It is also the athmosphere of anxiety. Horror movies try to intentionally create feelings of fear, and uneasiness, which then is present in the color scheme, camera angles, music (or lack of), spacing… everything. In documentaries and the like, usually the incidents themselves, also speak for themself.

I cannot take horror at all either - I cannot usually watch even horror comedies - but one of my favorites, is to watch real tsunami footage. The point is not to see people dying or some unreal scary stuff, it is to witness the real absoluteness of destruction nature is capable of, yet also people managing to survive, and help each other, in the middle of it.

Adding to this, the documentaries also include interviews with people saying “I thought they should look into this more and they didn’t”, or “Our department was really trying to solve this, and it just took awhile.” The implication that someone out there cares. It is less isolating than horror movies generally are, which tend to show how things went wrong usually because no one cared or no one knew anything was up. I guess the documentary is the natural sequel story - we couldn’t stop the bad thing from happening, maybe multiple times, but we are at least aware of it and trying to figure it out.

You said documentaries aren’t “usually” made to be scary, so you’re implying that there’s some documentaries out there that’s got jump scares and shit. It makes me want to see such a documentary.