Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Me I am six years old, and I see a man turning into a wolf. The movie is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 drama. I’m watching our black and white TV set on the slow-motion werewolf adaptation and I start screaming so uncontrollably that my parents carry me upstairs to calm me down.
That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror and supernatural movies, the dark and being alone in the house.
I am now a psychologist, and for years I have been troubled by the question: why are horror films so popular (and profitable) when I personally find them so depressing? These days, the need for parallel attacks has never been greater. While movies are struggling to regain their former audiences, and the way comedy and drama are driving the migration, horror has gone the other way: color took about 70% more at the North American box office in 2023 than it did a decade ago.
Why does watching such a transformation make one child cry for the moon with joy and give another one years of avoiding the dark? (I’m not alone. In Research done in the late 90s(One in four U.S. middle school graduates reported having an enduring fear related to a scary movie as a child.)
There is a medical term for what may have happened to me: cinematic neurosis. It describes how the film is so powerful and enduring that it solves post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – constant arousal, anxiety, something that is relieved through thoughts and disturbing images. We usually reserve PTSD for survivors of violence or tragedy. Abbott and Costello’s 1948 drama is not on paper, either. However, the disease makes common situations that are dangerous – and watching the movie, it’s worth it.
The most interesting story I know was written in 2007. A woman known as Ms X watched The Exorcist as a teenager. At the age of 22 he went to the ER in distress, believing he was possessed, drowning in movies he had seen before. His case was very complicated, and was partly explained by the psychological problems that occurred before the film. I have never come close to his symptoms. But I realize what has happened to me, because his silent nature has affected me since I was six years old.
To understand why a movie can do this to a person, it helps to understand why almost everyone else doesn’t. We are always telling ourselves scary stories, from the Minotaur of Greek mythology to Beowulf’s Grendel, from tales of ancient vampires to Edgar Allan Poe. Freud, who I am very fond of these things, said that the most powerful take on fears that he calls psychic – in German, dangerous – which translates into words like not at home, meaning a strange thing that wears a familiar face.
His richest example is the double: two people who look alike but we know they are not. It’s the evil twin, the mirror that gives you away, Jekyll and Hyde. What scares us is not knowing that monsters are out there but the fear that this monster shares our address.
You can see why movie theaters have been so late to the home crowd. Two horror movies with box offices, Back rooms and Emotions – all made up of gen Z former YouTubers – sell exactly that. The back rooms leave you lost in an endless street of shopping malls filled with people and purpose. It is a well-known architect that can be thought of, but poorly designed. Obsession sees a relationship go awry after a boy wants his girlfriend to love him “more than anyone else in the world”. Both are unheimlich translated almost literally; famous people, places and things taken from home and not from home.
It makes sense that we want to invoke this fear on purpose. A horror film builds a protective wall in which we can experience horror, chaos and helplessness without negative consequences. It’s the same machine as the bedtime story, with its witches and trapped children and murderous stepmothers. We scare children, mildly, as a form of inoculation.
But the body cannot always distinguish repetition from reality. My research is about the mind-body connection, and I still find it amazing that a movie can raise your blood pressure and trigger your immune cells to be ready for war. The fear center of the brain is fired not only by the jump but also by the long wait it causes.
In 2012, researchers wrote about the womancalled SM, whose disease destroyed the amygdala, the central alarm system of the brain; he could no longer be afraid of scary movies. He can feel the right amount of anger, sadness, disgust and joy from watching movies – but he’s never responded to anything from The Blair Witch Project or Arachnophobia.
In Danse Macabre, Stephen KingA well-known study of horror fiction, he argued that horror is about threats that people cannot say out loud. He wrote about television as a young man in 1956, during America’s Red Scare, and footage of alien invasions went viral: Earth vs the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The first is a wonderful metaphor for communism from abroad, the second is a terrible story of turning your neighbors inside out. The second is always a horror concept, and spans several generations of horror movies from The Exorcist and Alien to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us. In today’s decade – horror, horror – it should come as no surprise that horrormania has reached new heights.
after advertising
As for why horror movies scared my six-year-old into the funhouse, this study hits home hard. A number of behaviors cause a child to act out of pain instead of happiness. Seeing the film at a very young age is one: until the age of seven, children cannot tell fiction from reality, and “it’s just a story” falls on deaf ears. Another big pity: the more a child sympathizes with the victim, the worse the problem becomes. What fits me best is what researchers call hypothetical empathy: planning can be a made-up world. If you ever see yourself watching an action movie, cowering somewhere between your sofa and a burning building while taking out strangers, you’ll know you’re in for it.
And then there’s the last discovery, which I’ve had for far too long. Children who experience trauma due to trauma may have experienced loss or other emotional problems at home. For that child, the monster on the window is somewhere to put the feeling that there is no other place.
A few years later, in therapy, I returned to the werewolf. I always thought that what I was doing was what I was seeing on the screen but I realized that it was about my home. A person being a monster scares me a lot because it caused fear I was already: that you can lose the people you love when you suddenly change something you do not realize, that calm can suddenly give place to anger. The werewolf did not instill fear; it released something that was already underground.
So what do you do, if you are the parent of a fearful child, or if a fearful child still lives inside you? When fear runs this deep, there isn’t much encouragement. You can’t Speaking a six-year-old from the dark – you should show they. Another study took scared children and played them pictures of an actor being made, slowly, into the Hulk: they saw a man with latex and other paint, who looks like a monster but is still a man. Children who saw this change were less fearful afterwards compared to those who did not.
It’s the only trick that works for me. When the film begins to drag me down, I isolate myself for a second and capture what is happening outside the frame: the cameraman, the sound moving over the heads of the actors, the director with his headphones, the crew standing a few feet from the monster, looking tired. Long enough to rise from fantasy, short enough to rise again. It’s his little act of doubling: the second person on the edge of the set while the first person is lost in the darkness.
So – to borrow an idea from one of the biggest horror movies of the decade – I’m going to see something really scary, I’m going to see the horror of the Upside Down. Then, when I chat for a few seconds, I’m a grown man on his sofa, I turn it on, the house is perfectly quiet. After that, I take a breath, and go back down.
Carmine M Pariante is professor of biological psychiatry at King’s College Londonis the editor of the mental health blog platform Strengthen the Mind.
