‘Psycho’ for the Anxious: Why Horror Movies Bring Me Comfort

“I know I am about to be afraid, and I am also about to be just fine. This is controlled terror.”

This is A Cure for Fear, a monthly column by Laura Turner on working, creating, and living with anxiety.

There should be a word (preferably long and Germanic) for the feeling of being wrapped in a blanket on your couch on a dark night while you watch a horror movie. It is a feeling of unparalleled safety and coziness and rest, knowing that at any moment the person onscreen could meet her end but you, secure inside your home, will fear only the end of your bowl of popcorn. If hygge got weird, I think we would have the word I am after.

I was nine years old the first time I saw Psycho. It was my first time seeing a scary movie of any sort, unless you count E.T., which I remember being more sad than terrifying. I was sitting in our small living room, squeezed in between my younger siblings—seven-year-old Mallory and five-year-old Johnny—on the green and white couch our dog, Chestnut, had torn up the week before. The sliding glass door looked out onto a long yard and the weeping willow creaked in the wind. Inside, the house was warm and protected against the chill air, a sign of the impending Chicago winter.

Our mom, a horror movie buff, had returned from the local Blockbuster with a video she told us was a Looney Tunes video. Mom grinned at us expectantly as the TV flashed on. But instead of the lush orchestrals of the Looney Tunes opening, we heard staccato violins and saw names and credits violently broken up in black and grey lines. The post-coital nature of the opening scene went entirely over my head, but I knew the woman in an old-fashioned bra wasn’t Bugs Bunny. I watched in desperate terror as she stole forty thousand dollars from her boss, took it with her on the road to pay her lover’s debts so they could marry, and was stabbed to death in the shower at a roadside motel.

The rest of the movie glued me to itself; I couldn’t walk away, and I couldn’t move my fingers far from my eyes. I also couldn’t sleep that night. I lay in bed, shaking and trying not to look at the window above, where I imagined Norman, dressed as Mother, was staring at me. It didn’t matter that Psycho was just a movie; that the credits had rolled afterward; that we had all watched an episode of Frasier when it was over to lighten the mood. It didn’t matter that my mother, clearly rattled by the fact that this movie had scared her children more than she thought it would (“It was 1960! It can’t be that scary!”), told me that she liked to imagine the director yelling “Cut!” and everyone returning to their normal selves on set. I knew it wasn’t real life. I still felt terrified.

The next night, I watched it again.

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I have seen Psycho north of two dozen times, and each time, when the violins start and we see Marion and her lover in their hotel room, an overwhelming feeling of strange comfort descends. I know I am about to be afraid, and I am also about to be just fine. Norman Bates is after Marion, not me. Death has come for her, and I am safe at home, watching it all unfold predictably onscreen. Unlike life, Psycho never changes. There are no more surprises to be had—this is controlled terror.

I’m aware of how strange it sounds to find this level of comfort in an old horror film. And it isn’t even limited to Psycho, or to Hitchcock, or to classic scary movies. As a lifelong sufferer of anxiety, I find solace in almost any horror film precisely because the events are not happening to me. In this way, horror films are like exposure therapy for death. While I find more sturdy comfort for my anxiety in other things—including my faith, a good therapist, exercise, and conversations with friends—the instantaneous and simultaneous sense of fear and comfort that washes over me when I watch scary movies is like a high.

The first time my husband Zack met my extended family, we were all staying at a big cabin just outside of Lake Arrowhead, in the San Bernardino Mountains. Zack is unfailingly polite and deferential in his opinions, but even he was taken aback by the fact that we binged all available Saw movies at the behest of my maternal grandmother. Every night, I felt as safe as the world allowed, burrowed under enormous blankets, watching poor fools get tortured in increasingly creative ways.

Last year, my sister and I took a road trip through Iceland the month after I had a miscarriage. The timing was providential, it seemed—we had planned the trip months earlier, but now I truly needed to get out of my house, my head, and, preferably, the country. We spent most of the trip driving the island’s perimeter and reading history out loud to each other, but at night, back at our cozy house, we watched horror after horror unfold onscreen. In Akureyri, the country’s second-largest city, my sister introduced me to The Thing, and we shivered deliciously from start to finish. As we watched, I thought about the strangeness of a universe in which we scare ourselves on purpose, distracting ourselves from the real fears life has to offer.

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When it comes to real-life horrors, I often feel a sense of responsibility to learn about the scariest, most tragic worst-case scenarios people face. I have listened to recordings of phone calls made from those trapped in the World Trade Center on September 11th. I have spent hours going down Wikipedia rabbit holes about plane crashes all over the world. I have read every word of Death in Yellowstone. (Do not go near the hot springs!)

It is a strange mix of identification with the victims and an anxious desire to keep myself from harm that drives me: I want, in some small way, to bear witness to the end of life. The thought that someone should die and only their families, or friends, or worse, no one at all would know exactly how it happened—would have a sliver of understanding of how they felt, or what was occurring in their body at the end—creates a kind of sympathetic fear in me. It makes me wish I could spend my days reliving other people’s deaths with them.

No one should have to be alone when they die, but that is the world we live in.

I am afraid to die alone. I am afraid I will be abandoned, or forgotten. I am afraid I will die suddenly and tragically: take a fall during a hike, or board a flight that will one day have its own Wikipedia page. Fear assumes large, grotesque shapes in my mind, and one way to feel less alone in my fear is to immerse myself in it—often to my own detriment.

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To be anxious is to be always looking toward the future with a watchful eye, assured of my own destruction and prepared to meet it with all the resistance I can muster. This is why horror movies harbor such strong appeal—they remind us that the worst thing has not happened to us. Horror movies also give us a chance to identify with the victims, who embody so many of our anxieties: isolation; the inability to be saved through effort or intelligence; the proximity of evil; the inevitability of death.

Hitchcock’s characters, in particular, were always struck by the inner tension between what they were doing and what they ought to be doing. Marion Crane knew she shouldn’t run away with the stolen money, but she pressed on out of love for Sam. Norman Bates knew he shouldn’t be murdering people, but the mother side of him couldn’t be shut up. This tension always reminds me of the inherent tension of life with chronic anxiety: I know I shouldn’t worry; that worrying about the future is pointless and even harmful. I know that my life will likely not end in a horrifically gruesome fashion. I know that I am safe at home. But sometimes, at night, I still imagine a faceless killer standing above my bed, and when I do that old horrible sense of comfort comes over me. There is a finality to this scary game I play with myself—it focuses my thoughts on the small things I can control, like my breath, like the position of my body, like what I think about as I fall asleep.

My life is not always in my own hands, is what I’m trying to say. It is a strange thought to take comfort in, because lack of control is often what makes me anxious to begin with. Perhaps it is a bit like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who keeps a medallion above his bed inscribed with the words respice finem: “Look to the end.” There will be an end, over which I will have very little control, and that is one of life’s only guarantees. Hidden in that fear of death is a seed of serenity, the beginning of accepting what I cannot control—even from the comfort of my own couch.