Psychiatrist Explains 'Cinematic Neurosis' — When
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- Carmine M Pariante, professor of biological psychiatry at King's College London, traces his lifelong fear of horror to age six, when the werewolf transformation in the 1948 comedy Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein left him screaming and triggered decades of avoiding the dark.
- Pariante invokes the clinical term 'cinematic neurosis' — a reaction so intense and enduring it meets the PTSD bar — and cites a 2007 case of 'Ms X,' who watched The Exorcist as a teenager and arrived at an ER at 22 in crisis, convinced she was possessed.
- The horror genre took roughly 70% more at the North American box office in 2023 than it did a decade earlier, even as comedy and drama increasingly migrate to streaming; Pariante links this surge to Freud's concept of the uncanny (unheimlich), the familiar rendered strange, which current hits Backrooms and Obsession trade on directly.
- Stephen King's Danse Macabre supplies Pariante's framework that horror names the threats society can't speak aloud — from 1950s alien-invasion films allegorizing the Red Scare (Invasion of the Body Snatchers) to Jordan Peele's Get Out and Us.
- Research on trauma-prone viewers identifies childhood traits that tip children toward trauma rather than thrill: being under seven (when fantasy and reality can't be distinguished), high empathy, and — the finding Pariante sat with longest — prior loss or emotional difficulty at home, which gives the on-screen monster somewhere to put feelings with no other room.
- A 2012 study of patient SM, whose amygdala was destroyed by illness, found she could not be frightened by horror films at all, underscoring how the brain's fear circuitry treats a film jump scare like a real threat.
- The coping mechanism Pariante credits — and which a study on frightened children watching an actor be made up into the Hulk confirms works — is deliberately picturing the crew just outside the frame, a 'second self' that lets the viewer climb out of the fantasy long enough to breathe.
Why it matters: With horror box office up roughly 70% over a decade even as other genres retreat to streaming, the piece reframes a cultural boom as a clinical one: a subset of viewers experiences film-induced PTSD (cinematic neurosis), and the divide between the terrified and the thrilled maps onto identifiable traits — age, empathy, and pre-existing emotional difficulty at home.
