect for the human condition by portraying such pain. The amount of devastation millions of people willingly consume every time a big new horror film is released in theaters is often equal to some of history’s most grisly events. But if monkeys, babies and rats show more distress in response to another’s pain than most adult humans, we are a doomed species indeed.