How Horror Helped Me Get Sober
Patrick Brennan
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In the introduction to his book The Great Movies, Roger Ebert talks about the tremendous potential film has for cultivating empathy in its audience. Movies allow us to experience the lives of strangers in ways that other art forms can’t, creating a bridge between our world and theirs so that we have the opportunity to put ourselves into their shoes.
But sometimes, rather than being a window into unknown ways of life, the characters we see up on that screen can act as a mirror. They reflect back to us aspects of ourselves that we might not have known existed or might have been too scared to acknowledge were there all along.
I’m an alcoholic.
Deep down I think I’ve always known it was the case, but for many years I did my absolute best to avoid that reality. I became incredibly skilled at ignoring the warning signs, and when I couldn’t do that anymore, I could downplay the severity of my problem with the flair of a particularly manipulative politician. However, despite my mastery of self-denial, the reminders of what I was struggling with continued to slip in and build upon each other. They seemed to take the Trojan horse route, hidden within one of my favorite forms of escapism: horror films.
(Spoilers for Videodrome, Hellraiser, and Lovely Molly ahead!)
Ominously, the first time I started seeing glimpses of my addiction in the genre I love was during a viewing of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. I remember getting this uncomfortable feeling deep down in the pit of my stomach. It wasn’t the fun kind that usually accompanies the famous “Jesus wept!” gag (still one of my top five kill-scenes of all time) where Frank Cotton is torn apart by Pinhead’s hooks. No, this came while thinking about the character of Frank himself and what would drive him to seek out and use the Lament Configuration puzzle box.
Hellraiser is one of the finest illustrations seen in cinema of the dark side of obsession, and it achieves this through the view it gives of Frank’s downward spiral. We learn that he has an insatiable need for stimulation, in any and all of its forms. He seeks to transcend boundaries, to breach the limitations of existence by any means necessary, and little by little that obsession with experience leads him to his eventual ruin at the hands (and hooks) of the Cenobites.
But what was his motivation? Why would anyone seek such drastic methods just to feel something? The answer came to me as I fixed my fourth bourbon of the screening: because the usual methods weren’t enough for him anymore. The release no longer came unless the stimulus was stronger than it was before. Pouring the amber liquid into my glass, the irony of that moment didn’t dawn on me until later.
Years before, I had been a lightweight. A single beer could get me buzzed, and a generous double of bourbon at that time would have knocked me on my arse. But eventually one was no longer enough. Then neither was two, then three. Watching Frank’s demise on screen, I saw that the escalating nature of our vices were starting to become uncomfortably similar. It made me wonder: if alcohol was my Lament Configuration, then how long would it be before I came face-to-face with whatever hell I was creating for myself?
David Cronenberg’s Videodrome was the next film to feel as if it was reflecting back at me some uncomfortable truths. Its protagonist Max is similar to Hellraiser’s Frank in that he too is caught up in the need for experience pushed to its boundaries, but that’s not what grabbed my attention. Rather, it was the way in which his obsession causes him to drive everyone in his life away.
As Max begins to spiral, we see more and more of him sitting home alone watching Videodrome while riding out the hallucinations that follow. What starts off as a sensual exploration enjoyed with his lover Nicki soon leads to Max sitting by himself, night after night, becoming more and more detached from reality as he gives himself over to The New Flesh.
This felt all too familiar. At the time, I was becoming a shut-in, deciding each night that it was more pleasurable to drink alone at home rather than go out and enjoy people’s company. That’s one of the ways in which my addiction was exacting its control over me. As my alcohol dependence increased, so too did my fear and shame of what I was becoming. I felt powerless to turn things around, and even though I knew that isolation was only reinforcing that sense of helplessness, I just couldn’t bring myself to seriously address the problem.
Hellraiser and Videodrome both made me slowly acknowledge aspects of my addiction, but the film that felt like an air-horn-in-the-face of a wakeup call was Eduardo Sánchez’s Lovely Molly. The first time I watched it, my wife was away for the weekend and I was alone in our tiny apartment in Toronto. It was late in the afternoon and I had decided to spend the weekend getting drunk and going through my ever-growing watch list on Shudder. At the top of that list was Molly, so I grabbed a beer, sat back, and hit play. I don’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable watching a movie in my life.
Dread Central’s Josh Millican, in an editorial he wrote about addiction in horror, talks of how substance abuse is usually a response to another underlying problem, a “curtain that hides the real source of a person’s struggle.” [Link to full article below] Lovely Molly’s title character is a recovering addict who is haunted by memories of traumas from her childhood. When she moves into the secluded home she grew up in, the inner demons Molly thought she had escaped begin to resurface as long-forgotten family secrets are remembered.
Related Article: Fede Alvarez’s EVIL DEAD and the Horrors of Addiction
Before watching Lovely Molly, I had made a couple of fruitless, half-hearted attempts at quitting drinking. I had always chalked up those failures to not being strong enough to beat the addiction, but that viewing helped me make a connection that was crucial to my eventual recovery: I wasn’t drinking to feel, I was drinking to forget. My childhood had been a tough one, laced with hardships and uncommonly difficult circumstances. Rather than deal with the aftermath of the past and how it was affecting my mental health in the present, I chose to unplug my mind.
Related Article: Exclusive: Eduardo Sanchez Talks Importance of Horses in LOVELY MOLLY
One of the infuriating things about addiction, especially for those having to watch from the outside, is that all the wakeup calls in the world amount to nothing unless the addict is ready to make a change and confront their problems. Despite the conclusions I was coming to thanks to these films, I just wasn’t ready to put in the work.
But a funny thing happened. They rattled around in my mind, springing back to my attention on a near-daily basis until, two years later, I finally decided to see a mental health professional. Eventually, I felt ready to put the bottle down for good, and I’m proud to say that last week marked my first year of sobriety. It’s been 12 months of hard work, self-reflection, and (most importantly) a reconnection with the world that I hadn’t realized I had lost. And I owe a large part of it to the times when the genre I love seemed to reach out and give me a healthy slap in the face.
I can say without a shred of hyperbole that I wouldn’t be the person I am today if it wasn’t for horror.
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