Admit it, love to tickle your nerves watching a horror movie? Cly crunch the popcorn, watching the revived dead man bite into the brain, or scaredly turn away from the screen? Psychotherapist Grigory Gorshunin explains why romantic comedies we sometimes prefer the chorror -freezing horror.
What forces us, if not all, then many, with interest to peering into the screens on which the villains and monsters hunt living people, and they freeze with fear, squeal with horror and make endless stupid things: go alone to gloomy caves or invite to inHouse of ominous strangers? It seems that all this contradicts common sense. But the fact of the matter is that we get tired of common sense, from the need to protect the border separating our day consciousness from the world of nightmares.
Films of horror – about the violation of the border: between the world of aggressive fantasies and reality, dead and living, the world of helplessness and the world of predictability and management. Ultimately – between conscious and unconscious. The classic Hitchcock horror was not in vain called “psycho”. Films of this genre model psychosis – a breakthrough of unconscious horror into the world of an adult psyche.
The German philosopher and psychologist Karl Yaspers describes the beginning of psychosis as a loss of a feeling of “householding” of the world: that which was familiar and safe, becomes mysterious, sinister, complete dangerous meanings. Not only peace -loving perception is violated, but the very opportunity to comprehend the world and manage it.
Imagine that you are approaching your car that you know and love. Of course, you are not a car mechanic, but what you know allows you to safely use it. And suddenly, while driving, the car becomes something alien, incomprehensible, distant, unpredictable. The driver covers panic. But not a car has changed, but a perception: an illusion of management loss arose. If a person while driving he calms down and stops taking the car as something incomprehensible and hostile, control will be restored. Even if the salvation of the heroes is in question, as in “Trucks” based on the story of Stephen King, for us, spectators, watching the film becomes a synonym for mastering the situation – horror remains on the other side of the screen.
But we can identify not only with a frightened part, but also with an attacking evil, thereby identifying with different aspects of our psyche.
Another frequent topic is living dead. Let us recall at least “from sunset to dawn”: the heroes fight off the zombie all night, while everyone risks being bitten and turn into one of them. What is the attractiveness of the revived dead man? He symbolizes the “I” that tries to come to the daytime, which tries to come to a daytime reality.
Stories about the obsession with spirits, the introduction of parasites: about the terrible (as it seems) contents of the soul that can break out and destroy everything to destroy. We are relieved when the heroes manage to destroy the disgusting and restore the barrier between the worlds. But the best subjects, from my point of view, about establishing communication, attempts to understand
the torn ugly and hidden. Not about destruction, but about metamorphosis. Like in the thriller of Edrian Lyne “Jacob Staircase”, where demons turn into angels when a person stops being afraid and hate. Monsters come to recall the power that is hidden in us. This force can carry death – or transformation. If not afraid.
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