Psychological Horror

What defines it

Psychological horror builds fear out of mental and emotional states rather than out of a visible monster. The threat may be a disturbed mind, a fractured sense of identity, a guilt that will not stay buried, or a house that seems to press on the person inside it. What matters most is how the central character perceives things, and how much the audience can trust that perception. The camera, the sound design and the performances all work to make the viewer share the character's doubt.

The label is slippery because it borders so many neighbors. It overlaps with the psychological thriller, which leans on mystery and suspense and may never frighten anyone. It touches the supernatural ghost story whenever a film leaves open whether the apparition is real. It also shares ground with the slasher, since the killer in Psycho is a troubled man. The film scholar Susan Hayward, writing in 2001, even treated psychological horror and slashers as close cousins she called horror-thrillers. The usual dividing line is where the film places its danger: in the world, or in the head.

A useful test is ambiguity. A zombie siege or a creature attack asks whether the characters will survive. A psychological film asks what is actually happening to them, and often declines to answer cleanly. That uncertainty is the point, and it is why the form leans on close-ups, restrained effects and performances that carry the weight of the story.

A short history

The roots reach back into literature. Henry James's novella The Turn of the Screw (1898) gave readers a governess who sees ghosts that nobody else sees, and critics have argued ever since about whether she is right. Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) and Robert Bloch's novel Psycho carried the same doubt into the twentieth century. Later novelists such as Stephen King, whose Misery appeared in 1987, and Thomas Harris kept the mind-first approach alive on the page, and Japanese author Koji Suzuki's Ring brought it to a new audience.

On screen, the historian David J. Skal notes that The Black Cat (1934) has been called the first psychological horror movie made in America. A more influential early model came from producer Val Lewton at RKO, whose Cat People (1942), directed by Jacques Tourneur, kept its feline threat mostly out of view and made the audience imagine it. Lewton's low budgets turned suggestion into a style. Hayward and other scholars place the subgenre proper in the years after World War II, with the pivotal films arriving in 1960.

Those two films were Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, which opened in London a few months apart. Both put a damaged killer at the center and asked the audience to look through his eyes. The 1960s then produced a run of landmarks: The Innocents (1961), Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) and his Rosemary's Baby (1968), all of which made a person's fear itself the subject.

From the 1970s on, the approach spread into almost every other kind of horror. Andrzej Żuławski's Possession (1981) pushed it to extremes of performance. Satoshi Kon's animated Perfect Blue (1997) applied it to fame and identity, and Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan (2010) did the same for ambition and the body. In the 2010s, a new wave of arthouse-leaning horror, including Hereditary (2018), made grief and family trauma the engine of dread.

Hallmarks

• An unreliable point of view, so that the viewer sees the world the way a frightened or unstable character does.
• Ambiguity about whether the danger is real, imagined, or some mixture of the two.
• Slow, attentive pacing that gives performances and small details room to unsettle.
• Sound and image used for distortion: odd camera angles, sudden silence, noises that may exist only in a character's head.
• Domestic or confined settings, such as an apartment, a family home or a theater, that feel like extensions of the mind.
• Themes of guilt, grief, paranoia, repression, obsession and fractured identity.
• Restraint with gore and creature effects, which are used sparingly or not at all.

What separates it from its neighbors

Three distinctions come up most often. Against the slasher, the psychological film is concerned with why a mind is breaking down, while the slasher is concerned with the structure of the hunt. A group of strangers trapped with a killer, as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, faces an external threat. A film like Repulsion keeps almost everything inside one woman's experience of a London flat. Against supernatural horror, the psychological film often keeps a rational explanation available, so a haunting might be a symptom.

Against the thriller, the difference is intention. A thriller wants tension and a solution. A psychological horror film wants dread, and it may leave the solution out. In a 2013 piece for PopMatters, critic Bill Gibron described the film form as a gray area between splatter and a dark ride, which reflects how hard the boundaries are to draw. Many films sit in two camps at once, and the library treats the subgenre as a mood and method more than a strict category.

Peeping Tom and Psycho, 1960

Peeping Tom was directed by Michael Powell from a script by Leo Marks and premiered in London on April 7, 1960. It follows a man who films his crimes, and critics at the time reacted with disgust. Caroline Lejeune of The Observer called it a beastly film, and the backlash is generally seen as a major factor in ending Powell's career as a British director. It was not a box office success either.

Its fortunes changed later. Martin Scorsese first heard of the film as a student, saw an uncut color print in 1970, and in 1978 helped arrange a wider re-release through Corinth Films. Critics have reassessed it since the 1970s and many now call it a masterpiece. Placed beside Psycho, it shows two directors reaching the same idea from opposite sides: the killer is a person with a history, and the camera is complicit. Hitchcock made the more popular film, but Powell's showed how far the idea could go.

Repulsion and the apartment as a mind

Roman Polanski's Repulsion had its London release on June 10, 1965, after a Cannes screening. Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a young woman living with her sister in a London flat. Her aversion to men and to touch grows as she is left alone, and the film follows her breakdown from her own point of view. Polanski wrote it with Gérard Brach and David Stone, and the apartment interiors were built at Twickenham Studios so that walls and corridors could be shaped to unsettle.

The film won the FIPRESCI Prize and a Silver Berlin Bear Jury Grand Prix at the 1965 Berlin International Film Festival. It reportedly ran to about £95,000 against a planned £65,000. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called it a knockout in the psychological horror line. Polanski followed it with Rosemary's Baby (1968), adapted from Ira Levin's 1967 novel and starring Mia Farrow, and Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for it. Both films build paranoia in a home that should feel safe.

Ghosts that might not be there

Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) adapts James's novella with a script credited to William Archibald and Truman Capote, with dialogue by John Mortimer. Cinematographer Freddie Francis shot it in CinemaScope with deep focus and sparse lighting, and painted the edges of lenses for night interiors to give a closed-in look. The film leaves open whether the ghosts are real or the product of the governess's repression. Accounts of the production say the writer Archibald saw the ghosts as genuine, while Clayton wanted the story told from the governess's view.

Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963) adapts Jackson's novel and follows producer Val Lewton's belief that people fear what they cannot see. Most events stay off-screen. The sets were lit with ceilings in view, which made the house feel confined, and wide-angle lenses and tilted angles made it feel off-balance. The reviews were mixed at release and Jackson herself disliked the film, but its reputation has risen steadily. Scorsese has ranked it first on his list of scariest horror films.

Identity on the edge: Possession, Perfect Blue, Black Swan

Żuławski's Possession premiered at Cannes in 1981, where Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress award. It was shot in West Berlin on a reported budget of about $2.4 million, and Carlo Rambaldi, who built the alien's head for Alien, made its creature effects. The British authorities banned it as a video nasty, and the American release was cut to about 81 minutes. The uncut version reached home video in 2000, and critics have reassessed it as a cult landmark.

Satoshi Kon's Perfect Blue, Madhouse's 1997 film and Kon's first as director, is loosely based on Yoshikazu Takeuchi's novel and explores identity, voyeurism and performance. Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan reached theaters in 2010, with a reported budget of $13 million and a worldwide gross of around $332 million. Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar for it. Aronofsky has acknowledged similarities to Perfect Blue but denied that the earlier film inspired his own.

Grief and the modern revival

Ari Aster's Hereditary premiered at Sundance on January 21, 2018, and A24 released it in the United States on June 8. Its reported budget was $10 million, and reports of its worldwide gross run from about $82.8 million to $90.2 million. Toni Collette's performance as Annie Graham, a miniature artist, drew widespread praise. The film belongs to a cycle of 2010s horror that critics sometimes grouped with arthouse cinema, where family trauma and mourning provide the dread.

Other media have taken up the same techniques. Video games such as Silent Hill (1999) used fog, sound and an unstable protagonist to blur the line between world and mind. Academic work on the form includes studies of music, with researchers examining how sound shapes fear, and of lighting, including work on Rear Window and suspense. These studies suggest why the subgenre lasts: it relies on the basic tools of film rather than on a particular effect or monster that might date.

Where to go in the library

Start with Psycho and Norman Bates, then read about Alfred Hitchcock to see how he shaped the form. From there, follow the neighbors: the slasher shows what happens when the killer becomes a formula, supernatural horror shows the opposite pull, and body horror turns the mind's distress into physical change. Ringu is a good example of dread built on a curse and a rumor, and The Blair Witch Project builds fear almost entirely out of what the characters cannot see.

Verified details

• Repulsion (1965) premiered in London on June 10, 1965, after screening at Cannes.
• Peeping Tom premiered in London on April 7, 1960, and was released in the United States in 1962.
• Martin Scorsese helped bring Peeping Tom back to theaters in 1978.
• The Innocents (1961) was shot by Freddie Francis in CinemaScope.
• Ruth Gordon won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Rosemary's Baby (1968).
• The Haunting (1963) is based on Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House.
• Isabelle Adjani won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 1981 for Possession.
• Black Swan (2010) cost a reported $13 million and earned about $332 million worldwide.
• David J. Skal notes that The Black Cat (1934) has been called the first psychological horror movie in America.

Sources and further reading

• Psychological horror, Wikipedia
• Repulsion (film), Wikipedia
• Peeping Tom (1960 film), Wikipedia
• The Haunting (1963 film), Wikipedia
• The Innocents (1961 film), Wikipedia
• Possession (1981 film), Wikipedia
• Hereditary (film), Wikipedia

Related subgenres