psycho

Horror cinema’s engagement with mental illness has evolved tremendously from the 20th to the 21st century. These periods of growth are in conjunction with the growing understanding and awareness of mental illnesses within the professional field of psychology, as well as the general population. The increased knowledge reinforces the concept that people with mental illness are not innately monstrous – something taken up in contemporary horror films.

In his essay in Monster Theory, Jeffrey Cohen explains that the purpose of a monster’s existence is to represent a fear rooted in the attitude and culture at the time of its creation or revival.[i] Fear of disease was captured with zombies; fear of immigration was represented by extra-terrestrials; fear of nuclear weapons created Godzilla; the list goes on.[ii] I propose that the fear of the unknown, the “other” or an alter ego to society’s normal state of being, is explored through mental illness – a disrupted state of being.

Unknowability creates a fascination that can be described through the idea of privacy. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, the author of The Private Life: Our Everyday Self in an Age of Intrusion, says that the “guiding principle of our culture might be formulated not so much as ‘I should know everything’ as ‘nothing should remain unknown to me.’ It’s not, in other words, a question of wanting to know so much as a fear of what might remain unknown, inaccessible, in the dark.”[iii] Mental illnesses, however, are not an easy concept for general audiences to wrap their brains around. Nevertheless, cinema provides an opportunity to explore mental illnesses visually – making the unknown known. “Nothing should remain unknown to me”; therefore, if it won’t reveal itself, the cinema will make it so.[iv] Mental illness has always produced fear, but how has cinema in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries represented this fear to capture the cultural temperament? How has this fear changed from one century to another? Read more