Skip to main content

Death Anxiety and Horror Movies: An Existential Perspective

Why Do We Watch Horror Movies?

It’s a question that baffles and intrigues in equal measure. Horror films with their blood-soaked scenes, jump scares, and monstrous figures should logically repel us. And yet, they draw us in. Beneath the gore and the ghosts lies something deeper, something existential.

At the core of many horror films is death anxiety: our awareness of mortality and the psychological defences we construct to manage it. Existential thinkers like Ernest Becker, Irvin Yalom, and Viktor Frankl have written extensively about this tension. As conscious beings, we know we’re going to die. This knowledge can provoke dread and avoidance or inspire deep reflection on how we live.

Reflections in the Dark

From an existential perspective, horror doesn’t just entertain us; it holds up a mirror to our fears. The vampire’s eternal life, the ghost’s unfinished business, the masked killer’s inhumanity: these tropes externalise our inner conflicts. The monster often represents what we deny in our vulnerability, aggression, and finitude.

Take Hereditary or The Babadook. These films aren’t just scary because of supernatural threats; they unsettle us by evoking feelings of grief, loss, and a sense of powerlessness. Death isn’t just lurking around the corner; it’s already inside the house.

Facing the Abyss (from the Couch)

Existential psychotherapy invites us to examine the very things we fear: freedom, isolation, meaninglessness, and death, not to be paralysed by them, but to find clarity and authenticity. Horror movies simulate this process. They provide a safe container to feel terror, project our anxieties outward, and perhaps emerge from the cinema’s darkness into the daylight with a heightened sense of what it means to be alive.

When the credits roll, we might laugh, exhale, or feel a strange sense of calm. That’s because we’ve encountered death symbolically and survived. Horror reassures us of our resilience. In this way, it becomes a rehearsal for mortality, a way to process dread and return to life with sharper awareness.

What Lurks Beneath

Through an existential lens, horror ceases to be “lowbrow” and reveals itself as a profound philosophical genre. It confronts us with what we spend most of our lives avoiding, stimulating both intellect and insight.

Instead of asking, “Why would anyone want to be scared?”, we might ask, “What do I need to face in myself that this story is helping me see?”

In the end, horror reminds us of something essential: life is precious because it ends. And when we face the darkness, whether in film or in therapy, we open ourselves to the possibility of living more freely, consciously, and courageously.

Sean Phelan is a psychotherapist with a special interest in existential therapy. He helps clients explore the more profound questions of life, freedom, meaning, mortality, and choice both in and beyond the therapy room.

Facing the Abyss from the Couch


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Orestes, Anxiety, and the Irish Housing Crisis: What Rollo May Can Teach Us About a Generation in Limbo

Why are so many young people in Ireland feeling stuck, anxious, and lost in their own country? It’s tempting to label it a mental health crisis, and it is, but there’s something deeper going on. The Irish housing crisis isn’t just about affordability or availability. It's an existential crisis .
Post a Comment
Read more

The Mirror and the Self: Who Are We Becoming?

We live in an age of mirrors. Front-facing cameras, selfies, Zoom calls, Teams meetings, Instagram filters, and our daily lives are saturated with reflections. We no longer encounter mirrors as occasional tools; they are now constant companions, built into our phones, our habits, our culture. We are reflected to ourselves so often that our image has become a performance. To "be seen" has become the closest thing to existing. Visibility is mistaken for vitality. However, this relentless exposure comes at a cost. The more we are seen, the more estranged we become from what we see. We find ourselves alienated not only from others but also from our bodies, faces, and presence. We are not just looking in the mirror; we are becoming the mirror. The Architecture of Shame The modern beauty industry, in its hyper-capitalised form, has built an architecture of shame disguised as empowerment. Marketing slogans tell us we can become anything, so long as it is beautiful, youthful, and pol...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Big Beautiful Heist

  "We must learn to see policy not only as economy, but as ontology, shaping not just who gets what, but who gets to be."   Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has arrived, decked out in populist rhetoric and promising tax cuts for hardworking families. Its aesthetic is familiar, chummy, exaggerated, and brashly optimistic. Yet beneath the gloss lies a disturbing truth: this is not simply a piece of fiscal legislation but a continuation of a decades-long project that extracts wealth from the public and people with low incomes and transfers it upward into the hands of a shrinking elite. If the post-2008 era has taught us anything, political economy has become less about "solving problems" and more about  reconfiguring human life to suit the logic of capital . From an existential materialist perspective, we view this bill not merely as an economic intervention but as an ontological act that shapes reality. It defines who matters, what deserves protection, and how huma...
Post a Comment
Read more