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OK - at the risk of being flamed mercilessly and (again) being accused of being condescending . . .
Over the years of reading horror and lots about horror I've come across a bunch of theories about "why horror?" - the one that most people have suggested here is the "dark side" theory - which is kind of along the lines of Carl Jung and the whole "shadow self" but also similar to Freud and the idea of repression (so the monster is a kind of expression of the desires we've repressed oozing out of our subconcious - so movies and books are kind of like our personal nightmares).
But there are lots of others:
1) Adrenaline rush - horror shocks create a biological pleasure;
2) Rites of passage - I read somewhere this theory that horror movies are popular as "rites of passage" for teenagers (which always kind of made sense to me since I remember first going to horror movies as a pre-teen and it was always with a group and we were all egging each other on).
3) Social Anxiety - we go to horror films/read horror novels as expressions of broader cultural anxieties and problems Andrew Tudor has a great book about this called Monsters and Mad Scientists - also a book by Kendall Phillips called Projected Fears.
4) I read a cool but confusing book by Noel Carroll about how we like horror because its an intellectual puzzle to make sense of monsters - but I'm not sure I entirely understood it.
and, 5) there's also the subculture theory that says people define themselves as "horror fans" and then are attracted to horror stuff because of their self-identification (hmm, sounds familiar?!?!)
So, there are some additional theories - personally I'm not sure why I like horror films - but its an interesting question.
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