How I Use Horror Movies to Face my Fears and Accomplish my Goals

When I was in the 3^rd grade, I would sneak downstairs in the middle of the night. This is because downstairs was where we had our new cable box attached to the top of the television.

The beauty of this plan – no parents – was that this was the time of night when I could watch R-rated movies. We didn’t even have HBO! But for some reason, after 9pm – cable TV would run actual R-rated horror movies.

Specifically, “Friday the 13^th”.

“All night long!” they said.

How lucky I would be, to tell all the kids the next day I had seen them all!  

“While you guys were sleeping, I saw all the Friday the 13th movies,” I would say. “What did you do today?”

Their faces would no doubt drop in sorrow.

WARNING: This movie is not appropriate for kids, the television disclaimer came on.

Am I a kid?

This movie contains graphic violence. Watch at your own discretion.

So the movie starts.

There’s this pretty woman running away from some dude in a hockey mask.

I can handle this, I said to myself. I’m in the 3rd grade.

Side note: I still slept with my lights on at this time in my life. I was what you might call a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP). If you played Olivia Newton John records, yes, I would start crying for no reason. Literal tears. And I would ask, “Where are these tears coming from?” to no one.

Anyway – there is a pretty woman running through the forest. I’m cool with this.  She’s being chased by a man in a hockey mask who has a machete.

But then, something happened that sort of stopped me in my tracks.

She died in a very gruesome way. Horrible! This was unexpected.  The graphics were spot on.

And I’m not going to explain to you what happened to her except to say it was disgusting.

And I just hadn’t seen this before. I was used to watching Saturday Morning Cartoons.

I was used to watching Saturday Morning Cartoons.

I turned off the TV, really shook up.

I couldn’t get the graphic image out of my head. This was really a lot for a 3rd grader.

We’re really going to have to push ourselves to keep up this pace.

I went back to bed. And that night I had nightmares. I woke up my mom.

“What’s going on?” she said. “It’s 3 in the morning.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It must be the Hulk comic books,” she said.

“No it’s not that!” I shouted.

But it was too late.

She got so mad at the Hulk comic books that she threw them away. That really upset me. Side note: this turned into a trend where she couldn’t “turn it off”. I had the first number one Punisher comic book book and she ripped it up thinking I couldn’t handle the violence.

“It must be the Hulk comic books.”

She was wrong.

I kept going back.

Every night in the middle of the night after the parents went to sleep – I would sneak downstairs and watch another sequel in the “Friday the 13th” series.

Every night – shocking my senses. Every night – watching the forbidden fruit.

Now this sounds horrible. What was wrong with me?

But don’t forget – I didn’t see these scenes as “horrible”.  I saw them as “cool”.

This was something to brag about to my fellow classmates. Like they were somehow missing out.

And then I started to notice something. I could withstand more and more shocking scenes. I wasn’t quite so bothered.

This was because I would reframe the graphic, blood soaked scene that I was watching in my mind.

For example, as the scene was happening, I would say to myself, “This is what happens if I don’t finish my homework.”

And then the young woman would get eliminated.

“This is what happens if I don’t learn how to do my math problems at school.”

And the spear would go through the guy’s eyeball.

“This is what happens if I don’t finish my writing assignment.”

By reframing these shocking horror mutilations, I was able to reframe my anxiety.

Little to my knowledge, I was actually doing therapy on myself.

By reframing these shocking horror mutilations, I was able to reframe my anxiety.

While this is not recommended for everybody, there is evidence to back it up.

Andrew Scahill, PhD, who is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, wrote a a book called “The Revolting Child in Horror Cinema.”

And in the book, he said, “Allowing yourself to be triggered in a safe environment can actually be a process of therapy.”

And that was me! Yes, I was watching graphic horror but I was in the safety of my own kitchen. There was my mom’s lemon cake on the counter. I had unlimited access to milk.

I was in the safety of my own kitchen.

Scahill writes in his book: “Today, we have what we would call ‘surrogacy theory’, which essentially says horror films allow us, in a way, to control our fear of death by giving us a surrogate experience. Our body is telling us we’re in danger but we know that we’re safe in these cushy theater seats.”

Again, the kitchen was where we ate dinner every night. There was no safer place.

If it was too much I could always cry and my Mom would come hold me and throw away my Hulk comic books.

Plus, I was practicing “reframing”. I was looking at the problem from many perspectives. I had changed how I interfaced with the horror movie.

“This is what happens if I don’t practice the piano.”

Oh there goes an eyeball!

“This is what happens if I don’t (fill in the blank).”

I was actually using the horror movie to “get shit done”.  I was conditioning my brain.

I was brainwashing myself to get good grades!

Somehow, I intuitively knew this was a good idea.

By saying “this is what happens if I don’t practice the piano”, I was associating pain to the idea of not practicing the piano.

By the way I became the best piano player in Helena as a kid.

Because if I didn’t I would be chased by Jason, I felt. I suddenly started to get really good grades.

I don’t recommend this, side note. Obviously, especially for kids.

But back to the story.

Exposure therapy

By doing it every night, I was also practicing another psychotherapy trick called “exposure therapy”.  This is when a patient is presented with stressors.

The idea is that, over time, the stressors become reduced. As they did with me! I was suddenly able to handle larger amounts of stress.

“Can you take out the trash?” my mom would ask me.

Normally this would make me upset. But I started to notice that’s not as bad as Jason.

The key, again, is that this was a controlled environment.  I just happened to be nestled in the safety of my warm kitchen.  My favorite place.

In the middle of the night, if it got to scary, I could always turn the channel. That gave me a sense of control.

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT

The rewards were also high for me. The next day the kids would gather around me in the playground. And I would tell them the story of Jason, who would put on his hockey mask in the horror movie.

“He would come after kids just like us,” I said. “Maybe on a playground just like this.”

And Kim, who was the coveted girl on the playground, would kiss me on the cheek. But only if I really told the story in such a way that it made everybody look.

Now that’s a reward!, I thought. This is working way better than Olivia Newton John!  She just turned me into a crying baby!

Now I was like some kind of walking horror movie.

I was reading more, too.

The good part about this was that it actually got me to read more. Granted, it was the TV guide, but I knew it in and out.

I had it down! All the little charts and time schedules. I was a master at the TV guide. No one knew it better than me. I had it memorized.

Also, because I could “handle more” because of my exposure therapy, I was suddenly drawn to Stephen King.

While the other kids were reading kids’ books in the 4^th and 5^th Grade reading level, I was reading “Cujo”.

And my brain was being rewired to handle very high, stressful events.

Later in life I would attribute this technique to being able to do things like skydiving and rapelling. Once I did it off an 11-story building with the Marines.

I feel this is because I watched so many episodes of “Nightmare on Elm Street”.

To this day I still do this.

To this day I still do this. And it can be any horror movie. Or any movie with gross parts.

When I watch a movie, I actually look forward to the parts that might make most people squeamish. Because I know this is a perfect time to reprogram and recondition myself.

Halloween

My wife and I were just watching that movie, “Halloween”. She had never seen it. She wasn’t aware of my reframing technique.

As she held my arm and jumped in terror I said to her, “Oh, you don’t know the trick?”

And I showed her how to make horror movies fun. I don’t know if she quite got it. Although she enjoyed the science behind my thinking.

After we were done, I told her how I did this in college, too. I would purposefully find scenes from movies that are really scary and use those scenes to make sure I finished my papers.

“This is what happens if you don’t write your paper,” I would say, in my college dorm. (Safe environment.)

I would have my own version of lemon cake to turn to.

In this case – an Orange Julius and a Twizzler which I used as a straw.