Horror cinema’s engagement with mental illness has evolved tremendously from the 20th to the 21st century. These periods of growth are in conjunction with the growing understanding and awareness of mental illnesses within the professional field of psychology, as well as the general population. The increased knowledge reinforces the concept that people with mental illness are not innately monstrous – something taken up in contemporary horror films.
In his essay in Monster Theory, Jeffrey Cohen explains that the purpose of a monster’s existence is to represent a fear rooted in the attitude and culture at the time of its creation or revival.[i] Fear of disease was captured with zombies; fear of immigration was represented by extra-terrestrials; fear of nuclear weapons created Godzilla; the list goes on.[ii] I propose that the fear of the unknown, the “other” or an alter ego to society’s normal state of being, is explored through mental illness – a disrupted state of being.
Unknowability creates a fascination that can be described through the idea of privacy. Psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, the author of The Private Life: Our Everyday Self in an Age of Intrusion, says that the “guiding principle of our culture might be formulated not so much as ‘I should know everything’ as ‘nothing should remain unknown to me.’ It’s not, in other words, a question of wanting to know so much as a fear of what might remain unknown, inaccessible, in the dark.”[iii] Mental illnesses, however, are not an easy concept for general audiences to wrap their brains around. Nevertheless, cinema provides an opportunity to explore mental illnesses visually – making the unknown known. “Nothing should remain unknown to me”; therefore, if it won’t reveal itself, the cinema will make it so.[iv] Mental illness has always produced fear, but how has cinema in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries represented this fear to capture the cultural temperament? How has this fear changed from one century to another?
The fear of mental illness in cinema was culturally cemented after and during WWI and WWII. What is unique about the post-WWII period is that the atrocities, the monstrous capabilities of humans, emerged to the forefront. The aftermath of WWII also saw the motivation and push to create a more structured approach to psychology’s treatment and understanding of mental disorders – birthing the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders in 1952.
The cinematic monster during the post-WWII period transitioned from non-human to human. The perpetrators, now human and not supernatural figures, needed a reason for their malevolent actions, and therefore the mind, specifically the corruption of the mind, became the answer. Joshua Bellin’s Framing Monsters (2005) describes how an idea, thing or group can be victimized to such an extent that it becomes a monster: “The process of ‘framing monsters’… [is] a process whereby individuals or groups who lack an adequate means of self-representation or access to political power are made to bear disproportionate responsibility of social anxieties and ills and are therefore seen as justifiably robbed of human rights for the ostensible good of the whole or of the norm.”[v] Around this time, those with a mental illness had no voice to correct the misrepresentation of horror films like Psycho (1960), which showed that individuals and their mental illnesses together became the perpetrator rather than the victim.
At the ending of Psycho, Norman Bates’ monstrosity is physically unveiled during a struggle in which his wig and dress fall off exposing his open mouth and anguished facial expression. The unknown monster is being unveiled physically, but that isn’t enough. The next scene takes the audience into a room with multiple individuals who are waiting for the psychiatrist to explain Norman’s motivations, which would have been incomprehensible to viewers at this time. The motivation for the murders was not tangible; the $40,000 was not important to Norman. The psychiatrist attempts to explain a unique monster that hides within humans — “Norman Bates no longer exists.”
Norman Bates dressed as his mother trying to attack Lila
In a way, the psychiatrist’s explanation of Norman’s mental state is showing the victimization of Norman (a victim to his mind): the disrupted mind is perceived as taking over Norman when the psychiatrist says he no longer exists. However, the psychiatrist says that “[Norman] was already dangerously disturbed,” showing that, his “mother half” taking over is just the cementation of Norman’s monstrosity being both him and his mind. When the psychiatrist says that Norman no longer exists, it isn’t Norman himself but his humanity – which is shown to never have been there in the first place. This representation conveys to the audience that mental illness has the potential to take away a person’s very status as a person.
Twentieth-century horror shows that the person and their mind are one, and therefore so is their monstrosity – this idea is adapted in other movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Silence of the Lambs (1991). In twenty-first-century horror, however, people with mental illnesses cannot so easily be viewed as solely and innately monstrous: there is an increased awareness of how mental illnesses make people victims of their own minds. It isn’t just their minds to which they fall victim, however, as twenty-first-century horror puts more of an emphasis on how characters can also be victims of their environment. The case can be made that Norman was a victim of his mind and environment (his mother and her lover, his isolation and economic struggle, the death of his father, etc.), but this background is not developed as the emphasis is put wholly on the monstrosity of his uncontrollable mind, for which he is wholly responsible. Twenty-first-century horror cinema takes time to explore the way in which mind is shaped—made monstrous—by the environment. A case in point is Shutter Island (2010).
Teddy and his wife
Shutter Island follows a detective, Edward “Teddy” Daniels, who is trying to find an escaped patient from a psychiatric facility. At the end of the film, the audience comes to find out that the detective is actually the “most dangerous patient” of that facility, confined for murdering his wife after she drowned their children. Until this unveiling of Teddy’s true identity, there have been significant flashbacks that indicate that what led Teddy to do horrendous acts is not just because of his mind but because of the environment, as the trauma he experienced from WWII and the actions of his wife sent him over the edge. The memories and fantastical dream-like flashbacks invite the audience into Teddy’s complexity, which makes it harder to view him, the individual, as a monster rather than seeing him as a product (and victim) of his disrupted mental state and intrusive environment. The audience doesn’t see the environmental factors that influenced Norman’s monstrosity in Psycho, but the audience sees those that shape Teddy, and this allows the audience to see the humanity that still exists within Teddy. He is not solely monstrous.
The psychiatrist in Psycho says that Norman is gone, but the psychiatrist in Shutter Island believes that Teddy remains – Teddy’s humanity continues to exist despite the severe mental state he is in. The complex and agitated condition of his mind, and his prior traumatic environment, led to his not understanding what he was doing and who he was. Teddy didn’t willingly want his humanity to be lost, which is evident in his role-playing as a good detective trying to catch a bad guy.
Unfortunately, Teddy is unable to overcome his monstrous mind and the psychiatrist and facility take Teddy to be lobotomized. Before they do, though, he asks the psychiatrist if it would be better “to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” Twenty-first-century horror cinema’s reevaluation of the monstrous mind allows the audience to see the “good man”—the humanity—as well as the “monster” in the mentally ill.
Notes
[i] Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses), pp. 3-25.
[ii] Bellin, Framing Monsters.
[iii] Cohen, The Private Life, p. xi.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Bellin.
Bibliography
Bellin, Joshua David. Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2008.
Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Cohen, Josh. The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2015.
Hitchcock, Alfred et al. 1960. Psycho. Shamley Productions.
Martin, Scorsese et al. 2010. Shutter Island. Hollywood Calif.; Paramount Home Entertainment.
Kristen Ann Leer is a recent graduate from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, having earned a Bachelor of the Arts degree in Psychology, Classic Civilization, and Religious Studies. She has a chapter on the film Gladiator in one forthcoming edited collection and an analysis on social media responses to COVID-19 in the collection Pandemic Rhetoric, which is also forthcoming.
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