Catharthic Horror

How a bout of depression led me to be a horror fan. To preface, this is an incredibly personal piece. You are more than welcome to read this, however, I would like to request my family and those we knew me between ages of 11 and 17 (roughly 2013 to 2019) to not read this. Please honour this request. Thank you. Trigger warning. Originally published June 2024

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As the woman hung upside down, clown revving the chainsaw, preparing to saw her in half while she was still alive, I felt that I couldn't help but laugh at the sheer absurdity of whoever decided to write this into the movie. As the chainsaw mutilated her genitalia, cut up her insides and blood splattered everywhere, my laughing became audible and loud. My smile faded when I turned and made eye contact with my friends, who either looked at me or the screen in horror. The only thing that crossed my mind was the question 'How did I end up like this?'

Depression does strange things to a man. Especially when the man in question is a twelve-year-old boy. It makes man feel empty, a shell of itself. A zombie roaming the earth without any idea of what its doing there. Being non-existent. Feelings have long gone and in their place is nothing but numbness consuming the entire body. Numbness feels like nothing. Emptiness. Those inflicted with this anguish resort to cutting themselves up to feel something. But once you've cut yourself open you'll find that there's nothing there. No flesh, no organs, no blood, and no soul.

When I dragged sharp nails across my wrist I shuddered at the sensation. How enticing. Only the overwhelming fear of something going deeply wrong stopped me. Still, the thought of cutting flesh didn't leave me. It never did.

Often I dreamt of sharp blades, axes and meat cleavers. They meticulously hacked away at different parts of my body. Chopping off my fingers and my toes one by one. Stabbing the floor next to me when I was laying down, dragging itself with such force that my waist separated from my torso. My intestines spilled out, and I'd hold them like squirming worms, trying desperately to stuff them back inside, my hands shedding my own blood. And then people would see. People would notice. People would feel bad for me. An interior anguish so unnoticeable I felt the need to show its signs on my body. The tip of a pen that drew on my body was the closest I came to the sensation of a razor blade following the same trail on my skin. Burning chains came down upon me, melting through my throat like acid. I wondered how long it would take for someone to find my decomposing body. A garden fork could split my head open and let all my brain mass spill out. Mass that was good for nothing anyway. Mass that only made me feel worse.

My heart skipped a beat at the knife sections in grocery stores. I'd stare at them, imagining all the things I could do to myself there and then. Stab my heart. Stop it from beating. Perforate my stomach. I hated my body enough to think of that. The horrifying thought of self-inflicted genital mutilation even came up once or twice, as loving myself I deemed impossible at the time.

I wanted that pain inside of me to manifest on my body, in physical form. People would pity me and finally see that I needed help. That I needed to be saved. But I was a coward. I never wanted to hurt myself too badly, in fear of becoming permanently scarred or possibly disabled.

Years later, my mother told me she would inspect the kitchen drawers every night.

"I'd check before bed if all the knives were still there and all accounted for."

From the corner of my eye I could tell she had started to tear up. I couldn't look at her. Out of embarrassment. Out of guilt. I was at fault for making my own mother cry. Shame on me.

The closest I ever came to realising those thoughts was the time my ribs poked out of my chest, out of my flesh, as if I had been stabbed in reverse order My own body was betraying me.

In the search of being human again, I sought extremeness and adrenaline had pushed me to throw myself in front of a car. All the other things that had temporarily numbed my numbness had ceased to work.

I found this massive bridge, close to where I lived, and exhausted myself biking to the top. I felt a sharp and grating pain in my lungs, trying to cough out the pain. Then, soaring downhill gave me a thrill. I felt it in my heart, beating like crazy, refusing to die. And in the wind that blew past my face and through my hair.

There it was. That sign I'd been looking for. That I was here, alive. Present and accounted for. It was exhilarating. It was freedom. It became a habit. Every time I felt unwell or out of it, I cycled up and down that bridge. Taking a break or enjoying the view was never an option. The call of the void was too loud for my ears to bear and I always had to run away from it. I don't want to jump from the bridge. What if halfway down I regret it?

The paradox of not wanting to exist, yet actively avoiding death, was evidence to me that I must have still wished for hope, rather than disappearance. It's the unconscious that wants to die. But the unconscious doesn't know what death is, so it wants to have no control. That's the closest thing to death it can think of.

Over time the adrenaline wore off. I grew used to the excitement, and it became boring. I wondered more and more often what would happen if I... just stopped clenching my breaks when I went downhill. I would tempt that fate one day, and secretly hoped it would kill me. I'd been having thoughts of a detached gun shooting my head at different angles, over and over again. Quick and easy. I had no idea where to get a gun. No sane person would sell a pistol to a child.

Instead I laid in a puddle of blood, grazes covering my body and ribs poking out of my skin. I couldn't move. Every inch that dared to resulted in excruciating pain.

"He'd been smiling. Why had he been smiling?" The driver who'd hit me accounted to both the police, the EMTs and my family.

I was smiling. I finally felt something.

In the hospital that numbness I longed to destroy became worse. Administered morphine and boredom didn't help. I was forced to lay in bed all day, unable to move and nothing to entertain me. Friends to visit me didn't exist, and books I refused to read. Couldn't stand them at the time. Instead, my hospital days filled themselves with videos I watched on YouTube.

The autoplay feature on YouTube is wonderful: You select one video to watch, and next thing you know you find yourself looking at something far from your usual watching experience.

Mine somehow always landed on videos discussing infamous true crime cases. I watched with intrigue from the moment I woke up. Fascinating, really, how a person could come to do such cruel things.

"Why do criminals do the things they do? What compels them to do that?" I asked my mother one day. She was the psychologist closest to me and quickly picked up, along with the YouTube algorithm, on my new-found interest. I did often talk about this curiosity with my mother when she visited me.

"There's a Bachelor for Criminology available in Rotterdam. The moment I'm out of this place we should go to an open day." I informed her.

"You've barely started high school, and you already want to look at university courses?" Was her response. Secretly, I think my mother was excited. I had never been particularly interested in continuing school after high school, nor did I think I was ever going to finish high school, let alone make it past 16, because of...well..The suicidal ideation that lingered within me.

The course turned out to be 'not for me', as I called it, but the interest remained. It became a hyper-fixation. It's a common symptom for those who are autistic, including myself. Maybe you've heard of it. Maybe you haven't. But it's this thing where autistic people show their interest in something very compulsively. When something peaks our interests, we can find themselves unable to let go. It's magnetic. We are sometimes even incapable of thinking of something, anything else, and there's this deep obsessive desire to consume all knowledge available to us. I've had many sleepless nights browsing wiki pages and encyclopaedias myself. To stop such an overwhelming focus is hard, and it can become detrimental to other aspects of life. I came to be so interested, so fixated on criminology, that I found myself falling down a rabbit hole. I was unable, maybe even unwanting, to pull myself out.

More video recommendations came from YouTube, and I watched them all. The more I watched, the worse they became. From small-time criminals who may have shot one or two people, to some of the most heinous crimes against humanity you've ever heard of. And many, many cases in between the two extremes. The list is endless.

My daily viewings started to consist of tales of gruesome tortures, horrifying crimes, and I could not look away for a single second. I loved the intrigue and fascination I experienced, it distracted me from the horror of my own body and my own mind, killing the numbness that lured inside.

A cold shower, is how I'd compare the sensation. The first touch makes you shudder, and the cold surges through you. It makes you gasp, take a deep breath and it jolts you awake. You retract your hand but the cold water keeps enticing you, calling to you. You let the cold water touch your hand once more, and it still makes you shiver, but then you let it cover your whole arm and eventually your whole body and you feel awake. Refreshed. Awoken from a deep slumber.

And that sensation is what I felt in this horror. It pulled me out of a state of dullness. Cruelty that made me gasp, jolt. I felt in my chest, and it surged through my whole body. The cruelty of humanity had made me feel alive again when everything, including myself, had become lacklustre and boring. I remember at one point I told my mom I didn't like movies with happy endings anymore. They were predictable and that took away the excitement. In a grey world, terror turned to wonder and man-made horrors had become a light.

Guilt didn't take long to overcome me. Why? Why did I enjoy watching videos like this? Morbid curiosity and an interest in psychology, while natural, were no excuse for murderers and criminals to be glorified. I had become so engulfed in crime related content that I struggled to distinguish between that which sought to educate and inform and that which sensationalised the violence and exploited the suffering of the victims and their families.

Just why was the focus always on the criminals, and never the victims? Man-made monsters like these didn't deserve an inch of fame, let alone a constant glorification of their actions.

I felt awful. I owe every person who has suffered at the hands of these criminals a personal apology. I had contributed to the mass desensitisation of these atrocities, an act which I grew to hate. How unhealthy had this interest become.

"I thought you would grow up to become a serial killer." My mother joked, but it still rang through my head from time to time.

"The way you so intensely studied these heinous men at such a young age..."

But I couldn't just...shake it off. Such a frantic fixation is hard to get rid of.

'Surely..' I thought, 'There must be a healthier way to satiate this curiosity. And to silence this numbness?'

Mustering up the courage to turn to fiction in the form of horror seemed the most logical thing to do. It was strange how a cruel reality was easier to digest than fiction. The difference lies in what was shown and my detachment. Real cases only cover what has already happened, with occasional pictures or videos being shown to you. But they can never be too nasty, as one still needs to find a way to monetize this content. And I felt so far removed from both these crimes, and their victims. A case that happened in the United States? I live so far away from there. And it occurred in the seventies? That's when my mother was born, and it would take three more decades for me to spring into existence. Four more decades for me to end it. It felt like a story.

But fiction! Fiction never shied away from showing you all the gory details. It attached you to the main characters who have no choice but to endure this terror, and end up dying in the second or third act. Fiction forces you to confront the nastiest side of what it means to be human. Gory in its full glory.

I began to notice a strange form of catharsis, watching these films. Especially around the times somebody got hurt. Whether they got stabbed, or hit in the head by an axe. I recognised those actions as my own thoughts. Maybe even torn apart, limb by limb or getting skinned alive. All those awful thoughts, now depicted and represented on the screen. A knife puncturing someone's stomach, pushing with more and more force until it draws blood. Finally I could see what it was like. Understand what it felt like. Scalpels slicing away at the skin, blood oozing out while the victim cannot do anything but feel their sense of humanity ripped away. The need to harm myself faded. A bullet penetrating itself through each layer of the head. First tickling the skin, wedging itself through layers of temporals and then breaking apart the skull before perforating the brain, putting an end to its pulsating rhythm.

I felt it, I felt it all, and it felt real. It made me gasp and shudder. It was...It was a relief. How I saw myself reflected. How my thoughts of harming myself were transformed onto the scream and how it gave me the massive, although brutal, rush. I'd been looking for that feeling. Being Alive. This feeling of a drive I've never sensed before. I experienced a form of second-hand self harm, and I could finally breathe again after having been stuck for so, so long. Horror movies transported me to a world where I could live out my intrusive thoughts without feeling forced to act upon them, without feeling the need to suppress them. I could let them flow without facing any of the repercussions.

All that tension that had amassed inside of my head, that had manifested itself in my body, rooted itself there like some sort of parasite... Finally it began to release its grip on me, bringing me a sense of inner peace and satisfaction. My body exerted the pain that was pent up inside, a pain that had made itself unbearable, pain that had clung to me and refused to leave. Pain that finally stopped being so fucking stubborn! Pressure and discomfort were gone. I felt lighter. I felt rested. I no longer needed to wonder what shooting myself would feel like, thanks to the visceral nature of those films.

Jumpscares feature quite prominently in horror films, and I've got some mixed feelings about them. They're cheap. That's it. Horror and terror should be built up, and make the audience feel unsettled and unnerved. Psychological horror does that really well. It gets inside your head and messes with you. Exactly what I need when my own mind is playing with me. It drove me insane and I'd do anything to silence those intrusive thoughts. They're not fun. They're not mine. And love tormenting me. But when my mind is focussed on something else...something worse. Those thoughts just stop. I'm tricking myself; relying on those unseen and internal threats that a psychological horror realises.

I have this one game I like that does this really well. 'Amnesia' is a survival horror game in which players have to navigate an abandoned castle at night. There are many mechanics in the game. but I'd like to mention the sanity meter. It's crucial to prevent it from draining and driving you insane, which can be quite stressful when you're already fighting for your life. The gimmick? It's a placebo effect. It does nothing. As if the players are inflicting psychological torment upon themselves.

It may not sound fun, but a sense of impending dread on the screen keeps my mind distracted. No more room for negative thoughts when I trick my brain into relieving tension; the same way you can clench your muscles to relieve anxiety. My caveman brain thinks I survived a fight, but in reality? I barely did anything.

Speaking of fight or flight; Back to jumpscares, while I find them predictable in many cases, they're weirdly helpful in battling the two monsters called numbness and depression. Those two monsters that made me feel like a vegetable, in a constant state of wakeful slumber. A good scare, even when it is cheap, activates that fight or flight response. Kickstarting an energetic surge within my heart. Never have I felt so alive! The surge travels through my body, as if a defibrillator has been used on me. I have no choice but to get up and... do! Do something! With my heart pumping so loudly in my chest I have to get up and do something. I feel. I feel it. I feel alive! I am alive! I'm not a zombie! I'm not a shell of my former self! I am a human fucking being! Whose brain just triggered a fresh dose of adrenaline. Whose heart is pounding and pushing blood towards its limbs. They can finally move! My body is active, my brain is working! I get the urge to get out of bed and to be. To do. To live.

This forced flight or fight mode was my brain's last attempt to keep me going. I have no more time to be depressed. I need to survive this new state of being alive.

The death drive is the reason I stayed in bed all day. Because in doing that I would give up control of my life. This relinquishing of control offered me a semblance of relief from the burden that was existence, providing a temporary escape from the complexities of life.

Over time, the films I watched became more intense. I delved deeper into the many subgenres of horror to find what they all meant to me. I grew used to them. At times I worried the kick of it would fade, just as the bridge had, but it never did. There's thousands of horror films out there, and by God do I hope that I never run out. For my own sake.

Body horror was the type of horror film that fascinated me the most, and what relieved me more than anything else. I knew body horror very well. I have a body, and its existence is horrifying, the way I wanted to exist outside of it, disregard it as a mere vessel. Grotesques displays of the human body averted me in the same way one looks at a car crash. It's awful. Your eyes keep getting drawing to the image though, knowing damn well it will stay with you for a long time, maybe even forever. How easily the human body could mutated and deformed was downright disgusting. Even if it showed something I had wanted to do myself, I felt a repugnance deep within myself. Making me heave and tear up. We're all so vulnerable. I wished I had known this before I threw myself in front of a car. I was lucky that I didn't wake up looking like that flattened man from 'Beetlejuice'. The grosser the body horror, the gladder I became that the only remains I had from the accident were scars gracing my torso, reminding me of what I 'd done, and how much worse it could've been. I was forced to look inwards and appreciate my own body, my own existence, and how thirteen-year-old me failed to ruin it.

The unrealness of surreal horror was wonderful to me. The world I experienced was a distorted reality. Depression never made me think or act right; no sane person would throw themselves in front of a car. And that strange reality was depicted in those surreal horror films. I felt recognised and understood. Surreality echoed my contorted view of the world. Transforming reality, defying laws and expectations. Sometimes I look back on the things I did in my misplaced mental state, it makes me wonder if I really was myself. Delving into the realms of my subconscious mind felt like a surreal horror film of my own making.

I came to appreciate the depth and artistic expressions of horror. Another layer of intrigue. Unconventional storytelling, experimenting with new techniques. It inspired me. I wanted to make art like that. Those stunning and insightful films, where you're forced to look deeper, forced to look past the film and see and understand what you just watched. I loved the thought-provoking nature of those films. They were brilliant. I would kill to make art like that. I would kill to be able to pull that off.

A whole new world had opened up to me. Horror films became my go to method for releasing negativity. Horror movies are so much more than dumb teens getting murdered. There is potential horror in everything, speaking hidden fears into existence, and serving as a reflection to what society fears at any given point.

Nowadays, I consider myself to be a massive horror movie connoisseur. I would say it's even one of my hyper-fixations. They fascinate me, and I want to learn everything there is to know about them. There's so much, maybe even too much, one can talk about when it comes to horror films. Trends in horror reflecting the fears of society, satire horror being used as political or social commentary, film-makers and writers allowing themselves to delve into the deepest darkest pits of their mind and making art out of it. Unlimited imaginations. Escapism from the sombre world or your sombre mind.

Horror is great! For creativity. For telling stories beyond the human imagination. For making others understand you, what you fear, what you feel.

When I was younger I wrote a short horror story about my autism. I felt very misunderstood, as those around me had very little knowledge about Autism Spectrum Disorder. But I wanted them to understand, and thus far explaining my experiences in a literal sense hadn't helped. So I put them into a story. I wrote about social difficulties and overstimulation. About loneliness and isolation. The story was terrifying, but it finally made people understand me, and what experiencing the world was like for me and many, many others. Where previous explanations failed me, a story managed to fulfil its purpose.

Horror has been a great tool for me. It's helped me. With my depression. With my autism. With my loneliness. And with finding a purpose for myself. I study writing and film now, and I can't wait for one of my horror shorts to hit the big screen.