With Halloween coming up at the end of the month, we’re well into “Spooky Season,” and everyone is talking about their favorite scary movies and TV shows. Not me.
About a year or so after my first psychotic break, when I heard voices and experienced severe delusions until an antipsychotic kicked in, I remember talking with my psychiatrist about how I could no longer watch horror movies because they triggered symptoms. But this didn’t get really bad until the TV series The Walking Dead came out. That show scared me! My husband, Tom, used to watch it alone, and he called it his “stupid show” because, as he put it, it was stupid of him to be watching a show that silly instead of spending time with me.
Even after I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and even after I had that conversation with my psychiatrist, I could still tolerate some gore, violence, and spookiness in movies and media. I made it through The Sixth Sense, a movie about the little boy who sees ghosts (or, as he puts it, he sees “dead people”), even if I did have to chain smoke after watching it. (I quit smoking early in the 2010s.)
And Tom and I had a tradition of watching scary or horror movies on Halloween. When my own “horror” of spooky movies started to get merciless, but not to the point where it is now, we would watch Ed Wood, a ‘90s film by Tim Burton in which Johnny Depp stars as the B-movie director Ed Wood who befriended aging Dracula star Bela Lugosi. Well, there’s a scene that suggests suicide and, when we watched Ed Wood last year, I just couldn’t bear it. So this year we’re watching The Wizard of Oz. I know it’s still a bit spooky with the Wicked Witch of the West, the wizard’s giant head, and the flying monkeys. But there’s always a note of satire. I just hope I don’t cry when Judy Garland sings “Over the Rainbow!” That song has made me cry a lot.
For the record, I can no longer stomach violence and gore in movies and TV shows about cops, criminals, or the Mafia, either. Martin Scorcese's movies, like Goodfellas, Casino, and Taxi Driver (the latter of which used to be my favorite movie), are out the window. So are TV shows like Criminal Minds and even books like Columbine by Dave Cullen. When I read Columbine, I couldn’t get through the ending, which was leading up to the actual shooting. And, actually, I don’t know if it took you through the shooting. I just couldn’t bring myself to read it and find out.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s my anxiety that makes me have an aversion to gore, violence, and horror or if it’s all the death I’ve seen, especially the deaths of friends in our early 20s–one drug overdose, one due to liver failure from a medication, and two suicides. Maybe it’s a combination of anxiety and witnessing death. At any rate, since fall is my favorite season, I still manage to enjoy Halloween. Even if it’s just with Tom. So, Happy Halloween, and a Blessed Samhain to those who celebrate!
