Darkness Lurks
Lately I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies on Netflix. Isolated, at times quarantined due to COVID-19, I have resisted all better judgment to the contrary and submerged myself in one movie after another. And always very late at night. Call me crazy; or maybe there’s far more to it than that.
I’ve never been a fan of gratuitous violence, so my perception of most “modern horror” movies has often left me lacklustre, but here’s what I’ve learned lately about the content of many of today’s horror movies: most are about trauma. It’s curious to me why they would all fall under the genre of “horror,” but I suppose there are few things more terrifying, more horrifying, than incidents of trauma, as Stephen King probably knows all too well. “Trauma movies,” as a genre heading, likely would also not get as many clicks.
How we’ve all been traumatized and what happens to our inner demons certainly does make for the most hideous viewings, as I was reminded even last night while watching The Invitation, or Gerald’s Game a few nights earlier. We don’t have to think too closely on the specifics of our own particular histories—I suppose that’s the point; that’s the allure of watching a good “horror” movie in the comfort and relative safety of our homes, all snuggled up cozy under a duvet, or even sitting in a crowded theatre, munching popcorn, scared witless. We return to horror but are safe from horror. In our own limited ways, we exorcise ourselves of demons. But they’re never really gone. They never leave us entirely.
Demons have a way of leaving behind their residues. Like “burnt toast,” the character Dick Halloran says to young Danny in King’s The Shining. And they all speak to us in a language often only we, their survivors, can understand. Growing up, trauma had never been a foreign concept to me personally. Both my parents had survived World War II—my mother, after escaping three years in a communist concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia, my father, an orphan, after fleeing communist Hungary—yet they’d also never wanted to talk much about their “former lives in Europe.” They’d silenced themselves, or maybe were silenced because they did not have the emotional vocabulary to talk about their traumas. As an adult, I can now understand that they also did what they needed to do in order to survive.
As a child, however, my parents’ lessons cascaded down to me and preempted even the possibility that I could ever talk about my own childhood abuse. I, too, had been silenced, and then I learned to silence myself. Six years of a form of “conversion therapy” silenced my sexuality, and I’d felt silenced while fighting for legal vindication. No one, however, could silence my word. Silence equalled death, so I wrote my book, The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, to find my voice, speak up and out, not die silent. I wrote to resist invisibility, and shame, the lies of these “therapies.” Words helped me heal, and each one was the truth.
Or at least this is what I tell myself, now; this is my narrative. The “story” of my past.
According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., in his 2014 book The Body Keeps the Score, a new generation of antipsychotics are the top selling drugs in the United States, with $1,526,228,000 spent on Abilify (a 2014 figure), one of the many available. I wonder how this figure has grown these last six years. In 2014, half a million children in the US took antipsychotic drugs, which are often used to make abused children more manageable, less aggressive, even as they also decrease motivation, play, curiosity, and stunt the development of well-functioning and contributing members of society. Where does the experience of trauma go when it is stunted by medication, wiped off the screen of our conscious minds? One has only to look at the rise in graphic violence in television and film, with movies about zombies or cannibalism, “torture porn,” as it is now referenced, even the current plethora of “horror” films, and we can see how a projection of what’s been erased, through medication and other means, is potentially played out around us. What we cannot contain we project. More than a few wars, I’m sure, have been started by men with demons that needed to be projected. The doses of medication that my former psychiatrist prescribed far exceeded any kind of approved or recommended levels, but I did as I was told, because my doctor was the expert. Or at least that’s what I thought.
Somewhere deep beneath all words, maybe near the bottom of the sea inside, the timelessness of my own particular traumas has remained, coded into my cells. I often think now that it doesn't matter an iota what we tell ourselves about how we have or have not survived; our past shows itself, regardless. On one level I can say that I have healed a great deal; on another level I am drawn to the darkness that also repels. I return to what I escaped, not in reality but figuratively, ceaselessly. Even to this day I still dream about the doctor who practiced this “therapy” on me. I am crying in my sleep, afraid that I will never escape. I am trapped, still, to this day. Trapped by the limitations that the past trauma has imposed on my present days. For anyone who has ever been the victim of sexual assault or rape, we know that the assault did not end when the physical incident concluded, “in the past”; it lives on in the body of the person who was traumatized.
I struggle with suggestions that traumas of the past can be fully healed. Spoiler alert: I don’t think they can. We can learn; scar tissues form and conceal abrasions, physical and emotional, psychic, and spiritual—but the point is there are demons. They linger, and often in the dark. I can never get back the years that were stolen from me, not just from this “therapy” but also as a result of the childhood sexual abuse. All the years of depression and suicidal thoughts, eating disorders and body dysmorphia, unreasonable fears, staring into faces at schools or in places of employment but fighting to breathe through waves of panic. And then the sex. Sex has never been easy, even to this day. Sex will likely always resurrect the past, take me back to the therapy, what the doctor did to me to silence my sexuality, how the man who abused me as a child left me decimated. My childhood night terrors started not long after that incident in my elementary school, and in all of them I fought to escape life through an invisible hole in the air. I wanted death, or what came before life. I wanted peace.
Here’s another thought I can’t escape: if many of today’s most popular horror movies are about trauma, and the popularity of these movies has never been higher, what does that say about the people who are drawn to these movies as a form of entertainment?
My days today are highly functional; I work, play, have friends, family; I shop, cook, eat, clean, iron, read, write, watch films, listen to music, exercise, discuss interesting topics and try my best to be good, and moral, to not succumb to the darkness. But I’d be lying if I said it doesn’t lurk.