I am a psychiatrist who was afraid of horror movies – until I learned about “cinematoneurosis”. Horror movies

I I’m six years old, and I watch a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I stare at our black-and-white television as I focus on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin screaming so unbearably that my parents have to carry me upstairs to calm me down.

That night was the beginning of my constant fear of horror movies and supernatural phenomena, of the dark, and of being alone at home.

I’m now a psychiatrist, and for many years I’ve been concerned with the question: Why are horror movies so popular (and profitable) when I personally find them so traumatic? Today, the demand for terrorism simulation has never been higher. Even as movie theaters struggle to regain their pre-pandemic audiences, and as comedic and dramatic releases increasingly move to streaming, horror has gone the other way: The genre has taken nearly 70% more at the North American box office in 2023 than it did a decade ago.

Why would watching the same terrible transformation make one child howl at the moon in joy and send another child into decades of avoiding darkness? (I’m not alone. In surveys conducted in the late 1990s, one in four college students in the United States reported having persistent fears linked to a scary childhood movie.)

There is a medical term for what happened to me: cinematic neurosis. It describes a reaction to a movie that is so strong and persistent that it lends itself to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – constant arousal, anxiety, and retrieval of things through intrusive thoughts and images. We usually reserve PTSD for survivors of violence or disaster. A 1948 comedy about Abbott and Costello isn’t on the cards either. Yet the diagnosis makes room for ordinary events that can nonetheless be experienced as catastrophic – and it turns out that watching a movie can qualify for that.

The most surprising case I know of was written in 2007. It was a woman identified only as Ms. At 22, she arrives at the emergency room in crisis, convinced she’s been possessed, and plunged into flashbacks to a movie she’d seen years before. Her condition was severe, partly explained by mental health difficulties that preceded the film. I’ve never come close to experiencing its symptoms. But I recognize this experience, because the calmer version of it has influenced me since I was six years old.

To understand why a movie can do this to one person, it helps to understand why it doesn’t do this to almost everyone else. We’ve always told ourselves scary stories, from the Minotaur in Greek mythology to Beowulf’s Grendel, from medieval vampire tales to Edgar Allan Poe. Freud, my favorite guide to this sort of thing, said that the strongest of them tap into a specific fear that he called “the uncanny” — in German, Heimlich – Which literally translates as non-domestic, meaning a strange thing wearing a familiar face.

His richest example is the double: two objects that appear to be the same but we know they are not. It’s the evil twin, the mirror that betrays you, Jekyll and Hyde. What scares us is not the knowledge that monsters are out there, but the fear that the monster will share our address.

You can see why movie theaters have been reaching out to non-home audiences so hungrier lately. The two horror films currently thriving at the box office, Backrooms and Obsession, both produced by former Gen Z YouTubers, trade on exactly that. Backrooms leaves you stranded in the endless, liminal nowhere of a store basement devoid of people and purpose. It’s the most iconic architecture imaginable, but it’s wrong. Obsession sees a relationship violently disintegrate after a young man wishes his girlfriend would love him “more than anyone else in the world.” Both non-Heimlich are presented almost verbatim; Familiar people, places and things taken from home and uninhabited.

It makes sense that we would want to intentionally invoke this dread. The horror film builds a safe space where we can rehearse terror, chaos, and helplessness without any negative consequences. It’s the same mechanism as a bedtime fairy tale, with witches, trapped children, and murderous stepmothers. We scare children, gently, as a form of vaccination.

But the body can’t always distinguish between exercise and the real thing. My own research is on the connections between mind and body, and I still find it remarkable that a movie can raise your blood pressure and activate your immune cells to make them ready for combat to come. The fear centers in the brain are activated not only by the jump, but also by the long, tense wait that leads to it.

In 2012, The researchers wrote about a woman, known as SM, whose illness destroyed the amygdala, the brain’s central alarm system; I’ve lost the ability to be afraid of horror movies at all. She can feel angry, sad, disgusted, and happy when watching movie clips – but she doesn’t react to anything from The Blair Witch Project or arachnophobia.

In Danse Macabre, Stephen King’s landmark study of horror novels, he argued that horror communicates threats that society cannot speak out loud about. He wrote about cinema during his childhood in 1956, the era of the Red Scare in America, and the images of alien invasion that dominated: Earth vs. flying saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The first is a fantastical allegory for communism coming from without, the second a more sinister story about changing your neighbors from within. The second is always the scarier idea, spanning multiple generations of horror cinema from The Exorcist and Alien to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and Us. In the current decade – a frightened and fractured decade – it should come as no surprise that horror obsession has reached new heights.

As for the reasons why horror movies scared a six-year-old beyond the point of enjoyment, the research hits uncomfortably close to home. There are some traits that push a child towards reacting with shock rather than arousal. Watching a movie at a very young age is one of these things: until the age of seven, children cannot reliably distinguish between fantasy and reality, and “it’s just a story” falls on closed ears. Another factor is increased empathy: the more the child feels for the victim, the worse the ordeal will be. What suits me best is what researchers call imaginative empathy: the willingness to melt into an artificial world. If you find yourself watching an action movie, lost in a trance somewhere between your couch and a burning building as you single-handedly take down strangers, you’ll know you’ve got it in spades.

Then there’s the last score, which I sat with the longest. Children who experience traumatic terror are more likely to experience loss or some other emotional difficulty at home. For that child, the monster on the screen becomes a place to place feelings that have no other place.

Years later, during therapy, I reverted to the werewolf. I always assumed my reaction was about what I saw on the screen, but I realized it was really about my home. The man who turned into a monster scared me so much because it sparked a fear I already had: that you could lose the people you love when they suddenly turn into something you don’t know, and that calm could suddenly give way to rage. The werewolf did not instill fear; It unleashed something that was already beneath the surface.

So what do you do if you are the parent of a terrified child, or if the terrified child still lives within you? When fear runs this deep, no amount of reassurance is effective. You can’t He speaks A six-year-old child emerges from the darkness – you have to do it displays they. One study took frightened children and showed them footage of an actor being molded, step by step, into a structure: They saw a man with some latex and some paint, who looked like a monster but was still a man. Children who witnessed the transformation were less afraid afterwards than those who did not witness it.

It’s the only trick that more or less works for me. When the film starts to drag me down, I break away for a moment and imagine what’s happening just outside the frame: the camera operator, the crane boom hovering above the actors’ heads, the director in headphones, and the crew standing a few feet from the monster, looking bored. Long enough to get out of the fantasy, and short enough to get back up again. It is its own little doubling process: the second self is on the edge of the group while the first remains lost in the darkness.

So – to borrow a concept from one of the biggest horror films of the decade – I’ll watch something scary, and witness the horror of the Upside Down. Then, when I separated for a few seconds, I was a grown man on his own couch, the lights on, and the house completely quiet. Then, I breathe out, and come back down.

Carmine M. Pariante is Professor of Biological Psychiatry at King’s College Londonand editor of the mental health blog platform Inspire the Mind.