Freddy, Jason and Frankenstein taught me about Empathy
Most kids spend a certain amount of time sneaking around their parents to watch scary movies. I didn’t, not really. I remember watching The Sixth Sense at one point but I had no idea what happened in that film until years later. I also caught Being John Malkovich once on CBC. Despite overwhelming disagreements whenever I bring it up, I maintain that is easily one of the scariest movies of all time. Several years passed where I’d completely omit horror as a genre. I’d skip that part of Blockbuster, or I’d decline invites to the theatre. I didn’t have the stomach for it and I wasn’t that interested in gratuitous violence.
When I got a bit older, and things got a bit darker for me I came to have a certain detached appreciation of horror movies. They were a bit of a refuge when my brain didn’t work the way I wanted it to. They gave me that primal fix that touches you somewhere you don’t like people to know you were touched. I hunkered down for marathons of American Horror Story, and I trolled through the thrillers and psychological torment genres. I’m not much for gore. Stress, yes. Not the gore. I’m looking for something that’ll engage and challenge my mind, not just my gag reflex.
It dawned on me recently while I was re-watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo that these films and stories have some very important things I’d completely missed.
I spend a lot of time thinking about space, and how to make it more functional or inviting. How do we tailor the feel of a space to the psychology of those who are using it? What changes do we make to ensure that people feel welcomed, secure, sheltered, you name it. I was first introduced to these concepts listening to a critic* talk about Taliesen, the incredible masterwork, in my opinion, of Frank Lloyd Wright. My mom introduced me to Frank Lloyd Wright when I was a kid and I remember being flummoxed by Fallingwater like everyone else. I admired this artistic vision wrought in buildings but I didn’t realize their depth until later. The critic I mentioned discussed the intense history and change that has happened at the Taliesen house. The long and the short of this is that the house served as a refuge for the architect, then it burned, was rebuilt slightly differently, burned again and was rebuilt with minor modifications. What I had never appreciated was the physical changes to the layout, or the features. The critic described the closing in, the sheltering of Frank Lloyd Wright at the house throughout turmoil, loss and challenge that was occurring in his life. The house came to protect him, through its space. So naturally I made the connection to violent horror.
“So naturally I made the connection to violent horror.”
Arguably, not everyones life can be described as “horrific”, but we all feel more or less a baseline set of emotions (fear, anger, sadness, joy, contentment, ecstasy etc.). The strong ones make us act in different ways and seek out different things. My personal favourite being Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia…so far it seems to work for me with all emotions.
Horror movies make us think about specific kinds of feelings. Terror is important, stress, anguish and fear all play a major role in telling these kinds of stories. So I started to look at what people did when they felt these things. There’s an inordinate amount of blanket clutching in horror movies, just FYI.
Watching the way people move, where they hide, what they cower under, and inevitably where they perch to try to catch the killer from above tells us a lot about how we build space. There’s a considerable part of the cannon that deals with isolation; be it cabins in the woods or suburban sprawl where you lose yourself in the sameness. We’ve even got great works that look at what happens when cities turn green and start to eat themselves from the inside out. It’s fascinating.
Now, I’ve just sung the praises of scaring the crap out of people in order to figure out what those deep, animalistic fears make them crave. Furthermore, if you read it a bit deeper, I’ve basically proposed that we use this as a way to build out better structures as though there is an almost certain death outcome where Freddy, Jason and Jigsaw are really our neighbours and we don’t stand a chance in the woods or the suburbs. Thats not exactly it.
If you watch people fear and you watch people suffer you can definitely learn about what makes for comfort. You can come to understand the behaviour of those around you who may gravitate to a low doorway, or who may prefer shadow to bright lights. Its possible to understand why alley’s are scary and meadows are not. This isn’t rocket science, and we’re not all Tin Woodsmen. We can understand these things.
What I think we get from horror is a chance to work on our empathy. We can watch, feel, tense and then relax. There’s a reason they teach you about the climax and the denouement in english class. The denouement is where we make sense of what has happened. We process the feelings, we try to find closure and understanding. We think about what it feels like to hide in a low doorway, or under a table and we try to come out. We know where we would go when we hear the hook scraping, but the denouement is when we look the hook bearer in the eye and try to understand them. For a moment anyway.
So understanding is really at the core, and understanding in the face of trials and traumas is really, really hard. So if we think about the trials and traumas of the survivors we can start to learn not only where to go when things go sideways, but we can also start to build our empathy for how to ride out the denouement and improve ourselves, not just as designers of space, but as human beings who are making choices and changes that impact the lives of others.
In my first year of university I was told to buy a copy of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Its one of my favourite books now because we read it and talked at length about what it means to be human. Once we came to some tense agreement on that we argued about what in the damn hell that meant for us (humans) in the face of climate change. We were a headstrong bunch who’d come together to study the environment. Half of us didn’t know our ass from our elbows, let alone carbon, taxes, economics, or any of the other things we learned. We did know monsters though. It was a wild ride. I learned that the monsters were really more relatable than they seemed and sometimes a little more empathy is enough.
*I confess I have long forgotten who it was I first heard speak of this, but there are many commentaries on Taliesen available so go find one and have fun!
