'Goodnight Mommy'

“Don’t ever have sex,” she said, while I said, “Having sex is worth it, no matter what.”

But most of the time, our response to horror movies, like the harrowing Austrian import we saw this week, Goodnight Mommy, are the same.

We cover our eyes, exchange looks of abject terror, grab each other over the armrest, and exchange a flurry of texts on the way home.

We also laugh nigh-on hysterically, along with a lot of other people in the audience.

What happened to Mama?

What’s funny about Goodnight Mommy? (Ich Seh, Ich Seh in the original German.) It follows an eerily isolated trio: inseparable twin boys (Lukas and Elias Schwarz) and their mother (Susanne Wuest), who comes home with a deliciously creepy mien, bandaged from some kind of facial surgery following a mysterious accident. In the boys’ eyes, her increasingly startling and sinister behavior makes them think someone or something other than their mother came home from the hospital.

Like many squirm-inducing flicks, there’s a twist that American audiences, at least, will be familiar with as a narrative device in horror. And like most good scare-fests, the terror is rooted in the relatable real-life experiences of grief, trauma, and mental disturbance (check out my review of one of my favorites, The Babadook, now available to stream on Netflix).

So as the freakiest moments of Goodnight Mommy unfold (and this one is a doozy), why do our gasps dissolve into giggles?

The wisdom of Wes Craven

When American horror master Wes Craven died in August, a quotation attributed to him caught my eye: “Horror films don’t create fear. They release it.”

Certainly scary movies can be traumatizing in themselves, especially for kids. I myself probably had my brain rewired, and not for the better, when my parents insisted on renting E.T. when I was about seven. Since then, I’ve found that I’m a member of a whole generation of people apparently scarred by this so-called kids’ movie; one friend confessed to refusing to eat a basket of unusually skinny mozzarella sticks because they reminded him of E.T.’s fingers.

But today, from The Sixth Sense to Insidious to The Conjuring, I quake and then I laugh with sheer enjoyment.

I’m on board with Craven. Horror movies aren’t serving up anything more awful than my own mind can and does perpetrate on itself. Maybe I’m a particularly twisted individual; maybe my experience managing a serious lifelong mood disorder means my mind has darker corners than the average citizen’s. My own personal traumas have led to dissociative states when my rational adult mind seems to depart and I’m caught in a terrifying fog. My senses shut down or play tricks on me. An amorphous yet spiteful black presence seems to stand in the corner, though there’s nothing supernatural about it. It’s just my mind’s attempt to project or divorce itself from the agonies inside.

Craven also called horror movies “boot camp for the psyche.” He said in 1999, “human beings are packaged in the flimsiest of packages, threatened by real and sometimes horrifying dangers. . . .But the narrative form [of movies] puts those fears into a manageable series of events. It gives us a way of thinking rationally about our fears.”

Catharsis, not fear

This rings true for me, when I think about my real-life sensations and behaviors and a movie like It Follows, in which terrifyingly mundane visual manifestations of a supernatural curse relentlessly pursue its victims. Sometimes I battle dreadful mental states by getting out of the house late at night and walking until I’m exhausted. I’m not afraid of solitude or the dark, but I am afraid of keeping still.

Maybe flashing on scenes from It Follows or similar movies should scare me, but it doesn’t. Instead, I feel like something about my own experience — that sense of pursuit by a nameless horror that claims many people’s lives — has been conceptualized, reflected, and explored in a concrete, public way. The aftermath is more cathartic than frightening.

Wes Craven and movies like Goodnight Mommy (directed by Severin Fiala and Veronika Franz) make me realize how often laughter isn’t about comedy. Laughter can be the release that Craven alludes to. Laughter is recognition, both of our own thoughts and experiences and, at horror movies, a fun communal sense of our shared absurdity in paying our money and then squeezing our eyes shut at the climax.

Goodnight Mommy, which on balance lacks a strong internal logic, leaves you with plenty of questions to sift through and snicker over: Where did all that formaldehyde come from? Was the cat ever really alive? Does it even matter? Since when do charity canvassers wander around your house just because the door is unlocked? Will we, the ticket-buyers, ever be able to use superglue again?

’Tis the season. Find the right companion. Watch. Shiver. Ask. And go ahead: laugh.

For Wes Craven fans, this year’s Philadelphia Film Festival is offering A Very Scary Sleepover, a special tribute featuring 11 Wes Craven movies screening October 31-November 1.