[Pride 2022] Let it Play: How Horror Helped me Face my Intrusive Thoughts

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CW: suicide, intrusive thoughts

Much like my battle with my identity as a queer person, I’ve spent so much time trying to understand myself as a mentally ill person. I’ve tried on identities like hats—highly sensitive person, neurodivergent, empath—and been handed diagnoses like tarot cards—OCD, OCPD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder—and I’ve left some behind and have grown into others. It was a perfect storm that made me the way I am. I was born with a high baseline of anxiety, I have two anxious parents, and then there’s a little bit of trauma thrown in there. The only way through has been acceptance and therapy, at least as an adult, but in the middle of it all, I turned to something I never thought I would: horror.

As a small child, long before people online had bastardized the term “intrusive thought” and well before I ever heard it, I diagnosed myself with “scary brain,” and I knew the only way not to “upset my brain” was to avoid slow songs and scary movies. Slow songs (no matter what they were about) conjured up images in my head on a loop of my Granny, who was still alive at the time, in a coffin. At least that was predictable though. Scary movies, on the other hand, could do all sorts of things to me.

For example, the first horror movie I ever watched was Pet Sematary, and I was too young to make sense of it, so my mind filled in the gaps. I saw the bathtub scene with the cat, and somehow, I decided it was a warning about shampoo. If I got shampoo in my eyes, I would turn into an evil zombie, and every night at bath time I got shampoo in my eyes even when I did not, in fact, get shampoo in my eyes. This led to the first ritual that I remember creating: Mom had to put a dry washcloth over my eyes. It couldn’t be the washcloth that was used to bathe me. Dad had to come talk to me while my hair was washed. After my hair was rinsed, I had to alert my mom that shampoo was in my eyes. Mom had to hand me my towel. I had to remove the washcloth from my face and hold my towel to my eyes and count to ten. If we didn’t follow these steps, I would become convinced that my eyes were burning red and that I was losing control of my body. This happened every night till I was old enough to bathe myself, but even then, the ritual persisted but only as the last step.

That wasn’t a standalone event though. Sneaking downstairs and seeing the infamous opening scene of Ghost Ship turned into checking the walls for sharp wires every time someone was upset with me. Sister caught me listening in on her phone calls? Better touch the wall for 30 minutes to be safe. I didn’t even need to see a movie for this to happen. One time someone told me the bare bones premise of Candyman, and my brain decided that if I ever sneezed while looking in the mirror, I would insult Candyman, and he would use his hook to pull out my brain through my nostrils. This is only the tip of the iceberg of my horror-related intrusive thoughts and obsessive-compulsive tendencies before I turned ten. That’s when an ordinary day made my case of “scary brain” more severe.

I was getting ready for morning choir practice. I was never the kid who had to be told to brush their teeth. I was obsessed with being perfect, so that meant having good hygiene too, but for some reason that day I didn’t want to brush my teeth. I think I was feeling rebellious for the first time in my life and just wanted to know if I could get away with it. I heard my sister leave, and then I heard my mom knock on my brother’s door and ask him if he was going to school. His CD player was on repeat blaring the same song over and over again, but I distinctly heard him say yes.

It's cliché, but what happened next is a blur. I know that my brother missed the bus and didn’t come out of his room till the paramedics were carrying him out. He had overdosed with the intent of taking his own life. I remember riding in the car behind the ambulance. I remember stopping when they stopped multiple times because he was having seizures. I remember sitting through choir practice thinking “I have to brush my teeth.”

He survived, but from that point on (at least for a year or two), I had to brush my teeth five times a day in order to keep my family safe, and my intrusive thoughts became downright gruesome. Sometimes when I closed my eyes all I could see was my brother, pale and foaming at the mouth, his eyes completely vacant and staring while he carried on a perfectly normal conversation. I would knock on his door to tell him it was time for dinner, and my brain would flood with images of him seizing and vomiting while eating pizza. I didn’t tell anyone. My family still doesn’t know. I just suffered in silence and fought my own brain. Many nights were spent sobbing to the point of hyperventilation, and many days were spent asking myself “what is wrong with you, you freak?”

In the midst of all of this, we moved to the other side of town, and I had to start catching the bus at my paternal grandmother’s house. I was used to spending time with my Granny after school, and we had always been best friends, but this grandmother, my Mamaw, was more of a stranger to me. Plus, she smoked and loved watching horror movies. It was my worst nightmare, and I couldn’t escape because she was scared of the movies she watched and decided she needed protection in the form of her 11-year-old granddaughter.

Every day my brain was in overdrive, finding new ways to picture everyone in my family dead and new things I needed to do to prevent it. Then one day, I came home when she was watching the last hour or so of The Stand. “Finally,” I thought, “a movie that’s not scary!” I was wrong. By my standards then, it was definitely scary, but I had seen it before. I remembered watching it as a small child, and all I remembered was it turned “M-O-O-N, that spells ____” (fill in the blank with literally any word) into a catchphrase in my house, one that we still used to that day. I guess my parents had the miniseries on in the background while I was preoccupied with Barbies or something. That made all the difference. That day in 2003 I sat down with no anxiety and watched some pretty rough stuff (the demon rape scene, anyone?) and nothing happened. I got scared, but my “scary brain” was quiet.

It was a turning point.

I started lying to myself. Before every scary movie, I told myself that I had seen it before and that it wasn’t scary. I remembered how I was watching The Stand, right down to the way I was sitting (laid back with my arms crossed, drinking a Dr. Pepper, shoes and socks discarded, the epitome of chill) and I recreated that every time my mamaw made me watch something with her. It was another ritual, but it was a self-soothing one. As time passed, I took things a step further. I decided I needed to scare my “scary brain.” After each intrusive thought, I would literally whisper to myself “Oh, yeah? Look at this!” Then I would try to one up my own brain with Pazuzu snarling at me or Griffin Dunne’s mangled neck flap fluttering as he ate a piece of toast. Eventually, the thoughts lost their power over me, and every time a new thought popped up, I would repeat my methods. Let it play. Chase it away.

No one had told me that I needed to let my intrusive thoughts play out, that I needed to accept them. No one had even told me I was having intrusive thoughts. No one knew. It was all just luck. It didn’t cure me, and there was much more trauma to come and new demons to face, but now I had a weapon on my belt, a way to feel strong and brave. It had very little to do with the movies or scenes themselves. Like my mental illness, it was a perfect storm of events. Regardless, it made me love scary movies. Horror teaches us to confront what scares us and accept that the world can be grotesque and disturbing, and that’s okay. Just take a deep breath and press play.

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