Finding safety in the dark
Why do some of us enjoy difficult or dark stories during anxious times?
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit just over five years ago - during those weeks of wilderness between when rumors of a strange, fast-spreading virus had started to spread, and when the UAE imposed a night curfew and lockdown for its sterilization campaign - one of the first things I did was watch Contagion, and then Outbreak (the 1995 film about a fictional ebolavirus, starring Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo, not the 2024 one starring Raoul Max Trujillo - which is, unsurprisingly, also about a virus). Both movies are rather bleak - yet at the time, they felt strangely comforting.
At the time, I was already in a mentally dark place. One of my best friends had just passed away in a tragic accident (unrelated to the pandemic) two weeks earlier, and I was in the throes of immense grief. I was hurting, badly, in ways I struggled to explain - and while my inner world was already crumbling, it seemed that my outer world (and that of everyone else across the globe) was too.
It wasn’t that I wanted to watch the world burn - not at all. These films didn’t give me a sense of control, or reinforce my trust that everything would work out, either. If anything, they were pretty depressing. So why on our apparently soon-to-be fucked Earth was I seeking solace through escapist stories that didn’t take me away from my angst and fear, but pushed me deeper into them?
Turns out I wasn’t the only one: On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic - and by March 13, Outbreak had become the fourth most-streamed film on Netflix in the US. That same month, Contagion (first released in 2011) became Warner Bros.’ second most-watched movie for 2020 and made it into iTunes US’s top 10 movie rentals, as Google searches for the title spiked worldwide.
I didn’t fully understand the phenomenon, but it’s something I’ve felt echoed multiple times both before and since then.
In a world currently experiencing extremely reactive and contentious gender politics and related cultural shifts - and after having just watched Adolescence, the Netflix British drama mini-series making global headlines for its hard-hitting exploration of masculinity, gender-based violence, and the dangers lurking in the darkest corners of the internet - my recent re-read of Christina Dalcher’s dystopic speculative novel VOX felt more eerie than before. As I approach a dreaded “middle age” era, The Substance’s use of body horror to critique how society views women’s bodies and beauty has felt strangely liberating for many of my peers. And at a time when mental health crises and the effects of trauma appear to be more keenly-felt and discussed than ever, Baby Reindeer was described as a slow-motion car crash from which we couldn’t look away.
Yellowjackets’s first season had landed on the brink of a new wave of stories leaning into female rage - and I, too, was gripped. Severance fed into my growing feelings of dissatisfaction with and disconnection from corporate culture, and how in many of these environments (positive or toxic), it can feel like a parallel for cult mentality. As the gap between the rich and the poor widens, heightening global income inequality and sparking conversations on the disappearance of the middle class, shows like The White Lotus and Succession satiate the snarky side of our curiosity and voyeurism, and remind us that while many enjoy stories of rich people behaving badly, we’re also part of what enables that behavior.
Black Mirror, one of the most sensational shows of the past decade and a half, reminds us that it isn’t technology per se that makes us evil - it’s how we choose to use it that can be so twisted, especially when we don’t take into account the darker side of human nature, and how easily corruptible it can be.
The first time I watched Midsommar, I was a little nervous. I’d seen the trailer, and knew the folk horror would make for a scary watch - so I planned to do so during the daytime, on a day where I felt emotionally strong and quite cheerful and jokey. This way, I assured myself, I could laugh off the most disturbing parts, rather than let them haunt me. I’d seen Ari Aster’s 2018 film Hereditary under very different circumstances. The late friend I mentioned above had come round to my apartment on Valentine’s Day, telling me (with a mischevious twinkle in his eye) that it was a historical fiction film. I had nightmares about certain scenes in that movie for weeks, and I expected nothing less from Midsommar. Yet while it was just as gruesome (if not more so), full of hauntingly horrific visuals, at the time, I found it oddly comforting. Was I crazy?
While some people think the movie’s ending is happy, I do not. 🚨 Mild Midsommar spoiler alert ahead! 🚨 To some people, at the end of the film, the protagonist, Dani, winds up free of her bad boyfriend and not only as part of a community that sees her and accepts her as she is, but even celebrated as their May Queen. Some people insist that this was the feeling the director was aiming for. It offers the satisfaction of karmic retribution in what is essentially a revenge fantasy. Aster had even described it as a fairy-tale rather than a horror film, referring to it as a break-up movie.
To me, the ending is pretty grim. Sure, Dani has broken free of her shitty boyfriend - who was a jackass, but let’s be real, the punishment did not fit the crime! But Dani is not actually free. In my eyes, all that happened was her swapping one controlling force for another, with her now being brainwashed (not to mention heavily drugged), and swallowed up by a cult. To me, a genuinely happy ending would have been if Dani managed to break free, not only of the cult but of her entrapped grief, in a way that would finally see her no longer lose her voice, her sense of self, and her independence as she blew from one authority to another. I wanted to see her reclaim her agency, be liberated through her autonomy, and develop a real, genuine connection with herself first, then with others of her choosing.
At the time, I related heavily to her feelings of how lonely you could feel when surrounded by other people that fail to provide any real form of emotional support or genuine care while you’re struggling. Even at the very start of the film, when we’re introduced to Dani just as she is experiencing a deeply traumatizing incident, the loneliness she felt was a sensation I could relate to. I had, at the time, suffered so much loss that I felt alienated from everyone around me. No one I knew could truly relate to how I felt about the grief and trauma I’d experienced in the past decade, from having a family member with serious long-term mental health struggles to the sudden and shocking loss of my best friend. Even when I was surrounded by people, in bright daylight, there was always a gnawing pit of darkness inside of me. I found temporary relief in yoga classes, sound healing cacao ceremonies, and other forms of “instant community” like the spin studio, and in fleeting non-committal relationships where, for a brief moment, I could pretend to be someone else. Someone less damaged.
When I watched this film, although I think I’d have made different decisions than Dani did (for me, the real fantasy would have been that liberation I mentioned), I understood her pain, her desire for true belonging and feeling “held”. What she got at the end wasn’t it - but the film inspired me to begin a course of grief-centric healing that tackled my feelings on it. As for the initial sense of comfort I felt while watching that film? Now, years later with a real sense of community and emotional support in my life, I no longer feel the succour I once felt from watching it. I also understood why it had provided that to me at the time: it wasn’t schadenfreude, it was catharsis. It made me feel seen, and in doing so, gave me permission to acknowledge my emotions - so I could understand them, process them, and heal from them, in a way that the film’s characters did not. Dani helped me learn from her mistakes, so I could find the autonomy she deserved.
It’s this exact sense of feeling seen, and their ability to help us release or purge our difficult emotions, that can make uncomfortable stories so powerful in offering us a sense of relief during difficult times. When viewed with the awareness that they will cause intentional discomfort - and help us learn and grow from that - they can help push us towards some form of deliverance from our pain.
For some people, watching horror films or disaster movies, reading dark and twisty fiction, or just getting lost in any story that stirs up dark and unsettling emotions during times of distress can offer us a chance to process those emotions. Unlike in real life, the ones with happy endings (or at least some kind of satisfying finish) give us the chance to experience these emotions in a scope that allows them to be tied up in one neat little package. Every story has to conclude somehow, right? It’s a means of experiencing the fear, anxiety, tension, pain, trauma, anger, uncertainty, and more in a controlled environment, wherein our brains can bring up and process these emotions without the full physical consequences of actually going through those things.
If there isn’t a happy ending, or no neat sense of conclusion, the benefit can come from relatability. Humans have an innate need to feel seen, and the ability to relate to others is a huge part of the foundations of how we can connect to others, personally and emotionally, developing trust and loyalty, and feeling like we are not alone with our hardships in this great big world with all of its challenges. It can help us validate how we’re feeling and why. And in societies that often teach us to repress our more undesirable or negative emotions - like people telling you to: “Just cheer up!” “Go on and smile, love!” - it’s a way to force us to process our emotions, so that we don’t let them fester and hurt us as well as those around us. You know that saying, “Hurt people hurt people”? Well, this is a form of forcing away emotional suppression.
It’s kind of like how many of us listen to extremely sad music when we’re feeling blue. The “paradox of pleasurable sadness,” as we might call it, is a healing tool.
It should come as no surprise, then that so many books, films, and other forms of storytelling that have caused worldwide buzz in recent years relate to the very things so many of us have been feeling (or struggling to admit that we’ve been feeling). Writers and storytellers in general seem pretty good at predicting the future, so to speak, because to be a good storyteller typically involves being a good observer. To write good characters, that feel real and three-dimensional, we must first try to understand those characters - even the parts that don’t necessarily make it onto the page or screen. We must ask questions - the whys, hows, and what ifs. We must be able to see the small, tiny details that speak volumes without saying a word - while also keeping our eyes on the bigger picture. It is natural, then, that when something is powerful enough to affect the global collective, there will be a storyteller out there that is ready to share a powerful tale that can make us think, provoke our emotions - and in doing so, remind us that no matter how lost we may feel at times, we’re not truly alone.
