Horror and Trauma: Finding Odd Comforts
The first movie that I remember being scared by was Indiana Jones. I’m sure you all know the scene. The booby trapped temple; the body impaled on the spikes. It made me jump. I was just passing through while my dad was watching it but that left a lasting impression. (That, and Harrison Ford just blowing a guy away, which I later learned was because of severe diarrhea.) That was the first time I knew a movie could scare me. But that wasn’t the first time I got terrified.
No, the first time I was terrified of a movie was The Goonies.
I don’t know why, for the life of me. My wife and I rewatched it for this article and I still can’t think of a reason. But that was the ground-shaking influence on me and my introduction to being scared by movies.
I was staying at my cousin’s house, and she put on the movie. I was plenty old enough, I suppose. It’s a PG movie. But there was something about that movie that just terrified me. I asked my cousin to turn it off, and she did. I think maybe she was a little surprised. So was I. But she turned it off and we played video games. That was that.
I didn’t revisit scary movies for a while. I can’t remember which movie really broke the spell for me. There wasn’t a single moment in a particular movie that really gripped me. I didn’t cover my eyes during The Exorcist’s exorcism, or hide under the bed from Michael Myers. I was very brave last week. Rather, I saw Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. This isn’t a horror movie, either, but it was pretty intense. I think it was the context I was in that really unlocked its potential for me. I was far away from home, farther than I’d even been. I was in a strange, faraway land (Canada). It was a small city, and I felt smaller. So we went to the movie theatre and saw War of the Worlds.
I remember the tripod walkers that the movie became synonymous with. The sounds of the lasers scorching through lines of evacuating people, the indifference to which the aliens stomped through cities and tore through crowds were like thunder to my young ears. This is the first time I appreciated the effects of a movie theatre: the thundering bass when the tripods took their lumbering yet oddly smooth steps, the darkness of the theatre hijacking up the tension of hiding under rubble, and the giant screen making me feel infinitely small compared to dozens of those massive tripod titans moving their way across entire cities in only a few dozen steps.
It had absorbed me into a movie in a way I had never been before. The movie completely enthralled me. About halfway through my dad leaned over and asked, “Are you okay?” and touched my shoulder. I looked down, my hands were shaking. I didn’t even realize. I whispered, “Fine,” back and looked back at the screen. My hands stopped shaking, but my excitement didn’t calm down.
From then on, I wanted to get as much excitement as I could out of movies. Of course films can create a variety of emotions, but right then I was all about the adrenaline. I watched every scary movie I could get my hands on, and I was strangely resilient in a way I hadn’t been about the terrifying Goonies. It was harder to scare me, but I still loved it. It’s funny, I can’t remember which early horror movies I watched. I know I like quite a few of them. But none of them stick out like War of the Worlds did.
You might have thought in the opening that I was an awfully timid kid. And you would be right. I was pretty afraid. Some bad things happened to me. It made me want to crawl away from the world, to hide away from the scary things. But some switch flipped when I was watching War of the Worlds. I think it might have been the intensity for me; it looped back around until I felt that same tense fright I’d felt before, but differently. I wasn’t in the fight-or-flight stance. It was a safe way to play with a traumatic feeling without being in a traumatic situation.
That idea fascinated me. While I was mostly addicted to that rush of adrenaline, I branched out. Watching sad movies when I was sad, and so on. This was a distinct feeling. Mostly my friends and I watched comedies; we were already all together and having fun, so we extended that feeling with a movie that matched that mood. But I was experiencing new kinds of catharsis through film, including some dark ones. And that made me feel better. When I got depressed, there were movies there to feel it with me. Horror movies were there to share trauma and pain with. And I didn’t watch romance, because I was desperately lonely.
What is it about horror, though? It’s pretty polarizing; many people don’t like it. When they say why, I sort of get it. “I don’t like being scared!” Purely biologically, that makes sense. It’s triggered an adrenaline fight-or-flight response, something which isn’t precisely pleasant. Our brains try to keep us away from dangerous situations, most of the time; why would we want to simulate them?
Trauma is more than just an emotional reaction. It’s physical, too. It rewrites the brain and invades the body. There are new connections created and old ones wiped away. It changes who you are biologically. So sometimes, if you’re scared enough, you come to crave it. It feels normal. It’s home, strangely. Since it’s caused in such an overwhelming way, though, we often block out trauma as a defense mechanism. Our minds try to protect us. You don’t want the things that hurt you the most to be an obsession.
So, since trauma alters you, but you can’t process it directly, what are you to do? Horror movies, to me, feel like an eclipse. I couldn’t stare directly at the sun, but I could look through a viewing window into on-screen trauma. That helped. I didn’t feel alone. It made suffering seem fantastical and otherworldly instead of cold and mundane. It gave me a shared experience with other people who didn’t know what that was like. And some who did! There’s a good mixture of traumatized people in the horror communities, like little terrible sprinkles. But we like each other.
Playing in the realms of chaos on screen can ground us when it feels like the world is too much. There’s not one type of horror. Sometimes the villain is straightforward, like a serial killer with a chainsaw. Or sometimes it’s more complex, like the concept of death itself. But in real life, horror comes from unexpected places. It often comes from places of love: your family, your friends, whose love gives them the ability to hurt the most. Often it’s forces outside of our control that hurt us. Horror can come from excess or deprivation, from malice or indifference, and it can come from anywhere. No matter your movie, real life is a lot more horrific on the whole, and it’s a lot more complex.
When it comes down to it, many times, horror movies are about survival. Seventy different monsters might attack you, but you have only one goal: live. That simplicity is appealing. For just a little while, you’re not trapped in your life with your fears, anxieties, tribulations, dreams, hopes, or triumphs. You’re in the movie, seeing the sun of trauma through your eclipse viewer of the silver screen. For a little while, that’s all it is. That’s liberating.
When you’re alone with a monster, nothing else can hurt you.
I guess it helps if you’re already a little scared all the time. I guess maybe if you’re normally not anxious then a horror movie is going to be uncomfortable in the same way that a roller coaster is for many people. It’s faster and more intense than you’re used to. People subject themselves to it voluntarily. Everyone around you tells you how cool it is. But it makes sense to be uncomfortable.
For me, horror movies help fill two opposing inclinations. When I’m depressed, it’s sometimes a shot of adrenaline. It pulls me in, waking me up, pulling me into the new reality constructed by the film. A film too happy wouldn’t satisfy my mood; a dark place matches my mood, but the winding horror builds up interest and adrenaline when my brain just wants to withdraw. When I’m anxious, the films match me, giving me a catharsis about the stress and letting me release it with the characters in a less harmful way.
That seems to be what this very much boils down to: a genuine sense of catharsis. That’s going to be different for everyone. But for me, seeing something on screen helps me understand the broader experience of human pain. We all go through so much that we can’t understand, even with perfect knowledge of each other. There’s an irreducible subjectivity to how we feel and process emotions. Your grief is not the same as my grief; how could it be? We are unique constructions of bodies and minds, shaped by millions of experiences and thoughts just as unique as we are. Exploring those expressions through horror movies is one way of universalizing that pain; to share in others the feelings, even the dark ones, that lurk inside of us. The monsters, from haunted hotels to undersea predators, vary, but each one speaks to very universal feelings inside of us. Our fears of the unknown, of death, of anything that makes our heart pound are inside all of us, but what makes our fear tick? This is the fundamental question of horror movies that I find so fascinating: where do our fears come from? It’s obvious why we fear axe murderers and evil dolls, but less clear why many people bristle at lots of tiny holes.
This is one reason I very much enjoy watching horror movies across many cultures; you get a distinct sense of what scares people. A lot of things are common. While not a horror movie, after the worldwide acclaim that Parasite received, director Bong Joon-ho noted, “I tried to express a sentiment specific to Korean culture, but all the responses were basically the same. Essentially, we all live in the same country, called capitalism.” Even when we see different cultures reflected in these movies, we as an audience can identify the shared humanity that comes with the horror that appears on-screen.
So I’ll curl up and watch something horrific tonight. Maybe that French movie about a scissors wielding nurse stealing an unborn baby. Really pretty uncomfortable, if I’m being honest. But in reveling in that simplicity, in that fight-or-flight, that life or death, I can see past the specifics to what it speaks to in all of us. Our fear, our predatory instincts. Our victimhood and our victims. The desires most tied to our shadow side. And as bad as it all is, I know that sharing in that makes it better. The horror on screen connects to that fear in our hearts, and when we share that, we lessen it. So look at the eclipse that the director is sharing on screen, because that ray of light unites everyone with that shared experience. And when we share, triumph or trauma, the monsters seem a little smaller than before.
