What is Psychological Horror?
In a typical Horror movie, the plot is usually easily discernable as well as who the antagonist is. In Psychological Horror, a subgenre of Horror, the focus shifts from a physical entity of fear to a mental one, usually involving the main character and their inner struggles. The horror in this subgenre comes from creepy details and
The subgenre focuses on creating unsettling effects on its audience through the use of psychological and mental deterioration which causes the plot to advance. Psychological horror films tend to appeal to mental/psychological disorders to create unstable characters who are often unpredictable and unreliable narrators which create suspense and uneasiness in the audience.
Content
Psychological Horror incorporates elements of mental illness, hallucinations, and largely paranoia to create suspense and uneasiness.
The main. character in a psychological horror film usually suffers from a sort of mental disorder that causes them to act the way they do, catalyzing the film's plot. Despite being taboo in the past, mental illness has become a chief focus point in many productions in the past few decades, especially in the world of psychological horror.
Along with the topic of mental illness, hallucinations tend to largely form a part of psychological horror productions. The main character usually hallucinates that certain events happened even if it was all imaginary or merely a distortion of reality. This is where the idea of an unreliable narrator stems from. Most psychological horror narrators tend to be considered unreliable due to their own misconstructions of reality. This distortion creates uneasiness in the audience as it makes it unclear what is really happening and what is being imagined.
Paranoia between the characters tends to create an aura of suspense and anticipation which psychologically messes with the audience as they await the climax of the plot. The more paranoid the characters become, the more intense and unsettling the ambiance of the film is, which executes the purpose of a psychological horror film.
Production Techniques
Techniques in Psychological Horror serve to emphasize the mental decay of the characters which contributes to the plot development. Some of these include flashbacks, jumpcuts, and close-ups.
Flashbacks are usually utilized to fill in the blanks that unreliable narrators usually leave in the plot of the film due to their distorted perception of reality. They create moments of realization which help the audience develop their own explanations.
Jumpcuts are usually utilized when a character is moving quickly or beginning to disassociate with the world around them as a symbol for going fully off the rails and becoming unhinged. When a character in a Psychological Horror film goes on a frenzy, jumpcuts are utilized to capture this energy and convey to the audience that the character has reached their breaking point.
The eyes can be very telling of what a character is feeling or experiencing, and close-ups are utilized to capture the core moments in character development in Psychological Horror films. By capturing a character's facial expressions, a connection is created between the character and the audience, which helps create suspense and uneasiness.
Marketing
Psychological Horror films are targeted towards an older audience than traditional horror due to the level of intellect needed to follow along with the themes and not the amount of gore. The typical audience is adults in their early 20s and evenly split between female and male unlike the usual male dominance in the traditional Horror film target audience.
To market to more mature audiences, Psychological Horror film producers tend to release several trailers which instead of focusing on violence and jumpscares like usual horror film trailers, choose to focus on the psychological torment characters in the film go through. These trailers tend to include cliffhangers and scenes from a character's breaking point without prior information to allure audiences to watch the full film.
Samples
Black Swan
The film Black Swan (2010) by Darren Aronofsky, is an excellent portrayal of the psychological horror subgenre. This film follows the journey of Nina Sayers, a ballerina, as she seeks to be cast as the new Swan Queen in her ballet studio's Swan Lake Production, and follows her mental decay throughout the process. Nina's mother is overbearing despite Nina being an adult woman, leading her to be in a perpetual state of childlike innocence. When she is cast as the Swan Queen, the ballet director, Thomas Leroy, informs her of his doubts about her performance due to her innocent nature; he believes she cannot capture the alluring and sensual nature of the black swan despite her perfect embodiment of the white swan. This triggers Nina into a panic to become the black swan, triggering her perfectionism and acute dedication to her art. The film dives into the themes of eating disorders, anxiety, and obsessive-compulsive disorder, all of which Nina struggles within her journey to become the black swan. Nina's anxiety about being replaced due to her lack of sensuality to represent the black swan sends her into a frenzy of perfectionism triggering her OCD, which ultimately leads her to have a psychotic break. Nina compulsively picks at her nails and the skin on her back throughout the film which alludes to the wings and webbed hands she hallucinates during her psychotic break at the end of the film. During her psychotic break in the dressing room, Nina is seen stabbing her competition for the role of Swan Queen in a fit of rage, however, this is recounted in a flashback where Nina is seen mistakenly stabbing herself due to her psychosis. Overall, the film fantastically portrays how mental illness can affect a character in a psychological horror film in a way that unsettles and shocks the audience with plot twists.
American Psycho
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