Imaginary Worlds - Healing Through Horror

Episode Date: April 20, 2017

Steven Sheil grew up in the era of "video nasties" -- a pushback by conservatives in the UK to ban Hollywood slasher films before they could corrupt the youth. The effort backfired and made contraband films like The Evil Dead into hot commodities for impressionable youth like Steven. He grew up to become a horror filmmaker, but he never imagined the genre would help him deal with personal loss. Across the pond, Aaron Orbey wrote in The New Yorker about having a similar experience. Except in Aaron's case, he needed horror to remember a tragedy he was too young to fully experience. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. And this is Stephen Scheel. He's a filmmaker in the UK who specializes in horror. When I was growing up, my kind of first exposure to horror, I guess, was during the video nasty era in the 80s, where there was this kind of moral panic tied into the proliferation of VCRs in the domestic market, where suddenly people realised that horror movies could be seen in the privacy of your own home. So there was a campaign led mainly

by conservative Christian crusaders, backed by politicians and the media, which eventually led to the creation of an Act of Parliament which banned certain films and led to films even being prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. So they created a list of films that were not allowed to be certificated and that could be prosecuted under this act. And these were films like I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left, Cannibal Holocaust. There were raids on video shops where police would go in and they would seize all the copies of these films that were on the list.

It was kind of crazy. And it completely backfired. The effect that it had was it made horror films seem like this transgressive, dangerous, mind-warping thing. And when you're a kid, something like that is immensely attractive. Oh my god, this thing's so dangerous, I can't see it, I can't even have it in my house. Great. Some friend of yours at school, his dad would know a guy in a pub who would be able to get hold of this third-generation copy of Evil Dead

that was just like watching something through a sock, basically, because it had been through so many iterations, had been recorded and re-recorded so many times that you could barely see anything. But that, even that texture, that kind of rollover and interference, that texture even, made it seem even more transgressive, like this is something you shouldn't be watching.

This isn't like cinema, where it's big and glossy and special effects. This is something rough and low budget and video. And it's grimy and it's right there. But Stephen didn't have to hide his horror tapes from his parents. I remember when we first got a VCR, one of the first movies that my dad brought home was Halloween. We were well under 18 to be watching that. And he just brought it up. Watch this.

And it was great and terrifying and brilliant. But we must have watched that kind of a couple of times a week for a month. So a few months ago, Stephen contacted me on Facebook to ask if I would do more episodes on modern horror, because I mostly dealt with the classics like Dracula and Frankenstein. Although I did that one episode about zombies and why I'm so freaked out by them. And I said, you know, the only problem is I don't watch a lot of horror for, you know, the most obvious reason. It scares me. I mean, I'm actually still working up the courage to see Get Out, which I know is incredibly lame because the movie has gotten nothing but huge critical acclaim.

But then Stephen directed me towards an article that he wrote, in defense of horror, not just as a genre with psychological and sociological depth, but as a way to process personal grief. I had never heard that take on horror before, so I asked him to tell me more. There is definitely a kind of archetype of a horror film which starts at the point where somebody is lost,

somebody very close to them. It's a long time ago, but Nick Rogue's Don't Look Now was probably one of the early versions of that, where it starts with the death of a young daughter of a couple. It's such a raw moment at the beginning of that film where Donald Sutherland races down to this pond at the end of his garden and, you know, sees his daughter floating there in a red coat and wades in there immediately. You know, there's this shot of him rising up from the pond with her in his arms and just this kind of howl of grief on his face. When he was younger,

Stephen didn't make this connection between grief and horror, but now it seems obvious to him. My getting into filmmaking coincided almost like directly with the death of my first sister. So my sister Tina had, for a number of years,

suffered from epilepsy. She had a brain tumour when she was younger and had chemotherapy. And it had left her with a small amount of brain damage. But she was also very severely epileptic. And she one day had a massive epileptic fit at my parents' house and died. And, you know, it was a massive shock to all of us. It just, you know, for me a massive shock to all of us. It just, you know, for me, it, you know, just came out of nowhere. And it was just, you know, suddenly, like,

I don't know, it's really hard to describe. But when somebody's been there, you know, she was older than me, she was 12 years older than me. And when someone's been there your whole life, suddenly to have them just taken away like that in an instant was very hard to deal with. So how old were you when she died? I was in my 20s. I was like mid-20s. And she was, yeah, she was sort of mid-30s. And, you know, within a couple of months, I started my course on filmmaking. Now, at that time, Stephen was delving further into horror culture.

He started a horror film festival in his hometown, and that eventually led to the creation of his first feature film, called Mum and Dad. Mum and Dad was essentially set in a place that was about a mile from where I grew up. I grew up next to Heathrow Airport. So my first feature film, Mum and Dad, was made about a murderous family who live in a house at the end of an airport runway and send their adopted children out to find people to bring back to the house for them to torture and kill. When you're in my house, you'll abide by my rules. And some of the other details were autobiographical. I mean, other than the whole

murdering random strangers thing. I gave the characters, the title characters, mum and dad, who were these terrible killers, I gave them the same jobs as my parents had. You know, I knew my parents would be okay with it. And they saw the film and they just thought it was funny. And there were other aspects of the film which came from his life that weren't quite as obvious.

Like when his sister Tina was diagnosed with a brain tumor, the doctor told their father that she wouldn't live beyond the age of 30. And Stephen's father kept that diagnosis a secret from the rest of the family until after Tina died. That was a bit of a shock to all of us because it was like this secret that had been kind of kept from us that I knew the reasons for my dad doing that I knew that there was a you know a very kind of protective and man of the house kind of idea behind doing that but at the same time it felt like oh my god there's this whole thing that I didn't know about. So actually writing a film about a family that has these kind of secrets that on the surface of this very normal family that go out and have jobs and do

these things, but have these kind of secrets, I guess that was something that definitely fed into Mom and Dad. So his film Mom and Dad came out in 2008. This is a quarter century after that whole panic over slasher films. But in some ways, Stephen felt like nothing had changed. I wanted to make something that made audiences feel the way that I felt when I first saw The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was that I felt that it made me feel a little bit dirty after watching it.

Because there's something within, within almost like the celluloid of that film that is so grimy and grubby, and it permeates every single part of it. And I kind of wanted to do that. So a lot of people who were into horror really liked it. A lot of people really didn't like it. There had been a case about a serial killer couple called Fred and Rosemary West. who were into horror really liked it. A lot of people really didn't like it.

There had been a case about a serial killer couple called Fred and Rosemary West. Although I hadn't based the film on them, there had been some elements of their story, I guess, that were quite... Or just the basis of that story, the idea that there's a mum and dad of a family of killers, was similar to their case. So a couple of the newspapers picked up on that. And because

the BBC also put some money into the film, wrote headlines like BBC funds horror porn. So there was that kind of reaction on a very kind of personal reaction. I remember that when we had the first screening at my home cinema, I remember halfway through the film, I didn't sit in to watch it, halfway through the film, going back up to see how it was going. And a guy came down the stairs with a face like thunder. And he just looked at me and said, what is going on inside your head? He gets that reaction a lot. That being into horror is something that they can't understand and something that is a bit perverse and something that marks you out as, I don't know,

having something unsavoury kind of in your head. And so I started to kind of, you know, think, well, that's not the case. You know, for me, that's not the case at all. You know, and for me, it feels like the landscape of horror films is like the landscape of grief. It feels like, you know, this idea that death is this kind of implacable, relentless force that just comes out of nowhere and can completely destroy your life.

Feels like, oh yeah, I recognize that. That has happened to me. He feels like death is like a horror movie killer that won't leave his family alone. In 2011, my other sister Colleen died. She had a lung infection, went into hospital and developed complications, went into a coma and eventually died from it about a week later. And the year after that, my dad had a similar thing where he basically had a lung disease

and died from that. When his first sister Tina died, he gravitated towards horror, but he wasn't sure why. Now he understands it is part of his grieving process. I think it's something that people have a misapprehension about when they have an idea of horror films, which is gore. People are like, oh my God, how can you watch all that gore? You know, how can you watch, you know, arms getting chopped off or, you know, intestines being pulled out?

That desire is not a desire to, you know, create violence, but it is an acceptance of the mutability of the body. The idea that the body can succumb to violence and disease, and that it is quite fragile. There are certain rules that one must abide by in order to successfully survive a horror movie. For instance, you can never have sex. What's happened over the past 20 years is since post-Scream has become this kind of orthodoxy that there are just certain rules to horror films

that if you have sex, you die. If you do this, you die. But I think actually with horror movies, what's really interesting is that death can come out of nowhere and can happen to anyone. And oftentimes, some of the most iconic figures in horror are these remorseless, implacable, faceless killers, like Michael Myers or Jason. There's no way of escaping them. implacable faceless killers like Michael Myers or Jason. There's no way of escaping them.

Even if you escape them in one movie, for the next one, there'll be a sequel. For me, horror films are very fundamentally about massive questions. Two of the big questions that horror films are always about is why do people hurt one another and what happens when we die? And I can't understand people not being interested in exploring those questions. And so when people say that, you know, they can't watch horror,

it's just like, well, what? What's wrong with you? So I guess, you know, having years of people looking at me as though, you know, there's something wrong with you liking horror films, I eventually got to the point where I look at people who don't like horror films and think, what's wrong with you? In a moment, we're going to meet somebody else who also uses horror as a form of therapy, not to get through a tragedy, but to remember what happened.

That is just ahead after the break. That is just ahead after the break. asking about his career as a writer, and he said, well, I'm a sophomore now at Yale. And I was like, wait, what? You're a college student? You just sounded so mature and professional. And even though Aaron is going to college parties, he gets the same reaction that Stephen gets when he tells people about his favorite genre. In other words, horror is a conversation killer. It sort of bothers me because I don't think it's always a well-thought-out perspective. I definitely think there are people who don't want to watch these movies and they know that they'll make them feel bad. But I also think there's a way in which the genre is critically

condescended to and people kind of just think it's bad and they don't recognize the ways in which those movies might actually be very intellectually or emotionally gratifying for people. And so I might always think when people scoff at the subject, you know, I could say, well, no, in fact, you know, I'm not a weirdo who just likes watching bad things. I'm interested in it from this intellectual perspective because my dad was murdered. And that's about like the most off-putting thing you could say to someone. Aaron grew up in Massachusetts, but his family is Turkish. They would go back to Ankara every summer. And one year...

I was very young. I was three, about to turn four that fall. And my parents went out to celebrate their anniversary. The timing was very eerie. And my father that night was murdered by an intruder who just happened to be there. I think the story is that he had robbed someone else's house and was sort of looking for somewhere to hide. And at the time we were living on the first floor of a flat where there was scaffolding on the side

and he was able to somehow jump up and get in there. And my father hearing something went out to see what was up. And I think he surprised the guy who shot him. I was in the apartment. You were only three then? I was three and I was with my older sister who's nine years my senior and we were hiding. So you, do you remember it? No. In flashes, I think I do. And I've been told the story and I've thought about the story too,

both for personal reasons and because I'm a writer. But it's one of those memories that doesn't exist wholly for me, and that still fascinates and disturbs me a lot. And when you were hiding, did your sister hide you, or did you know to hide yourselves? My sister hid me. She took me, and we hid in the closet. And his sister continued to be protective of him over the years. One of his earliest memories is watching a crime drama

and seeing a dead body on screen. His sister and her friend physically turned Aaron around so he couldn't see the TV, which only made him more curious. And then there was this moment. I remember watching Panic Room, which is not really a horror film in some of its stylization, but that was another movie that I remember watching when I was younger and being very intrigued by,

also in part because I knew I wasn't supposed to watch it. My first access to that film, I think, was actually on a family vacation where my sister and I were in the room alone in the hotel room I don't remember where my mom was and we were sort of watching the previews for like pay-per-view movies on the screen of this hotel room and I remember my sister really being upset that a preview for this movie came on because in some ways you know in panic room I think it's a mother hiding with her daughter in a room as burglars invade the house and my sister kind of turned it off immediately. And I remember being surprised by that and then going back to the television when she was in the

bathroom or in the shower or something and turning the movie back on. And she heard it, I think, and came back in and was very surprised I was trying to watch this movie. But thrillers weren't enough. He wanted something scarier, more disturbing. Eventually, he found a cable channel dedicated to horror and watched it any moment that he could. And also because of the sort of familial circumstance of my dad's death, you know, my mom worked very hard and was and is such a source of support. The consequence, though, was that I often was home alone a lot when I was a child,

and so I had access to this television. I was living in the suburbs, and I could just turn on the television and watch these movies. But I also remember that if I would watch something on On Demand that was scary, I would always go to our purchase history and delete it. And part of that was I didn't want to be found out, but I think also part of it was that I wanted to be able to understand and process some of what had happened, or just, you know,

watch these movies without hurting or disturbing my mother. But he never found that horror film, which could make him fully experience and even remember the terror of that night. And I'm still interested in watching those movies or still just relieved by watching those movies. And I'm not sure if that's because it's just a habit for me at this point, or if it's because I'm still searching for something. And being able to watch that by myself still sort of calms me in a weird way. I was gonna ask that because I mean, for most people, you know, horror is scary. They have the adrenaline rush freaks them out. They have nightmares. It sounds like you're you very calm, clinical attitude towards horror.

Yeah, that is true. I mean, when you watch these horror films, what are you going through? The answer to that's twofold, in that, first, because really enjoying horror movies is weird to a lot of people and strikes a lot of people as bizarre or kind of perverted even, of people and strikes a lot of people as bizarre or kind of perverted even. Occasionally I'm pleased to remember as I watch these horror movies that the violence does affect me and that it does kind of disturb me. That you're not completely desensitized.

Yes. And I think there's a sense in which it's very relieving to be able to watch these movies and think how terrible and feel as shocked by the violence I see as I imagine someone who hadn't experienced what happened to my father would be. Although he disagrees with Stephen Scheel on one point, he doesn't think horror is terrifying because death could strike anybody. Aaron finds comfort in the conventions of the genre that the movie Scream made fun of. In fact, he thinks dramas like Manchester by the Sea are more disturbing because people can die for no apparent reason, like in real life.

The job of the horror film is to convince you that what's happening is, to a certain extent, believable. Believable enough to shock you, but unbelievable enough to keep you secure in your distance from the scenario of whatever is going on on screen. I think it would be very disconcerting if a horror film today you know showed a lecture hall at a university where a shooter entered and just started killing people because they were there but some movie like that would be a documentary. It wouldn't be a horror film and it would almost be inappropriate I think to have a horror film that was so real that showed victims who are totally innocent, who just happen to be where they are and to be confronted by this violence.

There's always sort of an indemnifying factor where someone didn't lock a door or someone was curious and went out to see the source of the sound. you know, the source of the sound. The closest Aaron got to feeling a sense of closure happened when he saw The Babadook, an Australian film about a woman and her son who are haunted by a monster after her husband is killed in a car crash. Normally, Aaron sees these movies alone or with friends, but in this case, he really wanted to bring his sister.

I had told her about it, and I wanted to see it with this understanding that this was a critically acclaimed horror film that looked like it was going to be good and really interesting. And then there were ways in which the circumstances of that movie overlapped with our lives that shocked and surprised me, such that I ended up feeling guilt. You know, I felt guilty that I had brought my sister to see this. that I ended up feeling guilt. You know, I felt guilty that I had brought my sister to see this. And being in the theater with her at the end of that movie was very powerful because we sort of just sat there shocked by what had happened. And as everyone else got up, there was this weird sense that, you know, maybe they didn't understand as we had.

It's funny, in so many of these situations, your sister is there, and she's still very protective of you in this case you're protective of her and that happens a lot in horror movies too you've got the relationship as well of the person you want to protect right yeah i do hesitate to bring her to bring anyone really into into the same theater space as me if i know that i'm going to watch a movie because i want it to kind of you know give me some cheap thrill and maybe part of the reason has to do with the sense that i'm trying consciously or not to access this part of me that feels missing and to her it's not missing because she was so conscious yeah during my father's death

and so the idea that i would somehow implicate her in my own viewing experience feels sick because, you know, to her it feels so much realer, even though the event happens to both of us, the different ways in which we process it and continue to process it separate us as viewers of the same movie. us as viewers of the same movie. In my own experience, one thing that took me a while to realize after losing somebody is that I would keep making new memories after that person passed away. And over time, my relationship with that person would become a smaller part of my overall life experiences. And given that I won't have any new memories

to make with that person, I find that it takes a certain amount of effort to keep the spirit of that relationship alive. And sometimes that effort ends up becoming a whole other part of my life, evolving into something else. That's what's happened with Aaron in horror films. And he's okay with that there's a way in which the experience of what happened to my dad

even though it's terrible feels central to my identity and so because it's a part of my identity I think the horror films too are a part of my identity that's it for this week thank you for listening special thanks to aaron orbe and steven shiel do you find horror movies cathartic beyond just the fun thrills let me know on facebook i tweet and email inski you can also support the show on patreon just click the donate button on my site imaginaryworldspodcast.org.