“Freud felt like it was a core human compulsion to revisit things that were traumatic. Horror movies where people are terrified, chased, physically harmed or tortured can be a way for someone who has experienced physical, psychological or sexual trauma to re-play aspects of that out on the screen.” (K.Jordan)
As I reflect about upon the nature of my ephemeral moments of surviving, I think about the text exchanges, the voice mails, his hands wrapped around my neck as I was being choked, the bruise that never formed, but the lump that still resides when I recall that memory, the receipts for couples therapy she insisted on going to, the list goes on and becomes lost moments, perhaps you could call it a kind of nostalgia which Machado defines for herself:
“Nostalgia ( noun )
1. The unsettling sensation that you are never able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event some essential quality of it is lost forever.” (235) - Nestle, Joan. A Restricted Country. New York, NY: Firebrand Books, 1987. Print.
It is this type of nostalgia that warps my brain's ability to process the trauma. This isn’t a lost feeling or sensation that is sentimental, but instead it is particularly the unsettling aspect of a past experience I can’t fully process or remember with great accuracy, however with trauma there is rumination and a return to the memory which is tangentially similar to nostalgia and it discontents. In German nostalgia is translated to mean “a type of homesickness,” and from Greek it means a return home. If many somatic notions of the body create this metaphor of memory keeping, I wonder why our body keeps the score and is left haunted by the past? The trauma body is both about survival, reenactment and and the process of becoming a self eventually can find meaning, healing and processing through art, culture and for me horror movies.
See AlsoYou Probably Haven't Seen These 7 Great Free Streaming Horror Movies in a WhileBest Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Video - How to Stream FreeBest MoviesJoy Alternatives for Streaming Movies OnlineStreaming guides | ProtonIn my experience, my body is both a disorganized home, a dissociation and a horror story. The connection between nostalgia, trauma and horror movies may seem abstract, but for me the correlation between revisiting the trauma of abuse and watching a horror movies is similar to the way nostalgia becomes a homesickness and rumination in the mind.
The body keeps the score, and the trauma body/mind can *sometimes* relate and process how the genre of horror is a type of speculative fiction that is intended to scare, disgust, terrorize and startle viewers, this is the experiences and feelings survivors can relate to, relive and reorient their relationship with fear.
Here are some of my favorite films, and corresponding tropes in horror movies and their relationship to connection to the trauma body.
all started for me when I was young and saw the late 90s teen horror films Scream, I know What you Did Last Summer. It was also very much mixed up with my sexuality, the first time I browsed down the Horror section of Blockbuster video (RIP) I remember getting turned on by the covers of Sleepaway Camp, and Nightmare on Elm Street. The women on the cover were partly exposed, and incredibly sexualized. There was an erotics associated with my queerness that at the time I could yet to explain. My first time kissing a girl friend when I was 12 was when we were watching Halloween together.
Final girl Movies include: Halloween, The Devil's House, You’re Next, the characters are usually virgin cis-gender women often babysitter's or type casted as the “good girls” or virginal girl. This trope also fits into the teen horror or ensemble cast. Trauma symptoms include: Hypervigilance, ( always looking out for something scary, out of place or bad) Fawn, flight or fight, abandonment depression ( feeling lost and alone) this often accompanies the characters ability to recover, regain power and overcome / heal / process the killer or in this case the symptoms that have caused them harm.
Rape/Revenge - also cis-gender women, often virgins, or women who are exploited for their femininity. Trauma symptoms include: shock, dissociation, emotional flashbacks, the fight flight, fawn response, and hyper-vigilance. The fetishized experience of watching a rape scene for many feminists is in fact filled with illogical contradictions because somehow watching your trauma on screen allows for a relatability, and a catharsis because “horror movies are one the only places women are told their fears are real” (Kier-La Janisse)
Teen Horror movies such as Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer evoke the real aspect of community, friendship and trust. It also involves teenagers coming into their sexuality and gender identity. Fraternizing among a group of friends, perhaps a cabin in the woods, and the possibility that one of your friends is actually “the bad guy” or complicit in the murders of your friends, this mirrors the real world in a way - it is a common that those closest to us can and often do cause the most harm; one example of this is the harm perpetuated within intimate partner violence.
“Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.”
— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil
Chris Marker is an experimental filmmaker, although not connected to the horror genre his work is associated with speculative fiction, science fiction films and travel documentaries. Sans Soleil is an experimental film that traverses time and place, while the narrative is based on fragments of letters read by a disembodied female voice. Although perhaps unrelated to the horror genre, Marker’s insight about healing, time and the wounded, resonates with my survivor mind and body. The one hour and 30 mins it takes to watch a horror film about rape and revenge can be a capsule where the internal wounds can be released and related to it.
Time is fragmented, the mind is triggered in the present and brought back to the past, the body is lost in the wound, feeling stuck, in pain and disembodied - I agree with Marker, time does not heal all wounds, sometimes the normative confines of time make the wound worse, sometimes the romanticism of nostalgia distorts time and obfuscates the wounds impact, sometimes our disembodied sense of pain doesn’t heal, but becomes wounded yet again.
Time, the wound and the disembodied are trauma stories and horror tropes.The horror of trauma causing the wound, time in the body causing fragmentation, and disembodied temporalities disrupting the healing.
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