Pain & Horror Films: How Our Fears Heal Us
Pain is a map that shows where we have been, where we are and what we are capable of
“Everyone runs from pain towards the pleasure, but they get there only to find more pain. You cannot outrun pain.”
- The White Lotus (2025), dir. Mike White
We all have a perverse relationship with our pain and savor it in unconscious ways: like picking on a scab till it bleeds, biting on nails till they’re raw to the finger tips or bursting a particularly stubborn pimple. It’s disgusting, but there is something sensual about pain and the ensuing pleasure around it. The experience of pain/pleasure carries variable feelings of disgust, shame, irritation. The point is that these feelings, these undesirable emotions that accompany the ying and yang dynamic of pain and pleasure, can be heavy and unwanted, leading many into repression, fear and dissonance.
There is a certain joy and entertainment in consuming and witnessing horror media, not only because horror and fear are universal primal experiences but also because media are a safe expression of our most buried, shamed fears. Horror, in this writing, exclusively refers to the intense feeling of fear, shock or disgust, which is not to be conflated with violence, the act of causing intentional harm to the detriment of a person’s physical, emotional and mental wellbeing.
I’ve always enjoyed horror media, for their stylistic elements as well as their provocative themes which tend to put societal taboos, superstitions and fears on a microscope to be observed and enjoyed (safely). For example, horror classics like Carrie explore female teen angst (especially with the scarlet red motif designed to echo period blood) and the Alien franchise is an allegory for reproductive justice and body autonomy; Alien succeeds as a feminist film by subverting gender through body horror experienced primarily through male characters. If you have never watched Alien, it’s about a matriarchal alien race that forcefully implants its parasitic offspring into human hosts without their consent. It’s victims often happen to men while the heroes who save the day are women.
What do horror films have to do with our personal relationships to pain?
It was Train to Busan that truly made me a fan of the zombie genre. I was both terrified but also fascinated by these undead apparitions that insisted on being alive and consuming the living who wanted nothing but to defend their love and liberty; people who would go to extreme lengths for their self-preservation. When I unpacked my fascination with the undead, I discovered that they speak to my own inherent fears around losing my sense of self and being taken advantage of by someone I care about, of being utterly consumed. It was liberating to see my fears take the shape of these monsters, which in turn made it easier to confront the roots of my fears in the first place.
“Look inside, into the unconscious, into your fears and triggers and pain, to admit you actually enjoy standing in that pile of shit.”
-Carolyn Elliot, Existential Kink
Accepting my love of zombies was admitting to myself that a part of me enjoyed fearing my capacity to be fully present for myself and others, and to share myself openly and vulnerably. My therapist once observed that I “was very good at finding ways to prove to myself that I was un-loveable”, and she was right, because that was how I fed my zombies. I relished in the belief that no one could ever truly love me like I deserved to. Convention would have you rule this as self-loathing, but in actuality it was grandiosity: I believed I was too good to be loveable and my existence was beyond human foibles such as love. So, I fed my zombies by erecting emotional walls, finding emotionally unavailable partners, pushing away anyone trying to get close and when they inevitably left, I could cry, “woe is me, I was right!”
Pain gives us meaning, control and motivation. Yet, we are destined for more than just suffering. In a world that often seems blind to our pain, our suffering feels like a debt we pay to keep on living but I would argue that is not the case at all. We are not solely built for suffering even when pain seems inescapable. Pain is a mirror to our pleasure, and as Rumi poetically put it “the wound is where the light enters you.” Pain shows us where the wound is so we can acknowledge it, drain it, clean it and dress it. This process is easier said than done because it is shocking and horrifying to look at the bleeding, gaping wounds some experiences have wrought on us. So, if we are to learn anything from horror films, it’s that looking at the horror that is our wounds can be courageous enough, and that asking for help doesn’t make is weak – it makes us and our team stronger.
Why is it difficult to see our own pain sometimes? For the same reason a fish doesn’t know what water is, only that that is its home – we don’t recognize pain as pain if that is all we have known. It’s why sometimes being told to ‘heal’ can feel like a hurtful accusation from which we have to defend ourselves. To name some of these patterns more clearly, let’s look at attachment theory which names four types of relational wounds: secure, anxious, avoidant and disorganized. These wounds can grow and evolve as we experience relationships and new relationships. When looking at anxious and disorganized as relational wounds, we can discuss a pattern like people pleasing as a way in which pain transforms into a sense of stability, security and even pleasure. People pleasing as a behavior rests on the belief that a person’s emotional response can be manipulated to accommodate your safety and every time this tactic works, there is a sense of validation. It does not feel like abandonment or being invisible, because this is a way in which pain gives a sense of control and meaning. However, when we look at people pleasing as a way in which pain transforms into pleasure, we can see that it is a pattern of pretending not to be seen, a belief that becomes an addictive ritual of self-abandonment because the pain at the root of it keeps promising safety and every time someone is blind to that behavior it only further reinforces its success.
It's why I think calling such patterns coping mechanisms is reductive and mars the complexity of the anatomy of pain. They obscure the lifetime of work and intricacy that has gone into giving our pain shape and form in a world that often cannot -and does not – want to acknowledge our hurt. These maladaptive strategies are testimonies of courageous self-preservation built over time.
But just like the monsters in horror movies, once you see the pain, you will be able to name it, take responsibility for it or heal it. If you want to that is.
Systems and how external pain becomes Internalized
As human beings we are more than just collections of our traumas and pain that we have spent our lifetime alchemizing. We are also repositories of stories, joy, beauty and resilience.
The pain we experience in our lives is often out of our control and often inflicted by institutions with power over all aspects of our lives. These institutions often demand blood sacrifice to prove our worth, in turn promising to reward us for having suffered enough: are you marginalized enough? Are you too privileged? Is this enough trauma to convince the committee to approve your application?
This constant process of proving ourselves and our pain becomes habitual because it means we are visible to the world. Visible pain means being a perfect victim, which translates to a person deserving of care. It’s why ‘strong’ people often get overlooked as people needing care. However, the caveat in all this is that only certain expressions of pain and certain bodies can be considered ‘perfect’ victims – Black women and Indigenous women, for instance, seldom are.
There’s a sharp contrast between the pain we carry internally and how it is publicly consumed. This often leads to a disconnect—a split between the self we feel and the one the world reflects back at us. A disenchantment of sorts that fractures how we see ourselves from how the world sees us. Here we witness pain get transformed into pleasure as it manifests into sexual kinks, fetishes, intrusive thoughts and habitual vices, which ironically are also laden with shame. By turning our pain into tools of connection with others, we further valorize our pain and that of others, especially when their wounds match ours.
No one has ever said they’ve discovered life’s pleasures by indulging more of their pleasures– they found it through adversity and pain. Pain is an inevitable guarantee and there’s a security and comfort in that. This is not to say we don’t deserve pleasure – on the contrary, it’s also an inevitable experience albeit one we often mistrust unless we feel we have given it to ourselves. Again, I want us to apply our understanding of horror media to our own experiences of pain: who or what is the big monster in our life? What makes it so scary? How did it arrive? What does it seek to accomplish? How do we save ourselves and those we love from it?
By answering these questions, we may synthesize our pain into pleasure, and hopefully, into fulfilment without fear, for pain is a map that shows where we have been, where we are and what we are capable of. It’s why our scars itch sometimes and healed bones ache with the rain.