Scary Movies, Scary Messages: How Halloween Reinforces Mental Health Stigmas

Arthur Fleck masks his pain with a bright red smile. Michael Myers is perpetually silent. Norman Bates impersonates his mother by dressing like her. 

Every Halloween, these characters return to our screens to remind the audience what it means to feel fear. For many years, horror movies have depicted mental illness as something dangerous or a threat to society, turning psychological struggles into entertainment for individuals. 

There are plenty of movies like “Halloween, Joker, Psycho, The Shining, American Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” and many more whose central focus is on the consent madman, where they show mental illness as the main cause of violent behavior. 

Despite their unique narratives in each film, they all convey a similar message, which is that individuals with mental illness are dangerous and unpredictable.  

Horror movies’ common strategy is to use mental illness as a means to create fear and danger within a horror flick. They often create internal psychological struggles into something terrifying instead of something to understand or aid.

In the film “Halloween”, they show Michael Myers in a psychiatric hospital. The movie makes it seem as if the reason he’s so evil stems from his mental illness. 

Research shows the media’s misrepresentation of mental illness shapes society’s perspectives toward people with mental psychiatric disorders.

Even though the movies mentioned are older films, the cycle continues in modern films like “Halloween Ends,” released in 2022. 

Research released in June 2023 comments on the way some of these films use dehumanizing language to refer to people with illness, using words like “crazy, freak, nuts, whore, psycho, monster, loser, idiot, hysterical…” 

An article from BMC Psychology explains, these words don’t only shape a character in a movie, but they also shape how the audience thinks about people with mental illness in real life and how they are consequently treated. 

Certain directors justify these characterizations as a way of being metaphorical. They represent illness in films to represent chaos or loss of control. However, when the illness is treated like the monster, the metaphor turns harmful. 

In the 2019 movie “Joker,” they show how society tries to ignore mental illness, yet the film still focuses on a man whose untreated illness leads to violent acts. This leaves the audience watching the movie with confusion and fear. 

Social workers see these portraits as barriers to understanding and treatment. Calabro explains how films normalize mental illness as violent, then this creates an open window for the audience to create an internalized stigma, which also makes people avoid seeking help due to fear of being judged. 

This is concerning because it can affect a lot of individuals, especially in communities of people of color, where care is already limited. 

This issue is related to college students, since a lot of students experience high levels of anxiety, depression, and other mental illnesses. Despite mental health struggles, many college students view vulnerability as a weakness and refuse to get help.

Rewriting horror movies doesn’t mean removing fear from the films. There are movies like “Hereditary,” which came out in 2018, showing how mental illness can be more about emotional understanding rather than for it to be evil or monstrous. 

This movie invites its audience to understand mental health and be able to see fear as a natural emotion, and not to judge individuals with certain illnesses. The real enemy is fear,  and not necessarily mental illness. 

Horror films often exaggerate reality, but the way the narrative is told still has an influence on how people think. Horror as a genre is very powerful because it reflects society’s fears. However, when these fears are presented in movies as harmful stereotypes of individuals with mental illnesses, the message becomes misleading, damaging, and far from reality. 

As awareness of mental illnesses and health grows, movie directors should also grow and change. The goal isn’t to get rid of good dark horror movies, but to show them in a way which helps people understand them.

Every year, on every Halloween, “crazy” villains return to our screens. All of their narratives might feel very similar, but the message they leave stays with people for a long time. The fear these movies create in individuals don’t stay only on the screen,  it follows them in their everyday lives, where stigmas continue towards mental illness and harm people more deeply.