Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Gaslighting Is Scarier
by Travis Hedge Coke
I am watching a movie about a woman inviting a camera crew into her home to investigate a haunting. She is awakened at night by whistling sounds. She sees things move in the dark, but nothing is there. Feels struck by things that are not there. Twenty minutes in, we hear and see someone drive a remote control car through her bedroom at two a.m.
I am watching a movie in which ghosts repeatedly reach out, or simply go about their business in front of the living family watching after the hotel they reside in, while the living husband lies, manipulates, terrorizes, and attempts to murder his wife and child.
I am watching a movie about a girl realizing the horror in her home is not ghosts, goblins, or her father being malevolent, but someone outside the home, who had the home tricked out with trap doors and widgets.
I am watching Roberta Findlay’s Lurkers, in which a girl traumatized by seeing ghosts and being disbelieved, comes to realize as an adult that ghosts do not do much harm, but the people in her life who abuse and gaslight her, those in her childhood, her rapey, shaming husband, his cult-like frat boy buddies, they hurt people.
Ghost Freddy Krueger is never as horrifying as alive and not-yet-burned child rapist and sadist who lives in your town and works at the local school Freddy Krueger.
For me, Freddy, himself, is never as terrible as he is in the 2010 remake of A Nightmare On Elm Street, in which Freddy convinces the survivors of his attacks that their parents killed an innocent man, that he was innocent and the survivors, making up stories, hurt him.
It is gut-wrenchingly cruel. It is not true, of course. Freddy is a sadist, a rapist, a monster before he dies and after, but that is a level of manipulative cruelty that pun and one-liner Freddy specifically lacks.
The capacity for people to fuck with you and make you believe it is your fault is scarier than phantasm apparitions or flesh and bone attacks because you can fantasize a way to ignore or physically counter those. Many horror stories, we can simply tell ourselves, “Well, I wouldn’t go in there,” “I would simply leave those woods,” “just shoot the monster now! Nonsense on the level of “Well, what was she wearing?” but it rewards our innate sense of our own capabilities and a social and moral order we perceive.
If the car behind you flashing its lights and driving aggressively is a gang trying to bait you into a lethal conflict? Don’t engage with them. Drive away.
Car speeding at you and throwing on high beams is trying to warn you of a killer in your back seat?
Maybe. Just. Don’t. Drive. At. Night.
That, really, is the ultimate lesson.
Attacks on drivers at night. Attacks on dating couples parking? You took a toe from the woods and put it in your soup?
You know the score.
This, then this. These are pacts. These are cause and effect. No matter how trumped up – and many of these are the stories, themselves, gaslighting you, they are causal and thereby conquerable by your behavior.
If the Devil is a liar? If the moral order is conspiring to make you feel culpable, in control, while you are only operating under false pretenses designed specifically to hurt you?
The only time the deadites of Evil Dead are frightening is when they are manipulative. They can be exciting or shocking, or funny and weird, but when they lie, when they play-act for sympathy or to inspire guilt, that is when they get frightening.
Cabin in the Woods knows it. The Shining knows it. Ghost Hoax. Lurkers. Nightmare on Elm St. Rebecca. Eko Eko Azarak. American Mary. Gaslight. Closer. Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Rosemary’s Baby. Surveillance. Breakdown. Angel Heart. Even if you are lucky enough for a chance to fight against lies – Sleeping With the Enemy – lies imply lies imply lies imply.
We live in doubt, and gaslighting gives us incentive to never stop.