I love horror films. I’m not ashamed of that, yet saying it still feels like a slightly dirty confession. That’s because I also experience severe mental illness, and I want to see people like me represented fairly. Most horror films are designed to do the exact opposite. Ever since Dr Caligari first appeared in 1920, horror films have tended to exaggerate the faintest sign of being psychologically “different” into something threatening.
I feel cheated by the way horror leans on lazy cliches when it comes to representing people experiencing mental illness. It is especially concerning as films are hugely effective mass communication devices, and many people’s first contact with severe mental illness is through film.
My objection has nothing to do with political correctness, or what we “should” be saying about mental illness; rather it is about basic empathy and a desire for more effective cinematic nuance. In the run-up to Halloween, I have been watching a lot of horror films, and I’ve started noting down some of the most persistent cliches involving mental illness.
1. Psychiatric hospitals are always Victorian buildings, huge and preferably shrouded in fog. This must apply even when the film is set outside Britain. American psychiatric hospitals are necessarily equally gothic. And dry ice must be a major drain on the budget. Matthieu Kassovitz’s Gothika, set in a psychiatric institution, and Scorsese’s Shutter Island (a murderer escapes from a hospital for the criminally insane) are good examples of this.
2. Psychiatric patients wear grey clothes. Always. Any bright coloured clothes are removed from patients during the property check on admission. See any film set in a psychiatric hospital from The Snake Pit onward.
3. Dripping water. Plumbers are clearly averse to psychiatric hospitals. In Gothika it never stops raining, so I suppose there is extra strain on the drains.
4. Grim renaissance pictures on the walls of doctors’ offices. Etchings everywhere. No attention should be paid to whether this might be disturbing for patients. In Antichrist they adorn the walls of the patient’s workspace too.
5. Doctors becoming patients is a recurrent theme in many horrors. However this does at least allow for some realism, as it shows mental illness can happen to anyone. This is key to the plot of Stonehearst Asylum, which is based on an Edgar Allen Poe short story.
6. At some point in this genre of horror/mental illness there will be a fake historic film about how horrific mental hospitals are, to ground the story. If this doesn’t get through to you then check out the etchings on the walls of the psychiatrist’s office. The fake historical footage of James Franco’s psychiatric hospital in The Institute is a good place to start. .
7. People escaping from psychiatric hospitals are usually serial killers, and certainly always dangerous. No one escapes just to feel free. This trope has been carried through 11 Halloween films to date and countless knock-offs. Never mind that only a minuscule percentage of people living with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder pose any risk to others.
8. Psychiatric patients are constantly muttering incomprehensible phrases to themselves. It would be madness to consider that all psychosis has a logic to it, you just have to make an effort to find it.
I’m very aware that traditional horror is built on a bedrock of the kind of tropes and cliches I’ve listed, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done differently, and better. Recently there have been a few that manage it – like the psychotic twists of grief that can be found in Hereditary, but they are few and far between. I am not a Witch is a twisted fable from Zambia in which an eight-year-old girl’s selective mutism and mildly unusual behaviour leave her shunned by her community. It highlights the flaws in how we have traditionally been taught to look at “witches” and outsiders. Although it has a tragic end, if seen as a metaphor for mental illness it presents a message of hope for future understanding.
Even if film-makers don’t want to take on the role of promoting understanding, my plea to them is to stop feeding the prejudice that our society is still propagating against people living with mental illness. Difference does not always equal evil. And anyone can develop mental illness at any time, at any stage of their lives.
Film-makers who want to tackle their own unconscious or lazy prejudices could start by actually meeting someone who lives with a mental illness; not just their doctors, their carers, or the people running the big mental health charities. They will soon learn that there are other ways to characterise “outsiders”, witches, outcasts, and all those who live on the fringes of society, and better ways to represent mental illness while still making brilliantly terrifying movies.
• Sarah Gonnet is a self-taught writer and artist from the north-east
