Midsommar - Trauma-Based Horror Movies
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TW: In addition to trauma-based horror movies, this article discusses personal accounts of grief and loss.

One of the unfortunate double-edged swords of being a human is having emotions. On one hand, the power to love, be loved, and remember the important and positive emotional moments in our lives is priceless. On the other hand, when we’re able to experience those positive feelings throughout our lives, there comes the inevitability of hard emotions that can tear us apart.

Grief, loss, guilt, depression, neglect, and abuse are all things that traumatize us to our very core. They can completely rewire our brains and can transition us into different people than we were, even mere moments before, against our wills. Sometimes we can find our way back, but often, we simply grow and move forward, forever hurt and better prepared.

Over the past decade or so, there has been a special sub-genre of horror movies that have used this inevitable transition period as the crux of their plot lines. Of course, horror films have always done this to an extent; films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho or Rosemary’s Baby explored the surface-level mental illnesses and PTSD that come with traumatic experiences or abuse.

Now, it’s become a regularity for some directors to take deeper dives into these themes in their films, fully traversing the ins and outs of the wounds that we keep closest to our hearts. While psychological horror may be the most accurate description of it, recently, some people refer to it as “elevated horror.” I simply refer to it as trauma horror, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it has helped me get through the last three years of my life.

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Before getting started, several of the films and experiences I discuss in this article tread through sensitive waters. Use this as somewhat of a trigger warning before reading on. It may get a little dark, but if you’re ready, let’s walk through this muck together.

Those that know me closely know that I lost my sister in 2019 to complications from alcoholism. She was the one person in my family that I related the most with, and although our in-person interactions had been limited for more than a decade, she was the person I’d call when I was excited about something, and she’d reach out to me simply when she saw something that reminded her of me.

We were as close as siblings that lived across the country from one another could be. In the end, I was with her when she died. I watched her last breaths leave her body; an image that will be burned and pressed into my brain for the rest of my life, and something I’d never experienced before the age of 33. Watching someone you unconditionally love die is almost like an out-of-body experience. It’s like your soul is running away from your physical being, begging you to be anywhere else.

Related: ‘Next Exit’ Review: Katie Parker & Rahul Kohli Shine in This Dark Supernatural Drama

Her death was seemingly the green light on several more that I’d experience over the next three years. One of my closest friends (and the wife of my best friend) died of cancer in her early 30s. My uncle, who was my Godfather as a child, and someone I confided in, died from giving in to his depression. One of my closest new friends and co-workers in my current town died on the operating table. My brother-and-law died of a drug overdose, and three of my wife’s grandparents passed. Trying to keep myself together through my grief while being the emotional rock for both my best friend and my wife was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life.

Needless to say, it was the most loss I’d ever experienced in such a short time span. Up until this point, I’d only lost my grandparents when I was a teenager, and they were old and sick. The grief was piling high, and another tragedy would hit before I could process the one before it. The mountain was getting higher and higher, and that was already on top of a hill of severe depression and the anxiety that came with Covid-19.

Though my sister had been sick for about two months, I hadn’t really had the emotional reaction one should expect in the days leading up to her death. I kept myself distracted with work. I read more than 400 comic books. I didn’t even cry, except for some short bursts of tears directly after and an hour of anger the night before. I took two days off work, then voluntarily went back.

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It wasn’t until the next week that, with the encouragement of my boss, and my self-realization that I needed to take some time, I decided to take a few more days for myself. On my first day off, I decided to go to the theater to see Ari Aster’s new movie, Midsommar. Now, I had seen Hereditary and dabbled in some other trauma horror gold like The Babadook and, to a lesser extent, The Descent and Silent House, but outside of my shocked reactions to “the scene” in Hereditary, my responses were pretty tame.

So, I got a ticket for Midsommar, and of course, within the first 10 minutes of the film, Dani loses her sister and both her parents to her sister’s murder-suicide, and Florence Pugh gives one of the rawest, most incredibly emotional performances I’ve ever seen on-screen. I could feel her loss and darkness through the screen. I could feel my own loss and darkness finally showing itself. I was floored. I felt like I had been hit in the chest with a bowling ball.

Related: When Horror Dishes Out Comeuppance: Did They Deserve It?

The film ends with Dani finally feeling like she has a family in this incredibly f*cked up way, and while I later realized exactly how crazy that situation was, for a second, I was completely clairvoyant about why cults are so successful in preying upon those suffering from grief and loss. The credits rolled, I was the only one in the theater, and I loudly bawled my eyes out for about 15 minutes.

I left the theater feeling better than I had in two months because I felt like Ari Aster knew exactly what I was feeling and showed me that other people feel it too. That movie made me feel like I wasn’t alone in a black hole of sadness. I realized that style of movie was cathartic for me, and if that one was, maybe others in the sub-genre could be too.

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Within that year, I saw three more films that affected me similarly. I re-watched Hereditary, which hit in a completely different way after losing a sibling. While obviously, the situations were much different, Peter’s (Alex Wolff) reaction after his sister Charlie’s death felt similar to my own. Not necessarily the level of shock because of the circumstances, but the guilt (more on this later) that immediately crushes him. For the rest of the film, he’s weighed by his decisions that all led to Charlie’s death, even to the point of arguing faults with his own mother.

When we lose someone to such quick and unfortunate circumstances, we immediately try to find someone to blame, and more times than not, it’s ourselves. What could we have done differently? How could we have been there more? Would they have gone down this path if we were more present? Hereditary reminded me that the blame game and the what-ifs and whys don’t really matter. In Hereditary’s case, the way things play out is predetermined, which isn’t real life, but regardless, we still have about the same amount of control.

Warner Bros. Pictures

That year, Mike Flanagan also gave us Doctor Sleep, one of my favorite Stephen King books, and essentially a study on trauma leading to alcoholism. While I haven’t read the book since my sister’s passing, the movie does a fantastic job of hitting home the theme that just because someone is an alcoholic doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. People don’t want to be alcoholics. They don’t “choose” to pick up the bottle. Their brains force them to because it’s the only way they can see the pain go away.

Dan Torrance had a messed-up childhood, to say the least. The fact that he even made it to adulthood was incredible. His ingrained childhood abuse and trauma caused him to become an alcoholic, just as it did his father. But he eventually flourishes, and he puts his life back together piece by piece, and although that doesn’t always work out for people like it didn’t for my sister, the possibilities are still there, and those possibilities prove that the good person is still in there. They always have existed, and they still do. Dan wasn’t a bad person. He was sick, and that sickness made him do stupid things. I saw my sister in Dan Torrance, and that movie resonated with me because of it.

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The third one I re-watched that year was The Ritual; a storyline that wouldn’t even exist if not for the guilt of its four main characters. Like Hereditary, decisions are made that lead to the death of a friend, and in a half-honor, half-guilt-inspired choice, a group of remaining friends finds themselves in a dire situation. Aside from the guilt over the lead-up decisions surrounding someone’s death, there’s also the survivor’s guilt that comes from feeling like you should be the one gone, not them. This is a highly relatable theme in that film.

Regarding guilt, I’m not sure any film symbolically expresses guilt better than 2022’s Nocebo. In this case, a woman gets a phone call and hears some kind of horrible news, and the shock and guilt materialize as a sick, tick-infested dog that shakes its parasites all over her, leading to one biting her, and her becoming physically ill over the next year. While the reveal and final act of the movie are flat-out wild, the film is a reminder that organic laughter, forced relaxation, and, most importantly, forgiving yourself little by little, all naturally help clear the guilt clouds away.

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The most explored reaction to trauma in these types of films seems to be grief, and there are so many effective and heartbreaking ways to do this. One of the most revered movies to do this is The Babadook, which I watched last year for the first time since its 2014 release. Admittedly, I was one of those viewers who enjoyed it, but I was annoyed by the child’s performance and rolled my eyes a bit at the themes. Watching it now, after experiencing severe and constant loss, the movie resonates in a completely different way.

Now, I no longer see a bad mother and an annoying child. I see two emotionally wrecked people with no ability to expel their grief other than onto one another in a nasty, sludge-filled, cyclical way. It’s a horrible situation that you can’t help but feel for, and the fact that the two characters are able to finally experience a little light in the darkness at the end is inspiring. It’s easy to remember that people suffer from tragedies every day. It’s much harder to remember that people also heal from them every day.

Related: ‘Pearl’ Review: A Perfect Complementary Prequel in Both Style and Tone

Different movies handle grief in different ways. Films like The Night House, Lamb, Men, Smile, and Pearl all venture into the darkness that grief brings; they show the realism that sometimes people are able to crawl out of that darkness, while others aren’t. It takes a lot of practice and work to break out of your traumas, and this can sometimes be too exhaustive.

For whatever reason, these types of movies help me process in a healthier way. I’m able to look at these characters, relate with them and their stories, talk about them, and come out feeling better. Let me be clear, though, they aren’t for everyone. People cope in so many different ways, and sometimes a person just might need a comedy, a good cry, chocolate, and a block of cheese.

Me, though? I sop up these dark stories like a biscuit because they offer cathartic reminders that no matter how dark things get, we’re not in the dark alone. For those of you who have been on this journey with me, I hope they can do the same for you.


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