Season’s Screamings: The Psychology Of Projected Fear

The other day I was in a meeting with my management and we were discussing local and national promotional ideas for Halloween, anything from showing up at the local spook shows to ghost investigations and even who we could contact that would make for a scary show. I said to the newly hired members of the promotions department that was not familiar with my show, “October is like this you know.” Milt McConnell, who is my direct liaison with the national network piped up, “You know there are only two holidays on Ground Zero, April Fool’s day and Halloween – and by now I guess you can tell what holiday it is.”

I laughed because, this time of year, I often see posts on my Facebook page, things like “A lot of occult topics lately Clyde – are you a Satanist?” or “So many important things going on in the world, like World War III and you want to talk about Werewolves? Or when Diabolous Rex was on the show, he threw the horned devil hand sign in a photo and immediately I am asked if I am a part of the Illuminati.

Well honestly if I was, I am sure I would be more rich and more powerful than I am currently, and I most certainly wouldn’t be doing Ground Zero —I would probably be plotting world take over and devising ways to eliminate Kanye West and anything Kardashian.

Whenever I see this type of questioning, I often feel like the character, Lawrence Woolsey in Joe Dante’s film “Matinee.” Woolsey is a huckster horror movie maker that is determined to show his new film “Mant” a b-movie that explains how atomic radiation can fuse a man with an ant, creating a horrifying mutation. Of course this is happening when once again the world is on the brink of World War III as it announced by President Kennedy that there are soviet missiles in Cuba.

The film is a send up of lots of themes from Civil Defense, to the Missile Crisis, to movies in general, to sci-fi 1950’s films, to spoofing life itself. I think it also says something about the escapism that is needed with the horror genre.

The world may be coming to an end, but it safer to watch the horror unfold with pop corn, milk duds and a Coke.

This reflects back to a Stephen King novel, Danse Macabre, which was recommended to me by the late Forrest J. Ackerman, the publisher of “Famous Monsters of Filmland.” At the time, I was publishing a B-horror movie Fanzine called “B-lame” about what was termed lame B horror films, and, I was interested in writing an essay about the psychology of horror films and why people love going to them to be frightened.

Danse Macabre was about horror fiction in print, radio, film and comics, and the influence of contemporary societal fears and anxieties on the horror genre. He claims that when we have to deal with horrors in real life—the horror fiction or even tales of supernatural horror experiences and urban legends excites us and even may create a bit of what is called “schadenfreude” which by the basic definition is a feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people or shameful joy in the suffering of others.

Many people will ask, what kind of sadist enjoys a horror film and why do we have to turn Halloween into a horrific holiday as opposed to a holiday that was first seen as a festival of the harvest?

To be honest, Halloween has had its ebb and flow of things terrifying and things not so terrifying. It is just that we notice the hideous costumes and slasher films because they affect us on a deeper level. In fact, it has been said that between 2012 and 2014, there was actually a decline in successful horror films, and a bigger market for religious films.

However in 2015, it seems that horror has once again started up again, with new ways to scare people with reality-based horror and new ways of finding humor in horror with films like Sharknado and television series like Z- Nation, Scream Queens and soon to be released shows like Ash vs. the Evil Dead.

Even though humor and horror is having a wonderful relationship, that doesn’t stop the real horror that is being released with television shows like American Horror Story, Sleepy Hollow and The Walking Dead. Movies like The Visit, Crimson Peak, Paranormal Activity, Annabelle, the Babadook and Insidious are doing a great job in breaking out into the mainstream, and creating a more sophisticated horror genre that does not rely on violence and chainsaw wielding killers to frighten audience members.

There is also the horror film that uses the POV or “point of view” technique where a voyeur using a camera wants to record for posterity the horrible events happening to others and eventually the cameraman. Arguably, the success of the Blair Witch Project started the whole giggle cam genre where horror goers not only get scared, but contract a severe case of motion sickness. I have friends that absolutely refuse to watch those types of films because they wind up in the bathroom after bringing up their gummy worms.

Movies like Cloverfield, a JJ Abrams horror film combined the POV experience with a CGI monster that looked like Godzilla as seen on a smart phone.

The qualities of both the horror film and the science fiction film are best appreciated in a psychological context, because each genre relies upon the projection of psychic material from the unconscious to elicit its meaning and value. Genre criticism has maintained that the monsters and aliens in both horror and science fiction are best seen as projections from the repressed unconscious described by Sigmund Freud.

However, I also see it as also projections of the collective unconscious as Jung would theorize. For example, one of my favorite films is the old Kevin McCarthy film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”

An alien invasion of some kind can conjure the unconscious fear of the “other” haunting or otherwise harming you or your family. But on a more cerebral level, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers shows you what happens when an alien threat is something as simple as creeping conformity, or the immediate rejection of your morals and cognitive resonance.

Another favorite horror film of mine is “Let’s Scare Jessica to Death.” This film is terrifying on a more cerebral and unconscious level, because of the setting and the fragile mentality of the woman named Jessica that was played by Zohra Lambert.

In 2006, the Chicago Film Critics Association declared that ‘Let’s Scare Jessica to Death’ was the 87th scariest film ever made.

At least it made the top 100 and if you can excuse the fact that it is a low budget film from 1971, you can allow yourself to try and understand what it would be like to be released from a psychiatric hospital and moving to a small rural town in Connecticut to escape your inner demons only to find that the entire town is plagued with supernatural phenomenon that has been kept secret by the locals.

The horror of the film simplified is that the woman “Jessica” was in a mental institution for a nervous breakdown. She is then released, healed form the experience except for an obsession with death.

She, her husband and some friends travel in a hearse of all things and then end up in a rural village somewhere on the east coast. Jessica begins to notice oddities around her that are very real, including ghostly appearances and a red-haired woman that she suspects is a witch, or even a vampire. When she tries to tell her friend and even her husband they suspect she is on the brink of insanity.

The Halle Berry film, Gothika also explores this topic, when a psychiatrist Miranda played by Berry almost runs over a girl with her car. She rushes to try to help the girl. The girl turns out to be a ghost and possesses Miranda’s body by burning her after she extends her hand to the girl. Miranda loses consciousness. Miranda next wakes up in the very hospital she works for, but as a patient treated by her co-worker played by Robert Downey, Jr. She is drugged and confused and is told she murdered her husband.

While in the mental ward, Miranda makes friends with a former patient of hers named Chloe. Chloe keeps telling Miranda she is being raped by the staff at the hospital. Miranda use to always dismiss it as part of Chloe’s mental illness. After witnessing the rape of Chloe in the institution, Miranda realizes that Chloe was not making up these stories and, apologizes. Chloe tells Miranda that she has no idea what it’s like to have these horrible things happen and not be helped or trusted. Miranda says that she needs to be trusted too.

Then, Chloe states the most chilling thing in my opinion and that is “You can’t trust someone who thinks you’re crazy.”

That is what I think is the most terrifying thing is to have something happen to you that traumatizes you. Whether it is supernatural, paranormal or otherwise and have people think you are crazy. How can you trust a person who doesn’t believe you and thinks you are crazy?

That is the horror that strikes the cerebral chord, not the hockey masked slashers or a killer with a burned face and a glove with blades – it is the idea of having an experience that no one believes happened to you –and then having the burden of paranoia so great that you can’t trust people because they think you are crazy.

Then comes the fear of being locked up, or drugged or being held against your will in a mental institution where you are abused and fearful with everyone attributing it to a delusion brought on by perceived mental illness.

Another film that also tackles the issue of the unraveling mind is the cult film, Carnival of Souls. The film was directed by Herk Harvey and starred Candice Hilligoss. I met Candice at a Utah horror film festival. The film was actually shot at a Utah landmark called “Salt Air” a pavilion that looked like an old Egyptian theater that sat on the shores of the Great Salt Lake.

After a car accident where a woman named Mary played by Hilligoss goes over a bridge with her friends the police spend three hours dragging the murky, fast-running water without success. Mary miraculously surfaces, but she cannot remember how she survived.

Mary wants to leave the area where the tragedy happened and gets a job as a church organist in Utah. She then begins to experience terrifying interludes when she becomes invisible and inaudible to the rest of the world, as if she simply is not there. When a strange dark man appears briefly in front of her in a park, she flees, right into the office of a Dr. Samuels. He tries to help her, even as he acknowledges he is not a psychiatrist.

The character of the dark man appears many times throughout the movie his ghostly face terrifies her – in the end we finally realize who this dark man is and in a Twilight Zone fashion we also learn why she simply was losing herself and felt like a ghost.

The answer at the end of the film is a twisted reminder that things that happen are not always as they seem, much like in the film The Sixth Sense where we realize that we are witnessing the neurosis of a little boy who says that he sees dead people. His mother and others worry about the boy and the man who he is talking to throughout the entire film – we realize is a ghost.

As Stephen King says, horror films often serve as a “barometer” of those things which trouble the night thoughts of a whole society.

The ability to cognitively represent horrific external events foreshadows the human capacity for symbolic thought. In some cases, a horror or a science fiction film fore-structures or even approximates a future event which makes it all the more terrifying.

There are many nightmares that are all too real, and there are many people living through them every day wondering why horrible things happen to good people.

The truth may be in the process of manifestation and the possibility of retro causality, where we see the effect happen before the cause. Real science says that it is all hypothetical, however with the aid of television and movies we can see hyper reality deliver a form of predictive programming setting us on the path of eschaton.

When reality imitates cinematic fiction, cinema no longer functions as the ‘prosthesis for memory’ but as an intact body for what is to come in the future. Rather than just preserving history, film instead furnishes a syntax and lens through which reality is being fore-structured.

Kenneth Anger, who is a follower of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, has stated that film does exactly what everyone suspects, it plants the seeds for a future event.

The purposes for some films are to stir the primal forces, and, are used as magical weapons to stir the soul out of conformity. The flickering image according to Anger creates a thought form and even if the image flickers for no one, it is still a causal engine that sends the image into the ether. If someone picks up on the meme and it is successfully implanted in the zeitgeist it is theorized that the very nightmare could easily transpire in the real world.

We are now being thrown into an onslaught of apocalyptic movie and television shows that glorify survival at any cost. The future is a place where mankind feeds on each other.

The new themes in science fiction and horror create a viral philosophy that it is useless to resist central, establishment control. It tends to posit a counter-cultural alternative to such control which is actually a counterfeit, covertly emanating from the establishment itself.

Quite literally, heroes creating villains to glorify themselves.

There is also the new genre of horror film that is based loosely on real events.

In fact, some horror films that you would least expect were based on a real event.

Incredibly enough, The Blob was based off a real phenomenon in New York City where multiple NYPD officers came in contact with a very strange gooey substance.

The terrifying film “The Conjuring” was based on a real-life investigators of paranormal activity reported by the Parron family who lived in a Rhode Island farmhouse that was violently haunted by wrathful wraiths. Many of us know that other famous horror films the Exorcist and the Amityville Horror were based on real events.

Real events also inspired Wes Craven’s, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Stephen King’s The Stand were based on real news stories that inspired their creators.

Wes Craven developed the idea for the Nightmare on Elm Street after reading newspaper articles that reported about multiple refugees who kept dying in their sleep. The Stand was inspired by an accidental chemical spill that happened in Utah.

A nerve gas agent was accidentally released at Dugway Proving Grounds and killed a group of grazing sheep in Skull Valley.

Horror movies have again changed because times have changed and audiences have become more sophisticated. It used to be that an axe wielding murderer killing teens while they are having sex was a warning and a metaphor for teens not to engage in risky behaviors – now there is less sex and more psychological terrors – that include and apocalypse full of disease and infected zombies, destroyed ruins of cities that are warnings about a looming nuclear end —scary clowns and warnings about not tampering with the monsters and spirits that live in the ether.

It used to be that old “B” horror films were made to escape reality and to feel a little chill in the safe confines of the theater.

Well, as we all know theaters are not too safe anymore, and usually if you go to a horror film, you are leaving the real nightmare of living today outside the theater door only to be shown a fore-structuring of what might happen to you in the present and or the future.

Text – Check out Ground Zero Radio with Clyde Lewis Live Nightly @ http://www.groundzeromedia.org