[Can you identify all the movies in these photos?]
It’s no revelation to say horror movies are full of death. But you know what else they’re full of? People who don’t want to die.
There are a few theories about why some of us are so drawn to horror movies and books. One is that they allow the experience of facing extreme danger and surviving. It’s similar to the way roller coasters give you a good fright, but you come out feeling accomplished (and superior to those too scared to ride).
Another is that horror penetrates the shell many of us have built around us. The theory is that early traumatic experiences caused us to go into emotional shock. Shock is a defensive response that protects us by not letting us feel too much. We go numb. The idea is that we had many traumatic experiences, so we did that many times. Because we never processed the emotion that caused the shock, we walk around in a state of partial numbness and don’t feel things very well. A very scary horror movie or story causes us fear, which feels better than feeling nothing.
And then there’s just having such a bad life that we want to see someone having a worse one. I’ve felt that many times. While others manage sad or hopeless feelings by watching a happy movie, I want a story that shows me someone going through even worse than I’m facing.
But it occurs to me that horror movies might also appeal to me because of all the people in them who don’t want to die. When my depression symptoms are bad, I watch movies with death after death, and I feel some envy of the fresh corpses. Why am I still here? My life has had so much pain (much of it simply from my own depressed mind) that I have no desire to be here for years and years yet. If there really were a god and he were weighing who to take next, I’d say “Don’t kill someone with children or a spouse who needs them or even a pet. Let me die. No one depends on me for daily support.”
Maybe horror movies fascinate me because in many of them someone or other is drawing his last breath, being excused from the table, buying the farm. They are relieved of duty as I very much wish I could be, when my depression symptoms are bad.
So, of course, these movies feature characters with a strong desire to live. I recently watched Ready or Not, an excellent movie, although I’d call it more a comedy/thriller than horror (but there is a lot of gore). One of the characters says, “I don’t want to die!” It’s not an original line, but in my current state of depression, it struck me: this person would do anything to stay alive. What must that feel like?
I had a friend who was once held up at gunpoint. The robber made her go to different ATM’s (because of the limit on withdrawals) until she’d given him all the money in her account. She said living through a situation where she could have died made life look different. It was like a reset or a re-orientation.
I wonder if a situation in which I could die would help me appreciate life more. The sad fact is that even when my depression symptoms are in remission, I still don’t feel like my life is worth much. I feel ambivalent about being alive and I definitely don’t long to be here into my 80s or beyond.
So I plow through horror movies. Maybe they help me feel emotion through my numbness. Maybe they make me feel better about my life. Or maybe I’m drawn to that moment when you pass from being alive to being dead and I’m comforted by the idea that sometimes you don’t see your death coming and it happens very quickly.
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