FEAR ITSELF: Mental Health and Horror

Hi. This video contains a lot of discussion of suicidal ideation, along with some other bad times. There will be an additional warning and timecode provided to skip the most unflinching and graphic section. [Thunder crashing] [Spooooooky music] Hello my lovelies. Welcome back to another spooky, scary Halloween special. Last October, I made a video using a spooooooky Halloween metaphor to unpack my personal trauma in the hopes of maybe making some kind of teeny, tiny dent in a larger societal issue.

00:42 - In that video, I copped to being a skittery little scaredy cat, but I also described myself as someone who likes scary movies. And anyone who knows me personally will likely know that that is a, um, generous description Or, at least, it was, until about six months ago, and the reasons just might surprise you. [fun spooky music, like some kids are exploring a house with a secretly friendly ghost in it] 0:01:10.023,1193:02:47.295 of the situation. [ghost singing] It Sits at the Edge of Town, All Creaky and Tumble- Down… I have always been just, like, aggressively affected by movies that scare me.

01:20 - I have very few actual memories of the years of my life my sister and I spent watching Aladdin every single morning, but to hear my mother tell it, we would wail from the living room for her to come fast forward the second Jaffar turned into a snake. I saw about 2 minutes of the decidedly un-scary Disney Channel Original Movie Phantom of the Megaplex on a hotel TV when I was 10 and I slept with the lights on for like a month. And let’s not even talk about what happened when I saw the trailer for The Exorcism of Emily Rose in front of… I wanna say it was Revenge of the Sith? There was a brief moment when I was convinced I had grown out of it because I went to see Disturbia in theaters because, aww, Louis Stevens is growing up, and so am I! and I fully enjoyed it. I saw 1408 on a day off from summer camp with a couple of rowdy friends because our other option was, ah, I don’t remember but we were definitely too cool for it, and I didn’t have a single nightmare, I watched The Number 23 in my basement because, come on, Jim Carey did a horror movie (or, you know, like horror-adjacent), and was able to laugh unconflictedly about how bad it was. But then came the haunted corn maze adventure I alluded to last Halloween, “Maybe they’ve never been to a haunt before, but the figured hey, I like Halloween, I like scary movies, I’ll probably like this, “but now they are getting straddled but not technically touched by a dude with a chainsaw and they are NOT OK WITH IT. “True story.

” 02:45 - and all of a sudden everything was terrifying again. Didn’t stop me from watching them in my friend’s attic, though! Lots of data points! Now, for a long time, I explained it to myself something like this: Those movies I’d watched before, when I felt like I could hang? Those weren’t real horror movies. They were just sort of, lightly suspenseful thrillers or something. And, OK, the ones that were definitely horror, they were sort of supernatural, and the fear wasn’t too difficult to logic my way out of. But now I was attempting to play with the big boys, I was watching slashers.

03:24 - Not just real horror movies, but stories that could theoretically happen and even mirrored an experience I had, sort of, actually had. Of course they were scarier than some weird thought experiment about a hotel room where ghosts exist. Makes sense, right? I watched a whole lot of zombie movies around this time without too much trouble. I wasn’t a weathered adult making my way through a post-apocalyptic hellscape, I was a mostly well-behaved teenager living in a well-off suburb, of course movies about teenagers in well-off suburbs being terrorized by men in masks basically out of nowhere and for no reason were gonna hit closer to home. But… OK, that’s pretty much exactly what Suburbia is. It’s called Suburbia.

04:09 - And luckily I own it on DVD for some indiscernible reason, so having rewatched it recently, I can confirm, it is genuinely scary! Like, yeah, it is some baby’s first level slasher shit, but it’s still more a slasher than not. It’s less graphically violent than most of the other February release bargain bin fodder that haunted my nightmares in late 2009, but it’s not really any less scary. And one of the movies that fucked me up the worst around this time was Drag Me to Hell, a movie which has absolutely no basis in reality and is about an adult woman with an adult job - an adult woman who pisses off a demon specifically by doing her adult job. I didn’t have an adult job, and I was pretty confident demons weren’t real, but I spent months with my eyes fixed on the crack under my bathroom door where Lamia’s shadow might creep in at any moment. Where was my justification for that? Welp, you see the lights, you see the cobwebs, you see the makeup and you’ve probably noticed it’s been coming off, LET’S talk about my personal damage! [ghost singing:] An empty house, a scary house, A Truly Haunted and Terrible House! I suffer from unwanted intrusive thoughts.

05:24 - Nope, sorry, my therapist says I’m not supposed to use the word “suffer” because it makes it feel like a big bad thing that I should be fighting, and as we’ll see, that’s actually exactly the root of the problem, uh, I have unwanted intrusive thoughts from time to time. So, basically the way this works is, OK, have you ever been, like, on the balcony of a tall building, or up on a hill or a cliff or something, and looked down, and thought, huh, I could jump? Or, I don’t know, looked at a baby and thought, like, wow, they’re so small, and my hands are so big, I could really hurt them, even kill them, it wouldn’t even be difficult? Or even, like, fed a dog, and looked at that gross canned meat goo and been like, hmm, I wonder what that tastes like? Or watched The Matrix and been like, whoah, I could actually be living in a simulation, and I wouldn’t even know it! You probably have! It’s pretty part and parcel to being human, to have the occasional thought that it is theoretically possible to do drastic harm to yourself or someone you care about, or to do something else that’s kinda gross or taboo or you just would never actually want to do, or something weird and plausible but probably false about reality. Most people are able to have these kinds of thoughts, and just kind of be like, huh, what a weird thought! and then admire the view or kiss the baby or feed the dog or finish their popcorn and move on with their lives. But for me, and for other people who have what can rather whimsically be called sticky minds, it’s not always so easy. We have the thought, and suddenly we cannot stop thinking it.

07:08 - For some people, this happens with all manner of disturbing stuff. For others, it’s one or two particular thoughts, or categories of thoughts, that are the most sticky. I fall into the latter group, and for me, it’s suicidal ideation. OK this? This is the really rough part. If you want to skip it, you can go to this timecode or you can find a link in the description. The first time I had a suicidal thought really get lodged in there, I was 22. I was living in my parents’ house at the time, and I was cleaning the bathroom, and the sink had been a little slow, so I was going to run some Drano through it. It was this fancy like industrial strength kind, you know, like a very handy and prepared suburban dad might buy, ah, that was super concentrated, and you had to dilute it and then let it sit for a little bit before you ran it down the drain. And I was, like, I was letting it sit, and I was looking at the measuring cup and the diluted stuff in it, and the whole big bottle next to it, and I just, I had this thought, like, I could drink that. It almost felt like, like I wanted to know what would happen, if I drank it.

08:23 - I knew that was ridiculous, what would happen is that I would die, obviously, it was poison. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it, I could drink that, why would I do that, I would die, I don’t want to die, but what if I drank it, well then I would die, so I shouldn’t drink it, but what if I did, I could, it’s right there and it’d be so easy, and then I would die, but I didn’t want to die, but I just, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and at some point it started feeling like it didn’t matter what I wanted, it was there and I’d had the thought and now the bell couldn’t be un-rung, I was going to drink it. I ran the diluted stuff down the sink the second my timer went off and shoved the bottle to the very back of the cabinet under the sink and used the half bath downstairs for the rest of the day, and for good measure I hid my razor in a drawer just in case I felt a sudden pull to slit my wrists against my will the next time I took a shower. The thoughts had pretty much passed by the time I woke up the next day, but those ten hours or so remain some of the most terrifying of my life. I wasn’t actually a complete stranger to suicidal thoughts - I had a period during middle school when I didn’t have many friends, and I sort of knew I was really weird and people didn’t want to hang out with me but I didn’t quite know how to stop being so weird and maybe, like, make some friends, and my life felt like it was just going to school and being overwhelmed and not sleeping enough and not caring about anything actually happening in my life, and I felt just, trapped, like the only way out would be, just, to die.

10:07 - I never got so far as to think about how I’d do it - it’s not an exaggeration to say that the school play, literally, saved my life - but by the time I found myself, ten years later, staring at this bottle of industrial-grade drain cleaner, I knew what it felt like to kind of want to die, and I knew that wasn’t what I felt. But I felt like I couldn’t stop myself from deciding to die. I felt… possessed by this idea. I couldn’t understand what was happening, I had no framework for understanding it, and I didn’t feel like I could tell anyone in a way that would make them understand, like they’d definitely panic and foist me off on the part of the hospital where they confiscate the ribbons from off of your teddy bear’s neck and I’d be locked down there for like twenty-four hours and then leave, good and shaken up but still unable to stop myself from drinking poison that I didn’t want to drink. That was the first time, and it was the worst time, but it wasn’t the last time. There was a particular dividing wall on the freeway that I felt compelled to drive straight into almost every time I passed it for a good month.

11:16 - I had a pretty bad bout triggered by a moment in Cloud Atlas, you probably know the one if you’ve read it, content warning if you haven’t and are planning on it. One time it was a box cutter that a coworker had found somewhere it shouldn’t be and he came into my office asking if it was mine, and then left it there, and I was pretty much useless for the rest of the day. And, I still panic any time I have to clear out a blocked drain. That shit goes directly from the shopping bag into the sink. I put all of this out there to say, if stuff like this happens to you, you are not alone, you are not broken, you probably aren’t even suicidal, this is a thing that happens.

12:04 - The first time I read a piece by someone describing having intrusive thoughts was… huge. To know that, oh my god, this wasn’t an indication that someday I would just kill myself without actually wanting to, that some people just have terrifying thoughts and can’t stop thinking them, that other people feel from time to time possessed by very graphic thoughts about the specific ways that they could kill themselves despite not actually wanting to and go on to have long and fulfilling lives that they do not end themselves, was world-turning. It also led me to decide that, like, OK cool, this is all normal and I’m fine and I don’t need to do anything about it! I’ll just keep on singing the praises of trigger warnings and making a blocked drain in my apartment a thing that merits a weeklong mental struggle! Which is, uh, I do not recommend that course of action! Therapy is figgin great if you have access to it! If you don’t, because, I don’t know, maybe you live in a country that ties your access to healthcare to your employment situation for reasons that are very good and normal and where “having access to healthcare” still means spending days at a time battling with your insurance company’s provider directory and waiting on hold for an hour to find out what your copay is and calling offices and leaving messages and finding out that they actually don’t take your insurance or they are in fact a hospital and don’t even do outpatient, because you already used your 10 EAP sessions and the awesome therapist you were seeing on that network definitely doesn’t take your health insurance and making it through a day without crying is already hard enough without getting another voicemail saying that actually only some of the therapists at this practice take your insurance, and none of them are accepting new patients, but if you call back in a couple of weeks they might eventually have an opening that won’t cost you an entire arm and half a leg… [deep breath] well then I can at least recommend a book that helped me a lot. Oh, I’m fine! Earlier this year, I was finally able to successfully run the gauntlet that is the U.S. healthcare system and get an appointment with a therapist.

14:04 - Now, my intrusive thoughts were not the reason I started therapy. That was because I kept sobbing uncontrollably out of nowhere and about nothing and I spent all of my time at my day job compulsively reading advice blogs and tabbing over to my email inbox whenever a coworker walked by my cubicle, and all of my rare time at home shotgunning boxed wine and staring at an empty Google doc that was supposed to be a script until finally conceding that all I was good for was re-watch Bojack Horseman, eat hot chip and lie. But, you know, spoiler, if you’re starting therapy as a person who has relatively regular if occasional suicidal thoughts, that’s gonna to come up on the intake paperwork, and your therapist is probably going to want to talk about it, and no matter how convincingly you tell them that it’s not really that big a deal, it doesn’t happen all that often, you’re not actually suicidal or anything, uh, they may well give you a book to read about it, and if you’re a good little Summa Cum Laude like me, you’ll plow through it over the course of three train rides, even if you spend the whole time being like ugh, seriously, I don’t need this, this is a book for people who actually have a problem with this, my intrusive thoughts don’t actually bother me, I’m fine, why am I wasting my precious few EAP-approved sessions on this thing that’s not actually a problem?? And then you’ll hit the chapter recommending strategies for engaging with the topic of your intrusive thoughts in a deliberate way so that they don’t feel so threatening when they come up unexpectedly and it will suggest writing a little song to the tune of Happy Birthday or something to declaw it, and a song will spring into your head fully formed and unbidden describing the worst possible fate that your life could have to the tune of Old MacDonald Had a Farm and you will be so disturbed by it that you will not sleep that night, and you will finally think to yourself, hmm, maybe I should extend one iota of trust to this trained professional whose services I have decided to seek. But, you know, if you, like me, are possessed of a voice in your head who is an aggressive finder of silver linings even when it’s super unproductive, even as you are fighting this book tooth and nail as it pertains to your actual intrusive thoughts, you just might start to apply it to something that feels a whole lot less threatening: The horror movie problem. Let’s gooooooo! [kid singing] You’re A Very Cranky Ghost, you need some company, [kid singing] and luckily you’ve now got Butch and Billy and Ben and me! [ghost:] Who? This book, Overcoming Unwanted Intrusive Thoughts: A CBT-Based Guide to Getting Over Frightening, Obsessive, or Disturbing Thoughts by Dr.s Sally M. Winston and Martin N.

Seif, is the 16:52 - one that gave me a panic attack on the subway, but also the reason I recently went on a weeklong bender of watching all of the horror classics I missed over my years as a scaredy cat without completely losing my mind. Let me explain. So, remember how I said I put all this energy into this story about how the reason certain movies scared me more than others was that they were about scarier stuff? Like, there was some actual decipherable logic to it? Well, that’s a classic pitfall of dealing with intrusive thoughts. Our brains try to get caught up in where the thoughts come from, or why they get stuck, like we can just logic our way out of it if we just understand it better, but, more likely, so that we can convince ourselves more and more deeply that we really are broken, angry, murderous, suicidal, perverted, heretical glitches in the matrix despite any and all evidence and life experience to the contrary, because we thought those things. They came from us, and they are bad, so we must be bad. So, for the most part, it really doesn’t matter where a thought comes from or why it gets stuck, and focusing too much on it is a way down which only madness lies.

18:11 - Speaking purely from my own experience, it might matter a little, like I have actually realized that there is a specific little metal top spinning in the safe of my mind that makes suicidal thoughts particularly sticky in a way that like, what if I’m living in a simulation isn’t, and figuring that out was really important, because it’s rooted in some past traumas that I’d been considering just, sort of over and dealt with because they happened a long time ago and I can mostly talk about them without just devoting a whole day to crying, and that’s great but it’s also not actually how trauma works! So it’s good and important information to have about myself, but it actually has fuck all to do with the intrusivene thoughts as they happen and is really unhelpful in treating them. Screaming at the top that I see it spinning, I know it’s spinning in there, doesn’t knock it over. And, in my case at least, so it goes with horror movies. Like, it’d be pretty disingenuous for me to sit here and tell you that I find Get Out to be a compulsively fun ride and not all that scary, without acknowledging that I am extremely, extremely white. But it’d also be pretty unfair for me to look at the months of nightmares I had after seeing Us and insist that it’s because I’m really really scared of….um…

19:34 - god, what specific fear is Us getting at in one quippy sentence? Well, that’s actually exactly the problem. See, basically what happens with an intrusive thought is, your brain starts arguing with itself. Winston and Seif describe this as an interaction between two characters they call Worried Mind and False Comfort, but since we’re on the internet right now, we don’t need to be nearly that disambiguous about it. So, let’s say I’m out on a hike, and I wander out to the edge of a cliff and I look down, and I think, huh, I could jump. So that’s, that’s just, it’s just a thought, it’s the kind of thought all kinds of perfectly happy and healthy and not suicidal people just, have from time to time.

20:17 - But somewhere in the back of my mind, there is an obnoxious Ben Shapiro stan who releases an hour-long rambling YouTube response video to some new beta cuck three times a week and namesearches herself on Twitter so she can quote tweet accounts with twenty-three followers just to start shit. Let’s call her, Claire. And this troll is always lurking, listening, waiting for this exact moment so that she can burst out of the basement of my amygdala and demand that I debate my suicidality or lack thereof in the free marketplace of ideas, or else my refusal will prove that I truly am going to jump off of that cliff! And, unfortunately for me, also keeping residence in a roach-infested studio apartment a few floors up is an aspiring breadtuber who we’ll call Cath, who knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that she can wreck this fragile troll, because she is not suicidal and she can prove it with the facts and logic that Claire claims to love so much and once she absolutely destroys her then we will never ever have to deal with a passing suicidal thought ever again, and anyway a highlight reel debunking this asshole would probably have a sky- high clickthrough rate, so she sets up her colored lights and accepts the hell out of that invite and now my entire brain is at capacity either holding or watching a debate live on Twitch about whether or not I am going to jump off of this cliff, despite the fact that not one single resident of my head actually wants to do it. What Cath, like so many overzealous newbies before her, does not understand is that it is absolutely completely and totally 100% impossible to reason with Claire. Claire will continue to dangle seemingly reasonable and easily addressable concerns in front of Cath’s nose as if satisfactory arguments to the contrary will shut her up. But there is no amount of convincing that will actually sate Claire.

22:24 - She does not want the most well-reasoned argument to win the day. She doesn’t even want her argument to win, not really. What she wants is for everyone to keep watching her Twitch stream, forever. So the recovery process is basically, setting Cath up in a mentorship with Ian Danskin so that the next time Claire is having a very normal one up in her mentions apropos of nothing like, “So, you admit it. “You admit you’re going to kill yourself.” she’s able to see it for the bad-faith baiting it is, mute the thread, and go make a stunning video essay about literally anything else.

23:03 - So, with a clearer understanding that this is how my brain likes to operate, I can understand that the reason Us fucked me up so badly for so long is actually precisely that it isn’t super clear about what specific fear it’s trying to tap into, that it very clearly has something to say but resists the impulse to say it too clearly. It’s the kind of movie that made me want to spend days just diving down rabbit holes of other people’s criticisms, stacking them up against my own experience of the movie and trying to form my own coherent theory of what it was even about. Discourse! [distorted audio] Feed me the discourse! But it was also a movie that I had a very bad time watching, like, physically exhausting levels of anxiety, I thought I was going to have to leave the theater multiple times before it ended. So whenever I would try to start unspooling it in the days and weeks after I had that experience, everyone’s favorite debate-me CHUD would immediately go live on Instagram like, “You know, it seems to me, that when a movie scares the absolute shit out of you then “the best thing to do is to not think about it? And I really don’t know why you’re continuing to think about it when you could just, not. “It seems, ah, pretty self-destructive to me, honestly?” and my darling, misguided picrew avatar would start quote tweeting every reply like, “quite literally just a movie, my dude!” and mug saleslady comes back like, “OK, you can say it’s just a movie if you want, but did you or did you not have “two individual nightmares about it just last night that left you completely exhausted “and underrested and weirded out all day?” and colored lightbulbs is like, “Woooooow, OK, so she’s talking about nightmares here, like, literally dreams, as if they do “some kind of material harm, like, even for her the level of intellectual dishonesty on “display here is, quite frankly, stunning.

” 24:58 - But now she’s shouting so loud in so many different social media feeds that every other resident of the apartment building that is my brain is completely unable to talk about anything other than this movie, and every time they do, their partner is like, “Hey, isn’t this nice, that we’re able to just, like, think about stuff, other than that movie those two really loud people keep yelling about?” So, long story short, not only did I develop some crucial insight into what, exactly, I find so scary about the movies that scare me that was maybe communicable to friends who might be able to give me insight as to whether a given movie was advisable to fuck with, it started to feel like, figuring out how to watch scary movies was, like, a useful thing to do. Like, I’d always felt like kind of a doof for not being able to hang, and now here I was in this boat where some variety of exposure therapy had, like, a point. Not just to increase my cultural literacy and be less obnoxious at slumber parties or whatever, but because figuring out how to watch these movies without starting a knock-down drag-out on r/mybrain just might flex the same muscles that would allow me to buy Drano like the primarily harmless cleaning product it is to most normal, healthy adults. Like, uh, you know, ah, doing all those push-ups so I’d be able to lift the bloody log. And then a pandemic happened! [kids singing] What was it? A ghost? A ghoul? [kids singing] Whatever It Was, It’s Cool! [kids singing] We’ll search the house and track it down, this terrific, incredible, Ghost of Bleak I can’t really explain what happened.

26:38 - Like, prior to mid-March of 2020, if I was interested in seeing a scary movie, it was most likely because someone whose work I usually like was involved in it. Or because there was Discourse, and I like to be involved in Discourse. [distorted audio] Feed me the Discourse. Or, maybe, you know, it was October, and I was feeling like getting just a little spooked, but, honestly, that would usually lead me the way of like, Beetlejuice, or Aliens, or, I don’t even know, whatever else that wasn’t actually scary by the standards of anyone who likes being scared even a little bit, but was a tiny aesthetically macabre toe outside my personal comfort zone. But that is not what I was looking for now. I wanted to well and truly get fucked. Absolutely everything felt bad, and all that I wanted was to crawl into a hole with some movies that also felt bad.

27:31 - I had all of these big, bad feelings and nowhere that made sense to put them, except into big, bad movies. And then, because this wasn’t already a perfect enough confluence, came the podcast we are going to call today the Untitled Reply All Spinoff, because Scaredy Cats is a YouTube show hosted by Scaredy Matt and I wouldn’t want anyone getting confused. The Untitled Reply All Spinoff sees your host Alex Goldman, an obsessive horror fan who considers A Nightmare on Elm Street to be a relaxing balm for insomnia, crafting a short course of exposure therapy for his co-host PJ Vogt, who just wants to finally have an opinion on Get Out but has publicly admitted to watching both Attack the Block and Drive from behind splayed fingers. Look, I want to extend all love and kindness to my fellow scaredy cats, but it is such a rare occurrence that in a conversation about scary movies, I feel extremely brave. But also so unbelievably seen. “It doesn’t feel like a movie, it feels like you’re watching a movie and behind you, there’s “a guy with a baseball bat, who’s going to hit you 4-6 times really hard during the movie.

28:45 - “And so like, you’re watching the movie kind of but so much of my brain is just like, how “bad is this gonna be and when’s it going to be bad?” PFFFFTTTTTT. OK, look, this is just, it’s such a tricky thing to identify in the first place, much less explain to people who are able to watch scary movies as, just, like, movies, that are scary? Because when we talk about fear, the conversation tends to revolve around subject matter. What scares you? Is it monsters? Clowns? Demonic possession? Creepy little children? Weird shit happening to your body? Being chased down in your own home? But what PJ nails here is that for a lot of us, we’re not really scared by scary ideas. We’re literally scared by the idea of being scared. This is why it’s such a common practice amongst us, the scaredy cats, to just like, sit down and read Wikipedia synopses of movies we have no intention of actually watching.

29:48 - Like 25% of the people watching just went oh, yeah, I totally do that, and the rest of you were like, wait, what? Why? We can still get the story for the sake of cultural literacy or more likely our own morbid curiosity, but in a way that is completely declawed by this clinical, dry, passive voice that wastes zero time with buildup. It’s why I’ve gotten so into Stephen King adaptations. I’ve actually never had a problem with scary books, which is another journey of self-discovery to be embarked upon at another time, and going into a movie where I basically know what’s going to happen, and where my brain is also processing the secondary higher-order task of analyzing an adaptation - what’s been changed and why, how particularly Stephen King-ish moments are even going to work in a visual medium - takes a good 75% of the edge off. It’s also, I think, the reason why my tolerance got so stunted after I got so utterly wrecked by that haunted corn maze. I am and have always been a knowingly jumpy person, but that day I learned that my scared-meter had about six times the capacity I thought it did.

30:54 - And it’s why Alex Goldman’s choice to use The Exorcist as his first pick is absolutely [chef’s kiss] perfect. See, for all its reputation of being one of the scariest movies ever made where people were literally fainting in the theater, The Exorcist kind of epitomizes something that I’m starting to think of as playing fair. It’s got a scary story to tell you, and it’s not going to pull its punches on that front, but it’s also not going to fuck around trying to make you any more scared than the story itself inherently should make you. The score is pretty sparse, the editing is relatively straightforward. As the scares escalate, they also get more contained, so you can relax into the character-developing, plot-moving scenes without worrying that a spooky face is gonna show up in the bathroom mirror.

31:43 - It’s less like waiting to get hit with a baseball bat than it is like, going to the doctor for a round of vaccines. You know it’s gonna hurt, and you don’t know exactly how bad it’ll be or for how long, but it’s clear why it’s necessary and the nurse will even count down from three if you ask them to. This is also why I, for one, was not even a little surprised when the first movie PJ just straight-up enjoyed was… Midsommar. Because again, for all of Ari Aster’s reputation for making the scariest fucking movies right now… dude plays incredibly fair. Which, again, this is such a subtle thing, I’m not saying that Midsommar or Hereditary aren’t scary, and I can absolutely see how someone who doesn’t experience scary movies as sitting in solemn silence on a dull, dark dock would find either of them to be infinitely more terrifying than, like, A Nightmare on Elm Street.

32:38 - Ari Aster has a tremendous knack for portraying the absolute worst emotions the human experience has on offer with no relief, and his movies utilize extremely disturbing imagery in a way that never, ever pulls its punches. But, there is a kind of relief in that when your worst enemy is your own brain. There is one particular image from Hereditary that has lived rent- free in my head on more 2’s in the AM than just about any other movie I’ve ever seen. But! It doesn’t get a tweet storm out of Claire. Because she knows and I know and Ari Aster confirms that that image is as bad as it gets. The best example of this, I think, is the ättestupa in Midsommar. It is profoundly disturbing to watch, in part because it is so much more straightforward than… well, than it feels like any movie is allowed to be. The camera is relatively static, the score isn’t doing that much, and it doesn’t cut away when the gore happens. It leaves nothing to the imagination, but that means it leaves nothing to the imagination. For contrast, look at the way the camera moves throughout Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, particularly in the opening scene.

33:55 - There is nothing in this hallway, but we’re being shown it, in a movie called The Invisible Man that has been marketed as horror. There is nothing but imagination happening here, and it is extremely effective. Whannell takes a particular delight in this movie in utilizing horror conventions to make you more scared than you really need to be, while Aster is constantly bucking horror conventions in a way that allows you to be precisely as scared as you need to be, but no more. Like, Toni Collette flying in through the window in the shadows without so much as a sound cue or a focus rack. I believe people when they tell me that this is terrifying, because it almost feels more like real life than a horror movie.

34:41 - But I’m telling you that to me, this is way less scary precisely because I don’t feel like I have to live in a horror movie. Does that make sense? And this works narratively, too. The fact that this movie introduces the barest possibility that some supernatural shit is afoot like five minutes before it confirms that the dead absolutely can be communicated with in this universe, that it wastes absolutely no breath making you wonder just how fundamentally the stakes have shifted, makes me feel safe, cared for, in a way few horror movies do. All of which is to say, you thought this video was about what a pansy I am, when in fact I am the baddest bitch of them all! That’s right, I watched the scariest fucking movie of the decade if not more and I didn’t even goddamn flinch. Just don’t ask me to watch any of David F. Sandberg’s short films, I will die. Claire will debate me literally to death.

35:36 - [kids singing] It Sits at the Edge of Town, We Painted it Pink and Brown, and night or day we get to play with our very own personal Ghost of Bleak House! So where does that leave our intrepid heroine these days? Do I just obsessively research every scary movie to find out whether it’s Ari Aster scary or Leigh Whannell scary before deciding whether to fuck with it? And give Claire a whole runway of taunting leading up to her inevitable attempt to drag Cath out of Twitch debate retirement? Hell no! No, I’m doing my best to act like scary movies are… movies? Like, the kind of movies where there’s not a person with a bat standing behind me ready to hit me 4-6 times really hard. You know, try not to get spoiled. Pop a big bowl of popcorn and prepare to spill it all over the floor. Toss a video essay about it into my watch later for afterwards. [distorted audio] FEED ME THE DISCOURSE!!! But here’s the important thing: Scary movies are movies. Quote it, don’t paraphrase it. The word “just” does not, under any circumstance, get a place in that sentence.

36:41 - Because there is nothing that will wake Claire from her slumber quicker than the phrase “just a movie.” See, this is the secret about Claire: she is deeply, deeply afraid. All of the time, about everything. She is genuinely, truly, honestly scared stiff that someday, with no rhyme or reason, I will drink poison and take down her with me. Now, that doesn’t give her the right to be such an asshole about it and demand that I reassure her at all times and forever and with increasingly sound conclusions from increasingly absurd premises that I definitely am not going to. But it does mean that, unlike an actual internet troll, putting a firm, gentle hand on her shoulder and looking her right in the eyes and saying, you’re right, that is scary… actually helps both of us.

37:38 - And Claire’s problem with scary movies isn’t that she’s worried that THIS FUCKING CREATURE is actually lurking in a dark hallway of my apartment. It’s that they scared her, pure and simple. The experience of watching them was, in a very small but very real way, traumatic. It hurt her. To say it is just a movie is to deny that pain, and the thing about pain is that it doesn’t stop hurting just because it is disproportionate or embarrassing or nonsensical. Here’s my mantra these days: Wow. That was a pretty scary movie, huh? I’m not totally reformed. But… I’m getting there.

38:27 - [that fun-spooky song playing] Thank you so much to my patrons for supporting videos like this, with an extra special thank you to Andreas Evans, Daniel Wright, Kaya, Lizzie Gray, llmilktray, and Michelle. .