Admit it, you like to tickle your nerves by watching a horror movie? Do you calmly crunch popcorn while watching the walking dead bite into the brain, or turn away from the screen in fear? Psychotherapist Grigory Gorshunin explains why we sometimes prefer chilling horror to romantic comedies.
What makes us, if not all, then many, look with interest at the screens on which villains and monsters hunt living people, and they freeze with fear, squeal in horror and do endless stupid things: they go alone into gloomy caves or invite them to house of sinister strangers? All this seems to defy common sense. But the fact of the matter is that we get tired of common sense, of the need to guard the border that separates our daytime consciousness from the world of nightmares.
Horror films are about border crossing: between the world of aggressive fantasy and reality, the dead and the living, the world of helplessness and the world of predictability and control. Ultimately, between the conscious and the unconscious. The classic Hitchcockian horror was called «Psycho» for a reason. Films of this genre model psychosis — a breakthrough of unconscious horror into the world of the adult psyche.
Horror remains on the other side of the screen
The German philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers describes the onset of psychosis as a loss of a sense of «home» in the world: what was familiar and safe becomes mysterious, ominous, full of dangerous meanings. Not only peace-loving perception is violated, but the very ability to comprehend the world and manage it.
Imagine that you are approaching your car that you know and love. Of course, you are not an auto mechanic, but what you know makes it safe to use. And suddenly, while driving, the car becomes something alien, incomprehensible, distant, unpredictable. The driver is in a panic. But it was not the car that changed, but the perception: there was an illusion of loss of control. If the person behind the wheel calms down and stops perceiving the car as something incomprehensible and hostile, control will be restored. Even if the salvation of the characters is in question, as in Stephen King’s «Trucks», for us viewers, watching the movie becomes synonymous with mastering the situation — the horror remains on the other side of the screen.
But we can identify not only with the suffering frightened part, but also with the attacking evil, thereby identifying with different aspects of our psyche.
Another common theme is the living dead. Recall at least «From Dusk Till Dawn»: the heroes fight off zombies all night, while everyone risks being bitten and turning into one of them. What is the attraction of the living dead? It symbolizes the suffering part of the “I” immured in the unconscious, which is trying to come to life, to get into daytime reality.
The same is true of the stories of spirit possession, the introduction of parasites: the terrible (as it seems) contents of the soul that can break out and destroy everything. We are relieved when the heroes manage to destroy the disgusting and restore the barrier between the worlds. But the best stories, from my point of view, are about making connections, trying to understand the rejected ugly and hidden. Not about destruction, but about metamorphosis. Like in Adrian Lyne’s thriller Jacob’s Ladder, where demons turn into angels when a person stops being afraid and hating. Monsters come to remind us of the power that is hidden in us. This power can bring death — or transformation. If not afraid.