I’ll call my friend Lisa. Lisa called me from home a few months ago ... Well of course she called me from home. At the time she had severe, untreated agoraphobia. The literal meaning of agoraphobia is “fear of the marketplace” (Greek). In general this means anxiety/panic attacks occur in situations in which escape might be difficult or impossible - like a bustling market place, crowded bus/train or even a street with foot traffic. Often the result is the person becomes home-bound. The home represents a place of safety, where the public humiliation of a panic attack or feared sudden illness, can be avoided.

Lisa sobbed over the phone, crying about a particularly bad panic attack she’d just suffered as her brother drove them about five blocks from home to buy eggs and milk. They came home without the food. This trip had been an assignment from her therapist - given over the phone- that she failed. But she calmed down and felt better after we talked it over for a few minutes.

“Lisa, I’ll call you a little later, O.K.? I’m leaving for the movies soon.”

“What movie are you seeing?”

“Gonna see ‘28 Weeks Later‘.”

I heard her sniffle a couple times, then exhale slowly …

“Can I go with you?”

It was difficult to stifled my laughter. She’d just been crying; beating herself up about lacking the courage reach the friendly neighborhood market for a quick shopping stint. Now she was asking to go to the theater, well over fifteen miles away, to see a movie designed to create fear; a menacing tale of an inescapable virus that transforms humans into frenzied, ugly homicidal maniacs. Though warned, she insisted.

She seemed nervous on the drive over and I thought “Shit, I don’t want to have to turn around and drive her home”. She sat quietly in the theater, barely flinching when people screamed. She giggled nervously, as most of us did. Lisa seemed happy and calm on the trip home. We even stopped and picked up those eggs and milk she‘d failed to get earlier. Lisa couldn’t explain why the horror movie acted as an antidepressant. In retrospect, it made sense:

Lisa was overwhelmed with her life. Horror films do more than distract us from our mundane or uncomfortable personal realities. Horrors rudely pull us up by the scruff of our necks and shout in our faces:

A well-crafted horror film has a way of knocking things back into perspective for some of us, even as they plague us with nightmares and some degree of mental torment. Truth is, Lisa’s real world had become abnormally restricted; home was not just a security blanket for her, it was Homemade Hell. A homemade horror tale of inertia, imprisonment; a golden cage. She’d found an exciting, momentary alternative - an incentive to remove herself from that cage and escape into a world of unparalleled chaos that was just what the doctor ordered.

I think there are other ways in which horror films serve the human psyche. But maybe that’s best left for another blog.

- R