There's nothing worse than a shifty psychologist...
...And other lessons from horror movies, in this month's Dark Narratives
Welcome to the May issue of Dark Narratives, your monthly source of horror deep-dives into questions you didn’t think to ask. In this month’s edition, we’ll be talking about mental healthcare in horror movies, particularly the notion of therapists with less-than-savory desires. So stick around for that, but first, let’s look at some announcements…
My newest writing guide is on tension and suspense. Like all my guides, it’s available PWYW on Gumroad! https://tlbodine.gumroad.com/l/uyevh
Hailey Piper’s newest book, Your Mind is a Terrible Thing, is now available wherever you buy books. On Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Your-Terrible-Thing-Hailey-Piper/dp/1737463350/
Sadie Hartmann of Nightworms has joined the team at Dark Matter to launch her own imprint, Dark Hart. Keep an eye on the site for further details as they develop!
Are you following Rooster Republic? Do you know about the amazing premade cover designs available there? Did you see the newest ones? Seriously, go check them out, they are stunning (and just waiting for the perfect book to represent): https://roosterrepublicpress.com/from-the-water-a-goddess-new-premade-covers/
Have you picked up a copy of Your Body Is Not Your Body from Tenebrous Press yet? If not, what are you waiting for? This collection from multiple trans authors is like a searing scream of rage and pain and horror, and the proceeds help trans youth in Texas: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09XLV2K2P
“God save us from psychoanalysts,” is a phrase you’ll often hear uttered if you drop by on a Sunday evening, that sacrosanct time when I settle in to watch horror movies with my willing victim best friend. We’ve been doing this for several years now, watching a pair of movies each week and discussing them. And after several years, amounting to hundreds of films, a few patterns begin to emerge.
One such pattern that is impossible to ignore: Mental healthcare in horror movies is terrible.
Of course, it’s not exactly groundbreaking to point out that horror as a genre has a not-great relationship with mental illness. But I’m not talking about that. I’m also not talking about the enduring-but-terrible haunted asylum trope (not today, anyway, maybe some other time!)
No, I’m talking about something too bizarrely specific to be as common as it is: the therapist who wants to fuck your wife.
Bad Therapists: An Overview
We first came upon this trope in 1942’s Cat People, a film about a woman from a rural Serbian village whose women suffer a curious malady: physical intimacy with men triggers an animal transformation. Irena, deeply in love with her new husband Oliver, is terrified to consummate the relationship for fear of turning into a panther. Oliver is quick to dismiss her fears as nothing more than superstitious delusion. He encourages her to talk to a psychologist acquaintance.
The psychologist in question, Dr. Judd, has his own motives for taking on the case — motives which culminate in his kissing Irena against her will, discovering much too late that her panther transformation is very real and quite deadly.
In House on Haunted Hill (1959), a millionaire invites a group of people to spend the night in a reportedly haunted house, with the promise of prize money if they survive the night. What most of the guests don’t realize is that the event is actually a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse between the millionaire and his wife, who are each trying to kill the other and pin the death on an unsuspecting guest. Complicit in this scheme is the wife’s lover — a psychiatrist, of course, Dr. David Trent. This plotline remains mostly intact in the 1999 remake.
We see an even more diabolical version of that in the Hammer film Stop Me Before I Kill in 1960. Here, a man named Alan Colby suffers a brain injury in an accident, leaving him with an inexplicable desire to strangle his wife. The couple meet and befriend a psychiatrist, Dr. David Prade, who encourages Colby to take part in a series of unusual and torturous therapies. One morning, Colby awakens to find his wife missing and compelling evidence that he has murdered her and disposed of the body without remembering it at all. In fact, though, his wife has run away with Dr. Prade — who has carefully orchestrated events to get Colby out of the way by convincing him of his guilt.
Psychiatrists and therapists committing murder and framing it on patients is a well-worn path all its own, showing up in films like Scissors (where a therapist uses a woman’s past trauma to convince her she killed a man), Dressed to Kill (which comes with a heavy side dish of transphobia, to boot), and Nightbreed (where the psychologist is a serial killer).
For my money, though, the very best example of the bad psychotherapist trope is David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979). The film features a facility of questionably cutting edge treatments called “psychoplasmics” — basically a method of releasing emotional problems through physical changes to the body. This gets more than a little out of hand when his favorite patient, a woman who parthenogenically gives birth to deformed little monster children who go out into the world to commit violence against the people who have harmed her. It’s more than a little bit implied in the film that the woman and her doctor have a special relationship, and I love the idea that the “intimacy” of their treatments has spawned these murder children. I can think of no greater distillation of the fears and uncertainties that seem to surround mental health professionals in these horror movies.
So what’s the deal? Why are there so many terrible therapists running around in horror movies? Why are all these psychiatrists giving experimental talk therapies rather than prescribing medications? What’s up with all the sex stuff?
I cannot claim to know all the answers on this, but I’d like to point out a few compelling pieces to the puzzle.
First: The Golden Age of Hollywood, the Dark Age of Psychology
It’s helpful to know that, from the 1920s until the 1960s, behaviorism was the prevailing model of psychology. In other words — the general scientific consensus at the time was that behavior was a result of conditioning, and that worrying too much about thoughts and feelings was a waste of time. (If you’re thinking, “Hmm, I bet that led to some horrifying mental health treatments!” you would be correct, but that’s for a different essay).
Without a lot of compelling new psychology science emerging, storytellers looked backward and found inspiration among thinkers like Freud and Jung. Those films popularized already outdated concepts, which then became enmeshed in pop culture and started to be replicated, built upon, expanded, twisted, etc. with each successive generation of filmmaking. Which is a big part of why mental health in movies feels so woefully out-of-date.
As TV Tropes so eloquently puts it: “The Freud of Hollywood is psychoanalysis of the '60s, flanderized and spun for drama.”
Second: The Sexy Intimacy of Vulnerability
Let’s just put this out there: People in real life do sometimes feel sexual desire or emotional intimacy with their therapists. It’s actually pretty common. The term for it is Erotic Transference, and it’s a fairly predictable outcome when you routinely spend time alone in a room with someone, spilling your deepest thoughts, fears, emotions, etc.
Therapists are trained to know this can happen, and they know it is never acceptable to act on it or do anything more than gently shut down any feelings sent their way. After all, the power dynamic is heavily weighted in the therapist’s favor: they know everything about you, but you know nothing about them.
Despite these affairs being unethical (and sometimes illegal), they do occasionally happen. One estimate I found suggested around 10% of therapists might violate a patient’s boundaries. The number who actually develop relationships or have sex is lower than that.
So these things do happen, but absolutely not with the frequency shown in the movies. Which, well, could be said of a lot of things in movies, including serial murder and car explosions. Which is all because…
Third: The Rule of Cool (and juicy drama)
A lot of storytelling operates under the general philosophy that if you’ll be including something in your story, you should write about the edge cases. Human curiosity tends toward morbid fascination. We don’t want to hear about the mundane day-to-day experiences we know so well. We want to hear about the weird, twisted, unusual things that might possibly happen but that we’re unlikely to ever witness ourselves.
And from a narrative perspective, bad psychology is undeniably fascinating.
Here we have an opportunity for a character to divulge their deepest secrets and place trust in another person. So what if that trust is broken? What if this person we rely on is in fact duplicitous? Surely it’s a fear at the back of our minds every time we decide to take that plunge, so why not explore it through horror movies?
And many horror movies — especially those up through the 70s — center on emotionally unavailable men, unflappable heroes who dare not crack under the pressure of their unusual circumstances. Is it any wonder that they would be threatened by the therapist figure, a man who is capable of reaching greater understanding of the wife’s inner life than her husband? A man who spends so much intimate time with her, out of sight and reach of the husband’s influence? What else could they possibly be doing with that time?
It’s not an especially charitable anxiety, but I can see it.
What’s the Problem?
So by now we’ve got a pretty good handle on why therapists in fiction seem so prone to be shifty. And as a dramatic storytelling element, it makes good sense! The problem, though, is that once something becomes a staple in pop culture, it reaches a saturation point in storytelling. They’re edge cases for a reason. Most people will never encounter the real thing, but they’ve seen the Hollywood version enough times to feel like they understand it. And so they develop some questionable opinions about the way the world works, informed (if subconsciously) by tropes.
Thus the potential harm of bad portrayals, and the importance of good representation as a method of reclaiming the narrative. Because these tropes are all well and good if we accept that they’re fiction written for our entertainment, right? But once they start influencing our decisions — perhaps dissuading us from pursuing mental health care, or creating suspicion when a loved one starts therapy — genuine harm can follow.
So the solution is just…write better therapists, right?
Well, maybe. But before you stamp “case closed” on this one, there’s another aspect that I think needs to be considered more closely, because it might just be the keystone for this whole thing.
The Complicated Distrust of Mental Healthcare
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist was made as part of a three-part “depression cycle” of films, all inspired by the filmmaker’s time receiving treatment for severe depression. It shows. Watching Antichrist feels a little bit like watching a nervous breakdown occur in real time.
The film centers on a psychologist and his wife whose young child died tragically while they were, ahem, otherwise occupied. Paralyzed with guilt, the mother suffers terribly. Her husband decides to take treatment into his own hands and, suspecting that she has some untold trauma or hang-up about nature, opts for a little exposure therapy in the form of a just-the-two-of-them cabin-in-the-woods getaway.
Things go very badly during this retreat, for reasons that would take a long while to unpack — the film is variously interpreted as a treatise on male vs female, society vs nature, god vs the devil — but the simplest way to explain it is that the woman’s mental health declines and she starts demanding and performing increasingly sadistic sex acts on her husband.
All too often in fiction, the redemptive power of sex and intimacy — the insinuation that mental health problems can be treated with love alone — gets overblown. Antichrist offers a harsh repudiation of that idea. It offers a glimpse into a world where sex therapy is a perversion in every possible sense.
And watching this movie, you cannot help but become frustrated long before the violence gets underway.
The doctor drags his wife out into the woods to confront her deep hidden traumas. But they just lost a young child. Her grief is justified. He’s the one who’s behaving inappropriately. We never see him grieve, in fact, or even really acknowledge the reality of the death. You have to wonder whether he’s concocted this whole therapy plan for his wife out of a desire to avoid his own feelings.
This is, I think, the thing with teeth that lurks beneath stigmatized portrayals of mental health practitioners in horror.
Other issues with mental health portrayals — like questionable depictions of transgender identity or dissociative identity disorder — could be chalked up predominantly to poor research + sensationalism. But the ever-present distrust of therapists is, I think, a twisted reflection of something true.
When it comes to horror, we most often see people encounter therapists and psychiatrists under extreme circumstances — they are battling supernatural forces that no one around them can comprehend, and the treatments offered are woefully inadequate. Not only is this a natural outcome within the parameters of reality in the story, it’s a powerful metaphor for what many people experience when seeking mental health care.
It’s remarkably easy for the discussion around mental health to become so medicalized, so pathologized, that it decouples from human experience. The reality of being a person is that you have thoughts and feelings. Sometimes those thoughts and feelings are irrational, but just as often they are perfectly reasonable responses to the circumstances of your life.
The woman who lost her child is not shattered with grief because she has some hidden nature trauma that can be healed by camping.
Maybe the person with depression is depressed because they’re suffering under a yolk of system oppression and abuse, not because of a chemical imbalance that can be cured with a pill.
What I think we’re seeing with these untrustworthy Hollywood psychoanalysts is backlash against the perception that mental health care is all either useless (talking about feelings without doing anything to fix the real problem) or transactional (take this pill to control your inconvenient feelings and ignore the real problem). And that perception is, unfortunately, not wholly inaccurate. It’s not only Hollywood doctors that treat people this way.
But things are changing for the better.
We are starting to develop better therapies and greater understanding of mental health. Modern brain science is all about that link between the mind and the brain, and the way one affects the other. You take the pills so you feel well enough to tackle the practical circumstances affecting your life. You talk through your problems so you can untangle thought patterns and change your responses.
So maybe it’s time we update our depictions in fiction to match.
Thank you for reading! I hoped you enjoyed this month’s topic. If you’d like a chance to decide what I write about in the future, be sure to subscribe to my Patreon! Patrons get to read my posts a week early and can vote on future topics. They also get all of my writing guides for free: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine
If you enjoyed this content, why not share it with a friend?