Fernando Espi Forcen - Monsters, demons and psychopaths: psychiatry and horror film

Monsters, Demons
and
Psychopaths

Psychiatry and Horror Film

Monsters, Demons
and
Psychopaths

Psychiatry and Horror Film

Fernando Espi Forcen

CRC Press

Taylor & Francis Group

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2017 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

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Version Date: 20160607

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This book is dedicated to my father who introduced us to his passion for the seventh art.

Contents

As long as I can remember, Ive always loved horror. When I was a kid, my brothers and I had a special way of playing hide and seek. My father used to hide in one of the rooms of the house with the lights off and each one of us had to walk through the corridor not knowing where he was going to unexpectedly scare us. I remember with nostalgia the mixed feelings of fear, joy and excitement I experienced right before walking down the corridor. During my childhood, my cousins, my friends and I enjoyed telling each other horror stories about serial killers, urban legends or dangerous madmen that had escaped from the asylum. The first horror film I ever saw was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a 1920 German silent movie. I was six years old and my father had told us that our grandfather was terrorized when he had watched it as a youngster. After watching the film I slept under the covers for at least a couple of weeks, scared by the feeling that the sleepwalker, Cesare, would come any minute to decide my fate.

One of those summers, while spending the holidays at a small town by the beach in Spain, my father shared with us the story of Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 movie which he had watched as a teenager and which was the scariest movie he had ever seen. Many years later during residency, together with my father, I visited the cemetery of Evans City, Pennsylvania, where several scenes had been shot.

Our caretaker at home, Moni, was in fact a horror film fan and she used to summarize for us the stories of Alien, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and other classics. At that time our parents did not allow us to see those films and I had to wait for my teenage years. However, one night, when my twin brother Carlos and I were still children, my parents went out for dinner and left us in the care of my grandmother. That night, Stanley Kubricks The Shining was playing on TV. My father had given instructions to my grandmother that she was not to allow us to see the film, something we were unaware of, but she fell asleep very quickly and we ended up watching that entire work of genius. I still remember my surprise when I watched the transformation from beauty to ugliness of the woman in Room 237.

I was eleven when I saw my first horror film in the theater: Bram Stokers Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola. We sneaked into the theater, and the excitement and fear I felt was comparable to that Id experienced as a kid right before walking down the dark corridor. I get a similar feeling every time I watch a new good scary movie now. I guess, at an early stage of development, I became somehow psychologically eroticized by horror and have been that way ever since. Today, at times when I am stressed, horror movies allow me to escape, relax and return to my happy upbringing.

I havent just been fascinated by horror; cinema in general has been the one passion I inherited from my father. Despite going to a Catholic school in Murcia, in southeastern Spain, religion was not my thing. Luckily, in my school, the Marist Brothers were liberal enough. During my last year of high school, we were allowed to start a movie club as a substitute for catechism for those who were not interested in the sacrament of Confirmation. We worked under the supervision of Brother Soriano, who had studied cinema. Our movie club was poorly attended, though; most students were interested in receiving Confirmation. However, Brother Soriano helped us look at cinema in an academic way and opened our minds to new perspectives. I used the skills I had learned from Brother Soriano during medical school and designed a module for my classmates about cinema and medical psychology.

After medical school I left Spain to pursue a residency in psychiatry in the United States in Cleveland, Ohio. There I met Dr. Howard Gottesman who ran the movie club for the psychiatry residents. Every month the committee would select a film for psychiatric discussion among the residents. Dr. Gottesman taught us how to interpret films psychologically, a tool that has been fundamental to the development of this book. At that time I started to work with my twin brother on a paper about demonic possessions and mental illness in the Late Middle Ages. The paper was later published in the