Why does watching the same freaky\u00a0transformation make one child\u00a0howl at the moon in delight and\u00a0consign another to decades of avoiding the dark? (I am not alone. In\u00a0surveys conducted in the late 90s<\/a>,\u00a0one in four US undergraduate students reported having enduring fears linked to a frightening movie experienced in childhood.)<\/p>\n There is a clinical term for what may\u00a0have happened to me: cinematic neurosis. It describes a reaction to a\u00a0film so intense and so enduring that it clears the bar for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) \u2013 the persistent arousal, the anxiety, the thing relived through intrusive thoughts and images. We usually retain PTSD for survivors of violence or disaster. A\u00a01948 Abbott and Costello comedy is\u00a0not, on paper, either. Yet the diagnosis makes room for ordinary events that are nonetheless lived as catastrophic \u2013 and watching a film, it\u00a0turns out, can qualify.<\/p>\n double quotation markWhat frightens us the most is not that monsters are out there, but that they share our address<\/p>\n The most striking case I know was\u00a0written up in 2007<\/a>. 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\u2019ve never come close to her symptoms. But I recognise the experience, because a quieter version of it has affected me since I was six.<\/p>\n To understand why a film can do this to a person, it helps to understand why for nearly everyone else it doesn\u2019t. We\u2019ve always told ourselves frightening stories, from the Minotaur of Greek mythology to Beowulf\u2019s Grendel, from tales of medieval vampires to Edgar Allan Poe. Freud, my preferred guide to this\u00a0sort of thing, argued that the most potent of\u00a0them tap a specific dread he called the uncanny \u2013 in German, unheimlich \u2013 which literally translates as un-homely, meaning the strange thing\u00a0that wears a familiar face.<\/p>\n His richest example is the double: two beings that are seemingly the same but we know they are not. It\u2019s the\u00a0evil twin, the mirror that betrays you, Jekyll and Hyde. What frightens us is not the knowledge that monsters are out there but the fear the monster shares our address.<\/p>\n You can see why cinemas have reached for the un-homely so hungrily\u00a0of late. The two horror films\u00a0currently buoying box offices, Backrooms<\/a> and Obsession<\/a> \u2013 both made\u00a0by gen Z former YouTubers \u2013 trade on exactly this. Backrooms leaves you stranded in the endless liminal nowhere of a shop basement drained of people and purpose. It\u2019s\u00a0the\u00a0most familiar architecture imaginable, but made wrong. Obsession sees a relationship violently\u00a0unravel after a young man\u00a0wishes for his girlfriend to love him \u201cmore than anyone else in the world\u201d. Both are the unheimlich rendered almost literally; familiar people, places and objects taken from\u00a0the home and un-homed.<\/p>\n Literal shop of horrors \u2026 Renate Reinsve in Backrooms.<\/p>\n It makes sense that we\u2019d want to\u00a0summon this dread on purpose. A\u00a0horror film builds a safe enclosure where we can rehearse terror, chaos and helplessness with no adverse consequences. It\u2019s the same machinery as the bedtime fairytale, with its witches and caged children and murderous stepmothers. We frighten children, gently, as a form of\u00a0inoculation.<\/p>\n But the body can\u2019t always tell the rehearsal from the real thing. My own research is on the links between mind and body, and I still find it remarkable that a film can lift your blood pressure and activate your immune cells into readiness as though a fight were coming. The brain\u2019s fear centres fire up not only at the jump scare but across the long, taut wait that sets it up.<\/p>\n In 2012, researchers wrote about a woman<\/a>, known as SM, whose illness had destroyed her amygdala, the brain\u2019s central alarm; she lost the ability to be frightened by horror films at all. She could experience appropriate anger, sadness, disgust and happiness when watching film clips \u2013 but did not react to anything from The Blair Witch Project or Arachnophobia.<\/p>\n double quotation markSeeing films at a very young age is one factor: until the age of seven, children can\u2019t reliably tell fantasy from reality<\/p>\n In Danse Macabre, Stephen King<\/a>\u2019s landmark study of horror fiction, he argued that horror conveys the threats society can\u2019t name out loud. He wrote about cinema during his boyhood in 1956, in America\u2019s Red Scare era, and the alien-invasion pictures that dominated: Earth vs the Flying Saucers and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The first is a fantastical allegory of communism arriving from outside, the second a nastier story of it changing your neighbours from within. The second is always the scarier idea, and it runs through multiple generations of horror cinema from The Exorcist and Alien to Jordan Peele\u2019s Get Out and Us. In the current decade \u2013 a frightened, fractured one \u2013 it should come as no surprise that horrormania has reached new heights.<\/p>\n
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