Illustration: Julia Specht/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: Julia Specht/The Guardian Horror films I’m a psychiatrist who was terrified of horror films – until I learned about ‘cinematic neurosis’ Why do scary movies thrill some viewers and send others running for the hills? Our writer gets to the bottom of his fear of the genre – with the assistance of Freud, clinical researchers and his six-year-old self
Prefer the Guardian on Google I am six years old, and I am watching a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I am staring up at our black-and-white TV fixated on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin to scream so inconsolably that my parents must carry me upstairs to calm me down.
That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror films and of the supernatural, of darkness and of being alone in a house.
I am now a psychiatrist, and for years I have been unsettled by a question: why are horror movies so popular (and profitable) when I personally find them so traumatic? Today, the demand for simulated terror has never been higher. Even as cinemas struggle to win back their pre-pandemic crowds, and as comedy and drama releases increasingly migrate to streaming, horror has gone the other way: the genre took roughly 70% more at the North American box office in 2023 than it did a decade earlier.
Why does watching the same freaky transformation make one child howl at the moon in delight and consign another to decades of avoiding the dark? (I am not alone. In surveys conducted in the late 90s, one in four US undergraduate students reported having enduring fears linked to a frightening movie experienced in childhood.)
There is a clinical term for what may have happened to me: cinematic neurosis. It describes a reaction to a film so intense and so enduring that it clears the bar for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – the persistent arousal, the anxiety, the thing relived through intrusive thoughts and images. We usually retain PTSD for survivors of violence or disaster. A 1948 Abbott and Costello comedy is not, on paper, either. Yet the diagnosis makes room for ordinary events that are nonetheless lived as catastrophic – and watching a film, it turns out, can qualify.
What frightens us the most is not that monsters are out there, but that they share our address The most striking case I know was written up in 2007. A woman identified only as Ms X had watched The Exorcist as a teenager. At 22 she turned up at an ER in crisis, convinced she was possessed, drowning in flashbacks of a film she had seen years before. Her case was extreme, and partly explained by mental health difficulties that predated the film. I’ve never come close to her symptoms. But I recognise the experience, because a quieter version of it has affected me since I was six.
To understand why a film can do this to a person, it helps to understand why for nearly everyone else it doesn’t. We’ve always told ourselves frightening stories, from the Minotaur of Greek mythology to Beowulf’s Grendel, from tales of medieval vampires to Edgar Allan Poe. Freud, my preferred guide to this sort of thing, argued that the most potent of them tap a specific dread he called the uncanny – in German, unheimlich – which literally translates as un-homely, meaning the strange thing that wears a familiar face.
His richest example is the double: two beings that are seemingly the same…