Psychological Suspense Genre Addresses Society’s Gaslighting
Entertainment for all
Psychological Suspense and Thriller novels, movies, and TV shows are perfect vehicles that show the social engineering forces that are prevalent in our society, as we are all being gaslit by falsehoods we’re officially provided. Life doesn’t make sense if we believe them. Settling down with some Psychological Suspense can be a great way to process the feelings, and move through them, while having a good time.
Disinformationists, mind-controllers, gaslighting newscasters and double-speaking politicians play games with us. And they likely manipulate the psyches of the protagonists in some Psychological Suspense narratives. The protagonists often already have unstable mental and emotional states. The antagonists’ obfuscation of the truth, and the protagonists’ perceptual challenges make it hard for the reader to determine what is going on, which creates addictive mystery, intrigue, and suspense.
The protagonist is in great danger, and with Suspense, the readers know this fact more clearly than the character does. This sensation of living in a dangerous world can make entertainment into a good cathartic experience to process the reality in which we really are being misled by psychopaths in charge of our society.
When everything starts to make sense by the end, we can get that wonderful rush, that ah ha moment that at least some of us find enjoyable when we come to a realization, even if it reveals the corruption or gullibility. The antagonist deliberately impacts the protagonist’s vulnerable mental state, making the confusion get worse before it resolves at the end, as the protagonist puts the pieces together and recovers a semblance of normalcy. The lines are blurred between the protagonist and antagonist, normalcy and strangeness, hero and anti-hero.
This is what we must endure in our own lives; for example, some people become soldiers or join the CIA because they are tricked into believing they’ll be helping out small unfortunate countries when in fact they’re subverting them to steal their resources. They might have to become disinformation agents to complete the jobs they signed up for, yet they are good people who can’t even tell their families the truth about the lies they’re perpetrating. A character who is close to the protagonist imposes his will on him through creating delusions.
Protagonists must use mental resources to win against the antagonists, who are sometimes actually parts of the protagonists. This is the world familiar from COINTELPRO, with infiltrators inside every activist organization, breaking people down, destroying their lives, friendships and reputations, making everything go wrong, while the activists wonder what’s going on, why nothing works our for them any more, why people are looking at them so judgmentally.
This amazing surreality day by day is what people go through who see through media lies, who understand false flags are being perpetuated, when their friends still believe the mainstream news. And what about people trying to get their family members out from under the sway of cult leaders, or to keep them from believing in hoaxes? Yep, time to have some fun and curl up with Psychological Suspense.
Readers and viewers of Psychological Suspense narratives expect to gleefully struggle with bewilderment while focusing on the themes of malleable reality, fragile perceptions and existential identity, with profound philosophical implications and emotional catharsis.
Tropes include claustrophobic spaces, being stuck, being confined to institutions, obsessions, shadows, complex old or futuristic buildings, doubles, hypnosis, mental illness, phobias, codes, sadism, dark sexuality, macabre motifs, secrets, mind control, passageways, betrayal, amnesia, isolation, inability to trust anyone and sudden reversals of who is the perceived friend and who the enemy. They often overlap with Conspiracy genres. Stream of consciousness is a common POV device.
Watching or reading psychological suspense and thrillers can be a wonderful pastime which allows us to go a little crazy with the characters, and enjoy the ambiguity and uncertainty. We can feel empathy for others living inside this fun house, bond with them, and feel we are not alone. It’s a great way to mirror reality with a bit of fun and camp, over-the-top excitement and delicious dread.
And by the end, very often, the protagonist puts the puzzle pieces together and we can have the feeling that there is some resolution, some way the Alice in Wonderland upside-down-world we live can be flipped in the right direction when we do in-depth research to understand what’s going on beneath the deceptive illusions.
