PSYCHOLOGY: Mental Illness in Horror, Joker, Hereditary & The Babadook

Does mental illness in horror movies make us fear the wrong people?

⚠️ Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its portrayal in media (13 Reasons Why), adolescent suicide risk, and references to mass shootings.

From Norman Bates to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker, horror has leaned on mental illness as shorthand for danger for a hundred years. This episode traces how that portrayal has changed, from asylum villains and "criminally insane" killers to modern films like The Babadook, Hereditary and Get Out, where the horror is how other people treat the person who is suffering.

Therapists Shannon and Cathy bring a clinical lens to the genre they love: what the films get wrong, what they get right, and why the line between mental illness and personality disorder matters for real people.

Covered in this episode:

- Psycho (Norman Bates)

- Halloween (Michael Myers, Haddonfield)

- The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Leatherface, Ed Gein)

- The Shining

- Hannibal Lecter

- The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

- American Horror Story: Asylum

- The Invisible Man (2020)

- Get Out (Jordan Peele)

- The Babadook

- Hereditary

- The Dark Knight (Heath Ledger's Joker)

- Joker (Joaquin Phoenix)

- American Psycho

- 13 Reasons Why

- Sharp Objects, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Mr. Nobody, Silver Linings Playbook

Clinical concepts: personality disorders, schizophrenia and violence risk, command auditory hallucinations, PTSD and complex PTSD, emotional abuse, covert narcissism, cultural competency, stigma, person-first representation, dialectical thinking.

A note on terms: we use Axis I and Axis II as shorthand for mental illness versus personality disorder. The axes come from the older multiaxial system of DSM-III and DSM-IV, which DSM-5 retired in 2013, as we mention in the episode.

A correction from us: we call The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari film noir. It is German Expressionism. We record as if we were live, and sometimes we get one wrong.

Related episodes:

- Joker - The Making of a Psychopath

- Villains Influenced by True Crimes of Ed Gein

- PSYCHOLOGY: The Alienist, Dakota Fanning, Luke Evans & Daniel Bruhl

- Michael Myers & the Halloween Franchise

Further reading: Megan Benham, "Horror Movies and the Exploitation of Mental Illness," The Boar, April 2018.

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Two licensed therapists, one forensic psychologist, one clinical LMFT, take apart the minds behind the crimes.

Until then... sleep safe. 😴

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