How 'cinematic neurosis' explains a lifelong fear of horror films

I was six when I watched a man turn into a werewolf in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. I screamed so inconsolably that my parents had to carry me upstairs, and that night marked the start of a fear that has lasted into adulthood: horror films, the supernatural, darkness and being alone in a house.

Now a psychiatrist, I still wonder why the genre is booming — it took roughly 70% more at the North American box office in 2023 than a decade earlier — while the experience remains traumatic for some of us. There is a clinical term that helps explain this: cinematic neurosis.

It describes a reaction to a film so intense and enduring that it meets the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder — persistent arousal, anxiety and intrusive images. One extreme case involved a woman who watched The Exorcist as a teenager and, at 22, arrived at an ER convinced she was possessed and drowning in flashbacks.

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