The Girl October Built: How Horror Movies and Halloween Helped Me Through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
When I was a girl, I hated October. The days would grow shorter and darker, and gory Halloween decorations would appear on my neighbors’ houses, tableaus of severed plastic limbs, stringy spider webs, and zombie-rotten heads. My classmates would begin discussing their plans for bloody Halloween costumes, and trailers for new horror movies filled the commercial breaks between whatever episode of Law & Order: SVU my parents were watching that night. As a child diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), all of these things made my anxiety spike and filled my little mind with fear. In the Hunter house, it was the one time of year we could always count on to be stressful.
What I didn’t know then, but what I do know now, is that the impetus for the compulsive portion of OCD comes from intrusive thoughts, and what it took a long time to realize is that October offered my young mind a wealth of violent imagery that was cannon fodder for this involuntary way of thinking.
The term “intrusive thoughts” has become a buzzword on social media with a slew of Reels and TikToks recounting any given creator’s experience of being honest or impolite and referring to it as “letting their intrusive thoughts win.” But if you’ve had a real intrusive thought, you know it’s so much more.
Intrusive thoughts are mental flashbangs of extremely violent imagery or scenarios that invade the brain without its owner’s consent, and they have a nasty way of simultaneously trying to convince you they are not related to your OCD, but instead a result of who you are inherently. These could be questions or ideas like: what if I unbuckle my seatbelt while I’m on a rollercoaster? What if I blocked out of a memory that I molested my best friend? What if I hit someone with my car and fled the scene? What if I said something that gave someone the impression that I wanted them to break into my house and murder my family? What if I become demonically possessed? In fact, these are intrusive thoughts I used to have all the time.
After I watched Silent Hill at my friend’s birthday party in fifth grade, the whole time stifling my fear just to impress the older boys she invited, I left with intrusive thoughts about the possibility that my parents had actually adopted me from a murderous, religious cult.
When intrusive thoughts spike, the obsessive-compulsive mind often replies with a compulsion, a specific behavior through which we, the obsessive-compulsives, hope to regain control of a situation or that will confirm we didn’t actually do the awful thing we think we did.
For example, in second grade my older cousin dressed as Freddy Krueger for Halloween. His little sister told me how Freddy’s face got that way (their dad made them watch A Nightmare on Elm Street in preparation for his role), and I was left considering what it might be like to be burned alive, what it might be like for my entire family to burn to death together. How sad it would be if we were stuck somewhere, cowering and breathing smoke, knowing our collective death was imminent. I imagined the look of terror on my little brother’s face as we burned. At the time, I was probably eight.
That year, my cousin didn’t wear a mask but instead had prosthetic burn makeup applied directly to his face. It looked like cheese on a pizza that had been torched. While the rest of us counted candy downstairs, he washed it from his face in our bathroom and dried his skin with my Pikachu bath towel, which unfortunately, I was never able to bring myself to use again. Every time I saw that towel, I thought of fire. I thought of burning.If I used it, I was inviting the universe to set my house ablaze. House fires became a trigger for me, and in response, checking the knobs on the stove was added to my nightly ritual before bed, a ritual that, at its longest, right before I received Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, clocked in at two hours in length.
Yes, you read that correctly. For two hours, every night before bed, I completed a ritual of my compulsions to placate my intrusive thoughts. When my mother or father tried to intervene, I would often melt down.
I can still remember the strange, waxy smell of my cousin’s makeup to this day. I am 30 years old, and despite having drastically cut down on how many compulsions I still exercise, most nights, I still check the stove.
(If you wanted to know what the remedy was for the Silent Hill intrusive thoughts, I spent at least a year compulsively flipping through my baby albums to ensure my parents were the ones who brought me home from the hospital).
It got bad enough during my junior year of high school that my parents took me for another evaluation with hopes that I could get better treatment through Cognitive Behavioral Therapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. At Penn, we identified that horror movies and my parents’ Law & Order: SVU habits, among other things, were triggers for me, and from there, as it goes in CBT, my therapist and I began working on controlling my anxiety while being exposed to these triggers.
So what does this look like in a clinical setting?
Since I rarely exhibited the need to exercise compulsions in the office, appointment hours were spent targeting my intrusive thoughts. My therapist and I would watch horror trailers and segments of Law & Order until I could work my way up to full episodes and full movies. My fear of home invasions was met with clips from The Strangers. My fear of demonic possession was met with Paranormal Activity. I have the most vivid memory of my therapist turning out the lights in her office to heighten the experience of watching The Exorcist together. The fluorescent lights bled in from the hallway through the slats in her blinds, and I was deeply grateful for every extra sliver of light illuminating the room. Regan spewed green vomit and thrashed like a rabid animal on my therapist’s small computer screen. I sat with a legal pad on my lap, rating and charting the escalation of my fear so that we could later determine what affected me most.
What does this look like at home?
The homework was the hard part. Ultimately, I had to abstain from my rituals and compulsions entirely while learning to co-exist with my anxiety levels as I did. Sometimes, when my fear of fire reared its ugly head, my homework was to turn on the stove and trust someone in my family to properly turn everything off before heading to sleep. When I feared merciless home invaders, I had to unlock the doors and leave them that way, hoping someone else in my family would make it right. It started with having my parents lock up and shut off the stove after me until I could work up to the final boss: my very forgetful, albeit lovable, little brother. I was not allowed to check any of their work.
I wanted to get better, and sometimes that meant having my mother sleep in my bedroom to ensure I didn’t break the rules.
Over time, things did get better. I fell in love with a boy who loved movies, and slowly, horror became a genre that we turned to with increasing frequency, something I didn’t totally understand at the time. I matured and I healed, and the further away I grew from the epi-center of my mental illness, the more I was able to reflect on it. Through these reflections, I realized that horror taught me three incredibly important things.
First, horror movies, at their core, are about the loss of control. OCD is the same. It is a disease that reminds us of our lack of control every second of every day, and in turn, it lies to us about how to restore order. Horror reminds us that we are not in control, nor should we strive to be. This way of thinking certainly can’t or won’t cure OCD alone, but it is helpful for me to remind myself of this in hopes of rewiring some of the feedback loops in my brain. I cannot control anything, only how I respond to it. I must cede the pursuit of control to make way for my strength and resilience.
The next thing the genre has taught me: women are powerful. Women are strong and resilient. The trope of the Final Girl has been an aspirational archetype for me as I’ve progressed through my treatment. Throughout my life, because of my anxiety and because of my OCD, I was told that I was a sissy or a scaredy-cat over and over again. Most of my childhood was spent believing that I was not brave. However, Final Girls like Laurie Strode and Sidney Prescott taught me that bravery isn’t an absolute lack of fear (in fact, that’s something more on par with what a slasher might feel), but instead, an ability to push on despite it. Horror reframed how I thought and still think about myself. And in doing so, it made me crave it even more.
Which leads me to the third thing that horror taught me: I am goddamn brave.
OCD requires me to face fear every single day to live any semblance of a normal life. Every single interaction I have with the genre feels like a reinforcement of this truth—each new movie I watch, each new piece of merch I wear, every year when I decorate for Halloween, and each new haunted attraction I explore. Which is why I love it so much today. I love it so much that I even married that movie-loving boy after he proposed by turning the home we own together into a haunted house. We decorate for Halloween in July and spend our wedding anniversary at a new haunted attraction each year, something that only works because we got married in my favorite month.
Now that I’m grown up, I absolutely love the month of October.
Categorized:Editorials
