Christine Mattschei:

Welcome to the Horror Analysis, a podcast that takes a psychological deep dive into all things horror and macabre. Here are your hosts: Frank Horror, writer, director, filmmaker, and podcaster with a background in counseling psychology; and Dr. Elliott Rotman, a clinical psychologist with a background in acting and the arts.

Frank Horror:

Welcome back to our second episode of the Horror Analysis. And we left off last time right in mid discussion where we were talking about childhood, and how a lot of our fears can be traced back to that. I remember when I was young, always had a very active imagination. And as a child, you're vulnerable, you are not a grown person, you have no way to defend yourself against whatever monster is lurking under your bed or in your closet. And so I remember many times being terrified that there's something under the bed or there's something, Big Foot's roaming around right outside my window and he is going to reach in and snatch me, whatever it might be. And you lay there under the covers, and you try to just wait for it to go away, just go away, because that's all you can do. You're helpless against something like that.

Frank Horror:

And I can't tell you how many nights I spent laying there under the covers because my imagination ran away with me. So that is something that, as an adult, when you watch a horror movie, if you're really into it, if you can get into it and you suspend your disbelief, because like you said you know it's not real. You're going into this with an implicit consent of I'm going to watch this movie, it's going to be an hour and a half, two hours. I know it's not real, but I'm going to invest in this as if it were. And that's when your imagination takes over and it really grabs hold of you.

Elliott Rotman:

It's the willing suspension of disbelief, that you just are going to go with it, which could be watching horror or watching a Broadway musical. You just have to accept that this is what's going to go on. You know, it's interesting, you're talking about childhood. When I was a kid I used to buy copies, my mother hated it, of famous monsters of Filmland. And the title was Of Filmlands, so you know that they are not necessarily out there. And I would read them in bed at night, and I would intentionally scare myself. And the question is, well, why would you as a kid want to scare yourself? But it was kind of fun because it was challenging. And I could imagine things that would happen.

Elliott Rotman:

And I particularly found the Wolfman scary, not so much Dracula or Frankenstein, but the Wolfman was less human. And I also had an association with it, which I have to today, that I was in a theater on a Sunday matinee, and my dad had taken me there, and we were watching, I think it was the old English Company Hammer.

Frank Horror:

Oh, the Hammer Films.

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah, the Hammer Films, which had a really strong colored palette, which made it more intense, more Gothic looking to me. But I was a little kid, and there was a scene in the Wolfman where he was just about to attack someone, and I apparently got hit with some kind of a stomach virus and got incredibly nauseous and had to go to the bathroom. To this day, lo these many years, I still remember that scene. And that's something that made the Wolfman scary to me because there was an association in my little mind of losing control physically. And I didn't get sick in the theater, I was able to get out of it, but it was associated with that scene.

Frank Horror:

Losing control physically, which is a great metaphor as well with the film, with the Wolfman, because the transformation is someone who's losing control physically. So you've got hit with a double whammy there.

Elliott Rotman:

Mm-hmm.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. For me, I did not find being scared pleasant when I was younger, when my imagination would run away with me, until I got to the point where I thought, I think one instance probably hiding under my bed at some point, and I thought, wait a second, don't be afraid of it. If you join with it, then there's nothing to be afraid of. And by that, by joining with it, I mean if I started to tell the story, if I became the one who wrote scary stories or told them around... I was in Boy Scouts at a young age, so if I was the one that told the scary stories around the campfire I was controlling it, it was an element of control. And then it became more like playing a prank on people, and that was fun. It was fun to see them enjoy the stories, but to be scared by it.

Frank Horror:

So then I learned to channel it, to a degree. There were still things in my life, though, that at an early age that scared the crap out of me. And I think it's probably why I moved into horror as a writer or filmmaker. I was eight years old, I went to my very first sleepover, had never seen a horror movie in my life, and they put in Stephen King's Creep Show. And I made it about three quarters the way through that thing, and the story where that Arctic wolf like monster comes out of the crate and mauls someone, that was it. I said, "Turn this off, call my parents, I have to go home."

Frank Horror:

But I was fascinated by that, to the point that I thought I need to inflict this on other people. I want them to feel this, because this is entertaining to me. So that I guess-

Elliott Rotman:

But how did it make that transition, if I can ask, from call my parents to I want to inflict this on other people? I mean, is it inflicting, or is it sharing? And does it then drive your imagination? How were you able to make that transition?

Frank Horror:

Well, I guess I used the term inflicting because horror is transgressive and I want to use transgressive language.

Elliott Rotman:

Okay.

Frank Horror:

Like I'm going to grab the audience and inflict them with this and shake them around. But it really is sharing, it's sharing a joy. Because there was, after that moment, and that's a good question by the way, Elliot. After that moment, I couldn't stop thinking about it. So it was just obsessing, obsessing, thinking about it, thinking about why it was scary, thinking about why it made me feel that way. And I think it was just deconstructing that to see somebody wrote this, actors did this, this was all fiction, this is all fake, but it affected me as if it were real. And I think the marvel came from that, from realizing that they elicited this response from me and it's possible to use a medium to that effect to get a response that strong from someone else.

Elliott Rotman:

So one thing that it taught you is that you could learn to control the narrative, you could create the narrative, which takes away fear and makes the whole process very predictable. And what Creep Show taught you is that you could learn to live with that fear. Which is also what a lot of fairy tales and other, even going back to myths, Greek myths, the hero of the story faces a monster. Theseus kills the Minotaur, Perseus decapitates Medusa. So you have these monsters there, and I know we'll talk about monsters in another time. But it's like it's a heroic act, and this is a creature who shouldn't be defeatable, and yet the hero does it with courage and diligence and all of those things.

Frank Horror:

So it becomes a template.

Elliott Rotman:

It becomes a template. It becomes a way to how do I deal with this, how do I get out of the haunted forest.

Frank Horror:

Yeah, I have to say there is, for people who are into horror movies or going to haunted houses that are particularly challenging and frightening, you find the ones that are lauded as this is the one of the most frightening five horror attractions in the country. If you can get through that, you come out on such a high of like, oh, I survived that, I conquered that fear. And I think that's got to be some of the allure, too.

Elliott Rotman:

But you go into those with the expectation that you're going to come out at the end. People rarely pay admission and think, well, I hope I don't die. But you know you're going to be scared, and there's fun in being scared. So there's the element of surprise, which goes to the lack of control. Someone's going to jump out from behind a door, or seem to have a seriously sharp weapon or something like that. So it becomes a personal challenge to go through it. But that's still, we're not truly horrified by it.

Frank Horror:

There are guardrails to prevent us from-

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah, that's a great way to put it.

Frank Horror:

... from being physically harmed or damaged or-

Elliott Rotman:

Right.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

Even if you sign a waiver before going in, so it's like if you get a panic attack they're not responsible for it. But there's also an expectation that they set up, saying this is one of the five most terrifying haunted houses in the country. It's like, whoa, okay, well let's see if I can make it through that. How scared can I be? And there's a sense of pride at the end. And the horror, whether it's they set up a medical surgical kind of thing, which also for many people is far more scary than just somebody in ghoul type makeup, because that's very personal and very intimate. But if you come out the end of it, you feel good.

Elliott Rotman:

Now how you might process it afterwards depends on your own experience. Some people might have nightmares. Some people, if they go through, if they find themselves in a similar setting, might go, oh, this feels like what happened to me last Saturday. I want to avoid it. That's not post-traumatic stress per se, but it's close enough. And that's the effect of horror, that it's stimulating.

Frank Horror:

Absolutely, absolutely. It is.

Elliott Rotman:

It's only when things go past a certain point where we actually take it in and we don't have that barrier anymore that says that's that, this is me. That's when someone might be traumatized by it.

Frank Horror:

Sure, when safety rails are removed. So for instance, I'm in my apartment, I turn all the lights off, I watch a terrifying movie and I'm enjoying the thrill of it, and then little do I realize the suction cup that holds the bar of soap in the shower gives way at that moment and rattles around and scares the hell out of me. Because now it's not contained to something that I can stop with a pause button, or I can control it, now I wonder what's in my apartment now. It's real.

Elliott Rotman:

Well, what happens there is you then integrate it mentally, cognitively into what you're watching. So if you were just sitting in your living room reading a book of some sort and you heard a noise from the bathroom, you would go, oh, it's a noise from the bathroom. You keep it separately. It's when that category gets jammed, the sound gets jammed, then it becomes part of what you're watching and has a whole other set of implications, mainly around personal safety.

Frank Horror:

You're primed for it. You're primed to interpret that stimulus in a way that fits your current heuristics, whatever that world may be.

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah.

Frank Horror:

I remember when I was reading Pet Cemetery as a child, or I guess maybe I was a teenager, and it's just to the part, for those who you're familiar with the story, the cat is dead. They bury the cat and then it comes back, and it's the first reemergence of the cat. And just as I'm reading this, as luck would have it, right outside the window I heard a cat go reeear. And that was it for me, the book had to go away for at least a day. Because I was primed, I was right on the verge of that suspense, and as luck would have it there's a cat.

Elliott Rotman:

Yep. And what makes that story so powerful is that it takes a familiar animal, a benign animal, and there's something off. It's my cat, but it's not my cat. And it used to be affectionate, and now this is something that could hurt me. That's what's so unsettling about it. If it came out as a 10 headed reptile it would be like, well, how did that happen? That doesn't make any sense. And then particularly when the child comes back and it's not your child anymore, it is, but it's not. And that is what's so unsettling, and that's what makes the elements of horror. It's that it's familiar, but it's not familiar and it's threatening.

Elliott Rotman:

And there's tension that builds in it, because we can be sitting here but neither of us, I'm assuming, are afraid of each other, nothing's going to change so there's nothing to be cautious about. But if there is that unfamiliarity, and then if it's accompanied by some element of like gore of a threat to body integrity, that enhances it. And if you can watch it from the outside, or read about it and imagine it, it's very powerful or it sparks our imagination. But keeping in mind, as I said before, we all have a different tolerance of it.

Frank Horror:

So the things that we find familiar we find comforting. And when things deviate from that norm, that's when it's a potential threat, that's when we become alarmed, because we have to now process this new information, this new wrinkle, and decide is this dangerous to our status quo or can we assimilate this. Can we roll with it, right?

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah. And if something is different, I think it's making distinction between fear and horror. If something's different and we can step back and go, okay, this isn't quite right, I see the sky is turning really dark and I wasn't predicting that. So can I go forward on the road or do we need to seek shelter? That's frightening, but we can take some action. But I think, in my view, what becomes really frightening is when the familiar is somewhat off and we can't put it into a category. And I'm sure we'll get into this in other conversations, but when someone's eyes shift from what we consider normal and direct to looking off, looking what we might call deranged, looking like we don't know what's going on with this person, that produces fear.

Frank Horror:

Sure.

Elliott Rotman:

And if we address that person, or we try to deal with that, well it's a creature, let's say an animal and they're not responding in the usual way, that increases our sense of threat and unfamiliarity.

Frank Horror:

Facial features, that's how we convey a lot of our non-verbals. It's how we can read each other and how we see is there a threat.

Elliott Rotman:

Right, particularly eyes and mouth.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. And if you look at a lot of horror movies that portray something really scary but slightly off, it's usually the eyes are different or the mouth is, like there's teeth that are different, or the way that... Look at the grudge or the Asian horror movies where it's a humanoid form but they walk in a weird way, that sort of thing is very unnerving to look at because it's not natural.

Elliott Rotman:

Or they don't blink.

Frank Horror:

Or they don't blink, right.

Elliott Rotman:

Like Japanese films, ghost films, they don't blink, it's wide-eyed and it's empty. So we're talking about eyes. Going back to films that we're more of a science fiction film but were still unsettling, is going back to the original Village of the Damned, which I believe was made in the early sixties, of these perfect blonde children who, with bobbed haircuts, but their eyes weren't right. And that's how you knew there was something wrong and something threatening. So those are all elements. So it's what becomes unsettling.

Frank Horror:

Yeah. Well, the eyes thing and then the behavior. It's like when we had that craze where people were on bath salts, and you're high on bath salts and their eyes were, you know, they looked like lunatic. And there were some instances where they were biting people, and there was a moment there where society really kind of did start to think are we on the verge of a zombie apocalypse? No, it was just a bath salt outbreak in Florida. But yeah, those subtle little changes can queue us into fears, because of the associations with them, much like music in a film, right? Like a musical score.

Elliott Rotman:

Absolutely, music has a very powerful emotional role in terms of comforting, in terms of inspiring, in terms of setting us on edge.

Elliott Rotman:

Now, going back to the Psycho reference, that those violin, the short violin strokes when Janet Leigh's being stabbed, as you were saying earlier, sound like knife stabs. And that has become a reference. So people were afraid to take showers after that. That's the element of horror, they took something that is very familiar, it's a shower, and yet combined with the music it's set up as such a sense of being unsettled and unsafe. And that's the power of it.

Frank Horror:

Well, that's one of the tropes of horror movies, too, is when that creepy music starts to proceed whatever might be happening. It builds that expectation in the audience that, uh-oh, we're entering scary territory here. And it might be used as a misdirection, that might be a false scare which leads to more effective scare later on. But without even realizing it, cognitively in most cases, when the music starts to kind of go a certain way our anxiety builds and we expect something messed up is going to happen here, something's going to scare me.

Elliott Rotman:

It sets an expectation, particularly if it's dissonant, something harsh, no question. At the same time, if you have something visually that is distressing or creating tension, and the music is completely contradictory, it becomes a comment on it. It's saying, oh, something really bad's going to happen but we're just acting as if this is totally benign, and becomes commentary. It can even add irony to what's occurring.

Frank Horror:

Yeah.

Elliott Rotman:

So there's a lot to that.

Frank Horror:

So I feel like we've covered a lot of ground here. We really kind of fleshed out horror, in terms of what sets it apart from just being a fear response, like what makes horror unique and distinct and an art form. So we've got elements of being unnatural, and unpredictable, uncontrollable, something that is transgressive of our taboos. It's threatening to us, it's threatening to our understanding of the world and our sense of safety. That's some pretty head heavy stuff.

Elliott Rotman:

Yeah. And we can't integrate it into our expectations, and that's the power of it. And what it does is it taps the imagination. That's a key piece that I don't think we've mentioned, is that it causes us to question. After seeing Creep Show, it's like you were scared by it, you were unsettled, but then you were able to use that. So it's not just a superficial scare, it's not just a boo, it's not just a ghost going boo, but something-

Frank Horror:

It challenges our sense of reality.

Elliott Rotman:

Yes. It challenges our sense of reality, even for a short time.

Frank Horror:

So moving forward, let's look at the different sub genres of horror. Let's drill down and see all the different types of horror that's out there, why it appeals to people, why it pushes certain taboos in society, and kind of take a look. Let's peel the onions back.

Elliott Rotman:

Sounds good.

Speaker 4:

The Horror Analysis is a Frank Horror production, and is brought to you by Frank Juchniewicz, Elliott Rotman, and William Rizzo. Audio engineering and the original theme music to the Horror Analysis were provided by William Rizzo. Audio editing provided by Frank Juchniewicz. Sound mastering was provided by David Parsons. The opening credits introduction was voiced by Christine Mattschei. To learn more about our show, visit us online at frankhorror.com