Exploring the complex depiction of mental illness in the horror genre
The horror genre has given us some incredible works of art that drip with true terror, forcing us to confront some of our innermost fears. Whether a horror film aims to disconcert us through jump scares and threats of the unknown, or uses scary imagery to comment on some of society’s scariest frameworks, like capitalism, racism, or sexism, the genre has had an indelible impact on popular culture.
Unfortunately, the genre’s impact has extended into negative aspects of cultural understanding, often perpetuating dangerous stereotypes and myths regarding mental illness, among other themes. While many of the movies discussed below are great films, it is important to acknowledge that so much of horror is built upon a foundation of negatively depicting mental illnesses such as depression, schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and bipolar.
These illnesses are easy plot devices, whether they’re used as explanations for a character’s behaviour from the get-go or utilised for a massive twist. Relying on mental illness to communicate instability, unpredictability, and fear can definitely work if these characters are given proper complexity and humanity, but many horror movies have turned people with mental health struggles into one-dimensional caricatures.
As a result, this has drastically increased the stigma around mental illness. To those unfamiliar with certain conditions, being exposed to them through connotations of evil and danger only serves to misrepresent and distort people’s lived experiences. An increase in stigma also prevents people from seeking help, subsequently leading to higher rates of bullying, ridicule, and judgement.
While it seems as though depictions of mental illnesses are starting to change, with more films depicting various conditions in positive ways, the film industry has a long and complex history of vilifying mental illnesses, which dates all the way back to the very beginning.
Early Examples
The Cabinet of Dr Caligari is a pioneering silent horror released in 1920 and directed by Robert Weine. It’s a fantastic movie featuring breathtaking set design and a truly terrifying story featuring murder and deception, but one which ends with a dramatic plot twist revealing that the whole thing has been a delusion dreamt up by Franzis, who lives in an asylum.
This is potentially one of the first instances of a horror movie using mental illness as a plot device to shock audiences. While it can certainly be argued that the movie negatively depicts asylum patients, it could also be argued that it highlights how extreme delusions and hallucinations can be and how suffering from a severe mental illness is comparable to the life of a somnambulist – never feeling as though you have control over your own actions.
Between the 1920s and 1950s, many adaptations of gothic stories like Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde were made for Hollywood. There are many ways you can interpret these stories as metaphors for different mental illnesses, but with the latter, the trope of dissociative identities and split personalities became popular – something that has had a lasting, damaging effect. While Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a thrilling tale, it paved the way for movies that inadvertently increased stigma around a very misunderstood condition.
The changing face of horror
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is at the heart of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, one of the most popular horror movies of all time. It was influential, inspiring practically every film that came after it, but it also allowed DID to be gravely misunderstood for years to come. In the film, Norman Bates dresses as his mother when he kills his victims, with a doctor explaining near the end of the narrative that his mother “took over.” Thus, for many people, their only exposure to the condition has been through movies like Psycho, in which it is associated with evilness and brutality.
The movie led to the explosion of the slasher genre, in which many of the killers were depicted as mentally unwell and, as a result, unhuman and savage. Look at Leatherface in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, who is clearly meant to be mentally disabled, or asylum escapee Michael Myers in Halloween, a sufferer of severe mental illness since he was a child. Without meaning to, these films have only heightened a negative public perception of those who suffer from mental illnesses, depicting them as erratic, scary, and monstrous.
Female characters and mental illness
Log onto platforms like TikTok and Letterboxd, and you’ll find young women and teenage girls discussing horror movies to which they feel a kinship. Movies that centre on women with mental illnesses, giving their neuroses complexity and understanding, have become rather popular online in recent years, with everything from Pearl (BPD) to Possession (Anna exhibits erratic behaviour and psychosis) receiving a cult following.
Black Swan, May, The Piano Teacher, and Audition are all horror (or horror-adjacent) movies that feature women clearly suffering from mental illnesses, which many female viewers have felt solace in watching. Additionally, movies like Symptoms, The Other Side of the Underneath, Suspiria, Repulsion, Saint Maud, and The Babadook also expertly depict mental illness in female characters. What makes these movies different from titles like Psycho and Halloween can be found in the fact that they don’t make the mental illness sufferer a voiceless villain. Instead, they’re fleshed out, their wants and desires understood, and their struggles illustrated.
For many women, these horror movies are cathartic, allowing their struggles – which are typically wrapped up in patriarchy – to be given on-screen representation. Kier-La Janisse, writer of House of Psychotic Women, explains (via Huck), “That horror framework allows for very extreme situations and emotions. It makes space for everything you want to say that’s too dangerous in other contexts,” adding, “I have found it empowering to see repressed energies being let loose, to see women raging, screaming, fighting back against their own demons.”
How are mental illnesses being depicted in modern horror cinema?
There is still a lot to be learned in terms of positively depicting mental illness in the film industry. Split, directed by M Night Shyamalan, was released as recently as 2016, yet it depicted DID terribly, trivialising it to the point of comedy. While filmmakers are still resorting to using mentally ill characters as killers and personifications of evil, this seems to be decreasing as mental health issues are becoming spoken about more online and in other forms of media.
The reality is, sadly, that mental illnesses have been stigmatised and stereotyped in horror for so long that it is difficult for these ways of thinking to be fully shaken. The increase of female-led movies about women and their neuroses proves that horror movies exploring mental health issues can be executed successfully. It’s about time filmmakers move away from making one-dimensional mentally ill villains and think about how this affects people in the real world. While it’s easy to brush off movies as entertainment, the way mental illnesses are portrayed on-screen has a profound impact on how people in everyday life view them.
