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My older daughter was at a sleep over party last week where they watched a horror movie. It was a whole bunch of girls together and none of them seemed to be particularly affected by the film, except for my daughter who was pretty disturbed by the experience. We don't watch horror movies in our house and I think this was the first one she had ever seen. She's had bad dreams for a week now and has vowed never to watch another horror film. I'm not surprised that the movie affected her like this. I've only ever seen two horror films in my life and both of them really disturbed me, and I think I have a theory why it is that I (and possibly my daughter too) get so upset by these kinds of movies.
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Sociopaths (bear with me here, I know what I'm doing) have no capacity for empathy for other human beings. They can't put themselves into the shoes of other people and therefore have no problem using those people as means to their own ends. There are degrees of sociopathy, of course, and not at all sociopaths are violent, but some are, serial killers for example. Just as 1-2% of the population have sociopathic tendencies, it's my theory that on your standard bell curve there must be 1-2% of the population who have too much empathy for other humans. If I'm correct and one of those people is me we are simply not capable of watching a slasher or horror film because we have excessive empathy for the victims in the picture. The first horror film I saw was Friday The Thirteenth which involves teenagers getting serially murdered by a maniac. I did not enjoy the experience of watching that movie at all. All around me people were laughing, hiding behind their hands etc. but I was utterly aghast at the poor kids who were being slaughtered. I thought about them for weeks afterwards, wondering how they could have escaped their fate and the emotional damage their murder must have inflicted on their siblings and parents. This, I gather, is not what is supposed to happen in a horror film...what I think is meant to happen is that you get a quick thrill from the murder and then you move on to the next shocking development carried along by the narrative. You are not supposed to be so traumatised that you want to stop the movie. But I reckon if you are one of the 1-2% of us on this theoretical empathy scale you have trouble separating fiction and reality - for people like us suspending our disbelief isn't the problem, for us the problem is remembering that all these individuals in the movie are only pretending to get hurt, the blood isn't real, the knives aren't real and no one actually died here at all.
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I think this may also be why I have so much trouble liking supposedly frothy middle of the road murder mystery shows like Elementary, Monk, Sherlock, CSI etc. - in a lot of these dramas the show begins with a violent murder (on Elementary it's often incredibly violent) and after that I don't really care how the mystery gets solved or what's going on in the personal lives of the detectives because I'm still reeling from the emotional trauma of the pre title murder sequence. (I also find it very bizarre that on American TV you can show someone getting their throat cut but you are still not allowed to say the word shit, a word which is in Chaucer.) In fact now that I think about it, maybe I dont have the problem at all. Maybe the problem is you. I actually wonder how anybody can enjoy programmes or films which begin with an act of shocking, lurid violence (often against young women). Why do you read torture porn novels and watch tv programmes like this? Why don't you care about the victims? How can you compartmentalize? What the hell is the matter with all of you?
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