How Developing A Love For Horror Films Has Helped My Anxiety
If you’d asked me a couple of years ago to list my favourite genre of films, horror wouldn’t appear anywhere near the top. I have had terrible anxiety since my early teenage years, and horror never seemed like a genre I would be able to make peace with. Why would someone want to be deliberately scared? After all, I still got scared thinking of that one episode of Doctor Who with the children wearing gas masks, asking ‘are you my real mummy?’ (although this episode does seem to equally haunt everyone my age…).
Around the same age that my anxiety started to blossom, I started to see a correlation between the kind of people that enjoyed horror, and the kind of people I didn’t want to be around. Boys would watch the scariest films they could find, and then show off their acts of bravado in Maths class by relaying all the gory details to their friends, daring them to protest that they couldn’t take it and risk ostracisation. Are people who watch horror just inherently sadistic and cruel? Are they bad people?
There were certain classic horror films that I had always wanted to watch, but were too worried about them triggering my anxiety or causing a panic attack. I would try to glean any facts I could off people who had seen them to test my boundaries, I desperately wanted to be someone who could at least watch these films at Halloween with my friends, and to not think of myself as pathetic for not being able to withstand them. It wasn’t until I was in my third year at university that I watched my first proper horror film. A friend of mine offered to watch each of the Saw films with me as I had been wanting to watch them for years. Now don’t get me wrong, the contents of the films has never been what bothered me about horror films, but rather my involuntary, anxious reactions to them, to be so out of control of my own body. But as I watched these films with my friend, I found the lack of control I felt almost freeing. I didn’t feel anxious, but instead got absorbed in the character’s anxiety, distracting me from my own circumstances that paled in comparison to the torture being inflicted on the people on the screen.
Now it’s not my best strategy for coping with my anxiety, but watching a horror film can definitely help get me out of my head for an hour or so. The fear that these films instil in the viewer, the anticipation, provide a much more immersive experience that allows me to distract myself more fully from my own life. I think there is a tinge of a violent streak buried in all of us, and for some, the act of watching films like this do make them grow into cruel people, but for me, the horror film acts as a catharsis.
Horror for me acts as not a means of inducing my own anxiety, but as a vessel to live in someone else’s head for a little while. There is a very powerful feeling that comes with having watched a film that is meant to scare you and coming out the other side unscathed, and I think that’s why people watch them - not to feel scared, but to feel powerful. To survive, as closely as we can without risking our own lives, the unthinkable. To get a practise run at acting out our deepest fears. There is an intimacy that comes with the horror genre that I think is unmatched by any other, and that’s why I love it.
Written by Sasha Smith
Sasha is a poet currently completing her Master's degree in English. Check out her poetry on Instagram @sashayawaypoetry