A creepy old house with lots of secret rooms and hidden passages. A summer camp surrounded by dark woods and resting on the banks of a deep, dank lake. An abandoned turn-of-the-century asylum. An ancient graveyard at midnight. A mortuary.
What do all these have in common? They’re often the principal settings on which some of our worst fears play out. But ghosts and goblins, beasts and monsters are stubborn. All too often they refuse to stay where they belong.
In fact, it’s not the monsters outside of us that we often worry most about. Oh no, it’s the monsters inside of us that create both the greatest fears and the greatest fascination. And that’s why it’s little wonder that the psychological horror genre has such a universal and enduring appeal. But what can psychological horror teach us about ourselves?
Monsters Within
You don’t need a Ph.D. in psychology to know that human nature is complex and frequently unpredictable. After centuries, we’re still trying to figure out who we humans are, what humanity means, and what we’re capable of.
That search for an understanding of ourselves has yielded many happy insights. We humans can be kind, generous, and loving. We can do wonderful and loving things.
But there’s another side, a far darker side. Human history is replete with examples of the barbarity of humankind, the capacity for cruelty, for evil. It seems that the human mind is capable of conjuring atrocities that make cruel nature, red in tooth and claw, blush.
Enter Hannibal the Cannibal, antihero of the multi-Academy Award-winning Silence of the Lambs. Dr. Lecter is a brilliant, educated, refined man who happens to have a taste for human flesh.
His unapologetically diabolical nature would seem to give the lie to all our comforting assumptions about the nature of evil–that somehow the forces of civilization and science can root it out–or at least contain it. Dr. Lecter is himself a man of science.
But he is also a monster and his unlikely escape at the end of the film speaks to our recognition and our terror of the ambiguous, amorphous, and ineradicable (because it’s internal) monstrosity of the human at its worst.
The Mysterious Mind
The plot of Silence of the Lambs centers on the quest for an elusive serial killer. Federal agents, running out of time and options, turn to the (temporarily) imprisoned Dr. Lecter for the psychological insight that only he can provide. And in so doing, the storyline reveals both the extent and the limits of our understanding of the human mind.
Dr. Lecter’s unparalleled capacity to psychologically profile this merciless killer ultimately leads to his capture. And yet the secrets of Lecter’s mind remain largely hidden, even, perhaps, to himself. Characters like Lecter lead audiences to question the nature of human evil. Is it the byproduct of mental illness, thus turning perpetrators into victims? Or is it a deficiency of the soul?
These are questions that inform a vast array of horror films. Mental illness seems to be a favored theme of psychological horror. One particularly ubiquitous and compelling subtheme in this genre is that of the “split personality.”
Indeed, as we’ve already seen, Lecter himself can almost be said to house multiple identities in one captivating personality. But myriad other films also examine abnormal psychology such as dissociative identity disorder (DID). The 2016 flick, Split, features a lead character with 23 different personalities who kidnaps and holds hostage three young girls whom, in the throes of his illness, he proceeds to terrorize.
Movies like these reflect our fears of the other, of the hidden depths of madness and cruelty that might be lurking not only in strangers but also in those we love. And at the same time, we can also see mirrored in these stories our fear of ourselves. At the heart of many of these narratives, after all, is the conflict between personalities, the horror that the “good” personalities feel toward the actions of the “bad” ones.
And perhaps even more disturbing for most of us is simply the lack of self-awareness that many of these characters suffer. Often, the character does not even realize what they have done until it is too late. That raises some pretty fascinating, and frightening, questions about what we might be capable of, about what secret selves crouch unknown within us, only waiting for the opportunity to emerge and destroy.
As compelling as these representations of mental illness are and as important as the questions they inspire may be, however, there can be significant problems with mental illness narratives in psychological horror films. The most notable and damaging are the frequent associations these films make between mental illness and violence. In psychological horror, the mentally ill are typically shown as criminals who are cruel, immoral, and out of control as a result of their psychological disorders.
In reality, though, persons with mental illness neither lack self-control nor are they any more likely to be violent or to break the law than the general population.
The Takeaway
The genre of psychological horror is among the most enduring and popular with audiences worldwide. And it’s not difficult to understand why. Psychological horror reflects the mystery, the fascination, and the fear of ourselves and others.
writerjorihamilton.contently.com.
