Finding Madness in Images of Horror
NOTE: Just to let you know, this piece explores themes of mental distress and sexual assault, please only read it if /when you feel able to.
With their exaggerated, gory, and often absurd imagery, horror films have a unique vocabulary, one that can accurately describe what I, as a mad-identifying person, would call “unusual psychological phenomenon”, but is commonly known as “mental illness”.
I know from personal experience that horror film imagery can define a symptom I am having, better than any other form of language, especially the largely empty words of diagnoses. The following are images taken from horror films, which have a way of discussing mental distress, and unusual psychological experiences, without saying a word.
In this image from Argento’s “Suspiria”, Sarah, a ballet student, tries to escape an assailant, but ends up trapped in a room filled with razor wire. Within the image, moving forward means injury. Staying still means being dragged downwards, deeper into the razor wire, being cut as she goes. Both options are painful- yet we can see that Sarah’s senses want to do both simultaneously. This is splitting her brain. Then there is that lighting. The unnatural blue-ness of everything- and the resulting disorientation.
One of the most disorientating psychological phenomena it is possible to experience is Mixed Mood. This happens when someone feels both depressed and manic at the same time. Like Sarah’s body in this image, mixed mood makes you into a shredded being. It causes your brain to be ripped in two, leaving a ragged edge, like a tear made by razor wire. Just like suddenly finding yourself in an unexpected barbed wire trap, any attempts to escape a mixed mood state hurt. You have to try and ride the pain and confusion out.
At the end of this scene Sarah is murdered.
This image from the end of slow-burn psychological horror “Relic”, precisely describes what repeated sexual trauma can do to your relationship to your body. The core of black mould, beneath peeling layers of skin, is something I feel like I possess. Like many people who have experienced sexual trauma, I find my body uncomfortable. It feels like a sack I drag around. I want to be ethereal instead. Exist without flesh. Without the flesh that has been harmed over and over. I know from other people’s accounts of trauma that I am not alone in having my relationship to my body changed by sexual and physical assault. Images like this one describe that sensation of not feeling at home in your own flesh.
Abjection, as defined by Julia Kristeva in “The Powers of Horror”, is terror of things that are both “us” and “not-us” consecutively. Borderline things like gore seeping from a wound, or, as in this image from short animation “The Bones”, body parts rearranged and mashed together. The intertitles at the beginning of “The Bones” try to convince us that the animated body parts are real, and that the fictional animation is actually a found text. This all adds to the uncanny aspect of the imagery. To watch this film is to face the fact that our bodies are only on loan. They become something else once we are dead.
There is a type of depression that is defined by a horrendous, hyper-awareness of the existential. It feels like free-falling into an endless well, weighed down by your lungs, which are full of concrete. This existential depression exists along the borderline cracks of abjection, as does this image from “The Bones”. It focuses on encountering death and the way that one day we too will become a corpse. It forces a person to face the fact that our bodies themselves perpetually exist on the border between life and death.
Dissociation is a psychological phenomenon that tips the world on its axis. Nothing seems real. It makes you feel like you exist within a video game, or a book, or a German Expressionist film from the 1920s. Some people claim that the classic “monster” films made by Universal in the 1930s are the original horror films, but for me, German Expressionist films, like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and Der Golem, are much closer ancestors to the image-focused horror films we have today. They are also perfect for describing what it is like to disassociate.
Everything in Dr Caligari is on a Dutch angle, because the sets were built intentionally wonky. Meanwhile the shadows are so well defined because they were painted on, rather than being created with lighting. This off-kilter, eerie soundstage, of a world is what dissociation feels like.
Flashbacks aren’t only visual, they can be somatic, or emotional, or take over any of a person’s senses. Whatever form they take, they transport you back to a traumatic event, and your memory is pasted over the top of the reality of the moment you are in. You live the trauma again, as if it was happening in the present moment. This layering of existence is something “Amer” is adept at describing, using split screens, like this one, and double exposure.
