فيلم رعب | الدحيح

Listen, Karim, we don't want a silly movie,

we want a gut wrenching horror movie.

I want to wet the bed of fear tonight.

Shame on you, Amgad,

forget about Hollywood and Turkish movies,

this is Tanzanian horror.

The poster looks sick to be honest.

What's that!

-What's this? -That's just a cat, man.

Focus on the movie, it's about a cursed book

and the idiot protagonist read the spell inside the book,

he became cursed since then...

cursed, Amgad...

cursed!

Karim, did you say something?

Say what? I'm watching the movie.

Watch with me, I think the house they're about to enter is haunted.

That house was built on a pharaonic tomb for a priest,

and for that priest to be reborn, there has to be a sacrifice...

and that sacrifice will be you, Amgad.

I don't want to die!

I don't want to die!

Calm down, man, who said anything about dying?

It's just a Tanzanian movie.

Please man, let me go home.

I want to go home.

Go home?

Go home where, Amgad?

You're already home...

or maybe you forgot what happened.

What happened?

You were killed here in this cinema 20 years ago,

and your spirit wanders in the hall everyday

to make you think you're watching that movie with your friend, Karim.

But the truth is...

Karim was the one who killed you

and ran away!

Karim!

Karim, where are you?!

No way, it's impossible I died 20 years ago!

It's impossible I died 20 years ago!

The popcorn is hot.

The popcorn is still hot.

If I died, it was probably just 5 minutes ago.

Oh my friend, this is Eldaheeh, not a Stephen King,

pull yourself together, now.

Hello, my dear viewers,

and welcome to a new episode of Eldaheeh.

In 1919, Sigmund Freud published an article titled "The Uncanny",

where he talked about important angles of subconscious.

subconscious also has angles, Abo Hmeed?

No they're different angles than yours.

Freud said that our mind is like Titanic's iceberg,

a third is only visible on the surface,

while the other two thirds are hidden underwater.

These two thirds represent hidden parts of us beneath the surface,

that we neither see or feel,

but it controls all our behaviors,

that's why it's a "sub" of the consciousness.

In his studies, Freud focuses on situations where subconscious appear,

and can be seen through, like dreams or nightmares or slips of the tongue,

situations where you have almost no control.

You might ask me, why should these things be hidden? let them be spoken out.

Why are they hiding? committed a crime?

My friend, you're not only subconscious but also foolish.

These things are hidden,

because subconscious hides the repressed and aggressive desires,

that we feel ashamed to express or confess of having.

Things that you aren't consciously aware of their existence within you.

But they lay low and hide

to have you look like a calm civilized person in front of others.

Imagine my friend, if these desires present themselves openly in front of others.

Miss Desire please wait! You, desire!

For the sake of our image in front of others,

and being decent and civil,

all this mess stays hidden in the basement.

And that basement is the subconscious.

In his article, "The Uncanny", Freud says

that subconscious doesn't only show when it's out of our control,

but can also appear in things we do on purpose, and by choice,

like arts. Art is for the heart, you know.

Freud, in his evaluation of arts, specially horror arts,

like horror stories, movies, and paintings,

says that all these arts hide one concept, called Returning to the Repressed.

meaning the resurfacing of what was hidden.

Horror arts are always about something hidden, secret, and scary,

and then suddenly reappears, like a ghost out of a graveyard,

or a vampire out of a coffin,

or Frankenstein when we walked out from a science experiment,

or even Reham AbdelGhafor's eyebrows in the series Room 207.

That's why Freud says that horror authors

write their works from the nightmares we see in our sleep.

Then through that, our fears see the light.

The difference between horror works and nightmares,

is that a nightmare is surreal, it borrows plots and faces from real life,

and create scary scenarios that expose your fears,

scenarios that we experience involuntarily in our sleep.

Hey nightmare, I need a movie, fix me up with something.

You know, my friend, one of my nightmares,

that I had a disease where my body secreted sesame,

and I had to go to the bathroom a lot to get the sesame off.

It was a chance to work in a bakery though.

But it's okay. Imagine me working with bread-sticks and sprinkling my sesame.

Anyway, nightmares are surreal whether it had a monster or you became a bread-stick

they expose what's in the subconscious.

As you see my friend, nightmares are surreal,

it could range between seeing a monster or becoming a bread-stick.

But my friend, the horror arts have nightmares that we willingly create,

and let them scare us.

Freud said that if we'll categorize arts

concerning their proximity to subconscious,

we'll find that horror authors aren't just close to it,

they're on the doors of subconscious.

They're the best to expose the being of subconscious for us.

Oh my God, expose the being?

That's what Stephen King says, one of the most famous modern horror authors,

that all horror stories lie in a zone between consciousness and subconscious.

And that it's the only art written by fear.

Fear is the most rooted feeling in our subconscious.

Sometimes I feel sorry for horror authors,

they need to be able to handle fear

in a much higher skill to be able to create art from it.

Everyday as an author, I need to dive in my subconscious

and figure out my real fears,

then keep exposing myself to it, to feel it and pass it on to the audience.

God help them.

In short, horror movies are subconscious turned inside out,

instead of the subconscious letting out our fears and nightmares,

and wake up forgetting about them with a glass of water,

no, we use subconscious to call in the fears,

in every word and every scene.

This means that every horror movie that you ever saw,

was a gateway between two worlds and two tales,

a conscious tale you see on screen, and a subconscious one hidden in a symbol

of an image, a monster, or a ghost.

Let me take you through a journey in the horror cinema, my friend.

To show you in a few examples, how can horror movies

express stories and monsters on the surface level,

and express the subconscious of its era deep within,

and the historical fears that influenced people during the movie's era.

Don't be afraid though.

We're in 1920, after the end of World War I,

the humiliating defeat of Germany,

and the destruction of its army and resources by the Allies.

The movie, "The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari",

a German movie about a boy named Francis who attends a carnival,

and meets a hypnotist, Dr. Caligari,

then his life turns into living hell.

Throughout the movie, we see Dr. Caligari controlling the characters by hypnosis,

until, through hypnosis, he makes a character commit hideous murders.

In his book, "From Caligari to Hitler",

the sociologist Siegfried Kracauer says,

that this movie expresses the subconscious need for the defeated Germans,

for a wizardry leader whom they surrender their will to, and he gives them victory.

Even if this costs them uncountable crimes.

This idea would reside in the German subconscious,

and keeps on hiding,

until it shows in whose reception?

The bohemian artist, Adolf Hitler.

If you think this is an over-correlation between conscious and subconscious...

David Lewis, in his book "Triumph of the Will",

writes on a strong relation between Hitler and a hypnotist, Erik Hanussen in 1932,

where he says that this hypnotist gave Hitler all the rhetoric tips

that helped him numb his audience.

For example, that his speeches are at night and close to normal bedtimes.

because the minds of the audience are preparing themselves to sleep,

instead of being awake, alert, and resistant to the ideas,

we need lazy accessible minds.

And another tip, like excessively using hand gestures.

I'm familiar, Abo Hmeed.

It's just one hand my friend, and I move up and down.

It feels like I'm almost Tanoura dancing.

Also another tip, was to have the speaker under extreme spotlights,

like we saw in Hitler's speeches.

We're now in the thirties while the world is still recovering from the twenties.

They called them The Roaring Twenties,

an era that thrived with arts, celebrations, and economic prosperity.

But then met with the nightmare of The Great Depression,

a recession that hit American economy,

and affected the world.

One of every 4 people was unemployed.

Unemployment and poverty rates that made all social classes on the brink.

That's besides inflation.

During these dark times, the movie Frankenstein is released in 1931,

of the famous story about a hopeful crazy scientist,

with a mood like the twenties, roaring and upbeat.

This scientist, with his assistant, pile up parts of dead bodies,

to make a human being,

one that comes to life by a lightning struck.

But, my friend, just as the people saw banks and stocks as closed safe places

that they can entrust their savings and woke up to a crisis,

the safe closed lab where Frankenstein was made,

the scientist would wake up to a crisis,

where his project turned into a monster,

with no control whatsoever.

His scientific optimism started turning into pessimism gradually,

when this monster killed anyone in its path.

That's when the movie posed a question that reflects the Great Depression,

how can we control the monster

that came out of the place we thought to be the safest?

Frankenstein's lab in the movie symbolized these fears.

The languages of science, economy, and numbers that people trusted,

couldn't explain to them how their savings vanished in a blink.

As if a monster came out of nowhere and destroyed all their dreams.

Now we're moving to the fifties,

the US didn't just overcome the Great Depression,

but it also won World War II,

but every victory has a price,

their price was the weapon the US won by,

the nuclear bomb that the Americans invented to settle the war.

And after a couple of years, their ex-ally, the Soviet Union, made the same bomb

and that ally turned into an enemy,

the entire world was threatened with the Cold War.

Because in case of any disagreement between the US and Russia,

if a party pulled up the weapon, peace would be forgotten!

It could turn into a nuclear war that ends the world.

That's where Stephen King says that the fear in the fifties was universal,

driven by guilt,

that for the US to exterminate a monster like Hitler,

it called a mightier monster into the world, the atomic bomb.

We find in the movie, "The beginning of the End" in 1957,

about an agricultural engineer that uses radiation to cultivate large vegetables,

but with a minor error, some insects eat from these vegetables,

and turn into giant monsters,

with a radiation-modified DNA,

and these giant insects start feeding on humans.

Enjoy!

For the beginning of human ambition for the atom,

it was the beginning of the end of the world.

We'll see this terror from the Japanese,

the only people so far that was affected by an atomic bomb.

We see a movie like "Godzilla" in 1954,

the famous dinosaur that was created as a result of atomic radiation,

that came out of the Japanese Toho film company,

as the imaginary monster

that expressed the Japanese's deep wound from the bomb,

that took them back to the dinosaur age,

an age of monstrosity without humans or humanity.

Can there be humanity without humans, Abo Hmeed?

Yes my friend, due to some radiations that affect the DNA,

there can be humanity without humans.

Horror movies didn't just subconsciously express universal or political fears,

but also cultural fears,

like the movie, "Rosemary's Baby" in 1968,

about the pregnant wife, Rosemary,

that lived next to devil-cult neighbors,

and these devil worshipers took control over the baby inside Rosemary,

to be a part of their rituals.

By the way, the "Hereditary" director, Ari Aster,

said that "Rosemary's baby" was an inspiration to his movie.

To know the importance of a movie and be a horror director, you have to see the past.

Old is Gold.

What does all this have to do with reality?

To understand, look where we are,

we're in the sixties, my friend,

the era of women's rights waves,

and discussions about women's rights like abortion,

and the question of whether a fetus is born based on his mother's decision,

or the society's decision that claims this fetus before it was born.

That's the conundrum.

The movie doesn't reflect something only fictional,

but something fictional that discusses a real issue and fear of the society then.

That's exactly what happened in "Rosemary's Baby",

they fought on his destiny before he was born.

In the sixties, horror movies would start to notice their effect,

and their close proximity to subconsciousness.

Like in Hitchcock's "Psycho",

about a secretary that goes to a motel on the highway ran by a disturbed man.

You know my friend these scary places that people fear going to,

like, a guy was buried here, or there's an evil spirit haunting whoever lives here,

and the place is inhabitable,

so the American protagonist here says

I'll spend my vacation there with my family. Man, everyone's warning you.

Sorry but I want that, work the genre out with me people, for the movie!

The mother keeps chasing her kid that wants her doll

and ends up finding a ghost and a curse...

it's a lot.

In the movie "Psycho" we see, besides the traditional horror elements,

for the first time subconscious appears,

in the shape of a monster or a ghost, but in its pure psychological shape.

Where the psychiatrist at the end tells us that that man is the killer,

who has Dissociative Identity Disorder, and is controlled by his subconscious.

The real fear here wasn't from the outside but from the inside,

this was a major turning point.

The horror stories before that were around poverty, science, and bombs,

these were the things that the subconscious presented as evil.

In this evolution and this horror version of Hitchcock,

the subconscious was the evil.

Shame on you, subconscious, what if you weren't a sub?

Now we're in the nineties and the beginning of the millennium.

The Cold War was finally over,

and the US single-handedly had supremacy over the world.

Thank God, there was no longer fear of nuclear war,

to be imagined in the shape of Godzilla, nor communists within the American dream,

to be imagined as zombies.

Does it mean that the fear is over? No, my friend, it's not.

We always fear something.

The American dream, after destroying everyone standing in its path,

didn't find something to fear,

so it started reflecting on itself and asking,

that's when a new genre of horror movies appear,

without a clear distinction between humans and ghosts,

or between humans and monsters,

we see a movie like "The Sixth Sense" in 1999,

about a psychiatrist that helps a child who claims to see the dead,

but my friend, here's the plot twist, I'll be spoiling the movie open-fire.

"A movie"

I'm on fire!

See how funny metaphors are?

The twist is that the boy isn't sick,

but that he has a true gift,

and the bigger twist, is that the doctor treating him, is one of the dead he sees.

The psychiatrist that supposedly represents

the supremacy of conscious, knowledge, and science,

is the one that's dead and a ghost,

and the worst, despite all his knowledge, he fails to reach his truth...his death,

that he's in fact the ghost.

Two years later, we see "The Others" in 2001,

about the religious woman Grace, who lives in a mansion with her kids,

waiting for her husband’s return from war.

During the movie, we experience the fears of this family

as they're surrounded by ghosts,

and we feel pity and empathy towards them.

I'll spoil the movie, my friend.

Abo Hmeed, I think you already did by spoiling the one before.

The twist, of course, that these kids are the ghosts,

but the other twist, is that the ones they feared were the humans.

You know when you corner your friend to beat him up?

So you ask him, are you with us or the others?

and he says, with you of course! then you tell him, we're the others!

This is what happens in this genre of movies.

In these horror movies, the American dream asks itself,

what if I'm "the others"?

what if I'm the bad guy? the others in a story?

who pays the price for intervening in the affairs of many countries,

whether in politics or war,

Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan.

And I can also be attacked in my home, my safe place,

like the events of 9/11 (11th of September 2001)

that rose out of extreme hatred that saw the American as the bad guy,

that he's the scary ghost not the savior hero.

These plot twists crystallized this scary moment of revelation.

In this journey, we saw how horror movies

were the movie-gateway between the conscious

represented in thrilling stories with monsters and ghosts,

and subconscious represented in historical fears,

that change with the change of eras and ages.

In an article by Emma John in The Guardian, "Why torture ourselves with Scary Films?"

she said that she used horror movies to overcome hardships in her life,

like her friend getting cancer and her mother getting Leukemia.

Because during watching the movie, the more complicated the event gets,

and her fear increases with fast heartbeats,

the more purification she feels, Catharsis.

Catharsis, as described by Aristotle, is a feeling after watching tragic plays,

where we liberate our feelings of sadness and loss,

as we put ourselves in the shoes of the tragic hero as he dies at the end,

and with his death these feelings are set free from our bodies.

A process that is seemingly a fear expulsion,

where we let out our fears of certain things into other things,

so we let go of the initial fears.

Emma continues saying that the catharsis she felt from the horror movies,

made her see all humans while they're free of any fake feeling of safety and control.

In that moment, people are stripped from all their illusions on themselves.

It's a crucial moment where the only thing that remains is the survival instinct,

the people's desire to live despite all the catastrophes.

This feeling gave her the strength

to handle the fears she experienced with her mother and friend.

These stories, my friend, frame the question that I've been waiting for you to ask...

Horror movies really simulates nightmares and both express things in our subconscious

things that we're ashamed or afraid to say,

but the nightmare is out of our control,

while the movies are intentional nightmares that we create!

And that's the episode's question, why do we willingly create the nightmare?

Nightmares are bad things that we want to get rid of,

we want to wake up, drink some water, sleep again, and have a good dream.

Why do we willingly create nightmares?

The scientist, Mathias Clasen, takes this matter back to Evolutionary psychology,

to ages where there weren't horror movies yet,

but man lived the horror scenarios all the time,

fear to be eaten, or attacked, or to die of hunger and thirst,

they were all fears at the time.

This made man develop something called Morbid Curiosity, towards danger.

Watching the habits of lions and monsters,

their ways of hunting, and sleep schedule,

made him close to danger and the creatures' dens,

to explore and understand them,

and collect the most information to help him either hunt or avoid them

Because as much as this knowledge was dangerous,

but it was essential for the survival and life of another coming generation.

Because if that generation was ignorant to the dangers surrounding it,

R.I.P to it.

But my friend, thank God,

or I guess that,

there was finally civilization and we left the forests.

There were no longer snakes,

the subconscious is doing their job very well.

I mean, God help each one of us with his mind.

You know my friend that inside you, you're the monster you want to defeat.

That's the fault in our stars, not forgetting, but realization.

Man is no longer exposed to scenarios that threaten his life,

but still kept his morbid curiosity.

His need to create dangerous situations to train himself on dealing with them.

That's what horror movies offered,

a frightening experience, scary, tense, and nerve wrecking,

but we experience it from a safe space,

and if we were exposed to these situations, we know how to handle the danger.

As if when I see a vampire in my kitchen,

I'll find some garlic cloves to defend myself.

That's exactly what horror movies did,

what the scientists called, Threat Mastery,

to control the threat around us before it surprises us when we're not ready.

Something like The Great Depression, isn't materialistic,

it doesn't have a head or legs or fur or something material,

not a being that we can capture and put away,

but with our imagination we turn it into a scary monster, like Frankenstein.

It's true that it'll attack and kill us,

but in the movie, we can capture it and get rid of it.

We turned our fears from the atomic bomb

to monsters that come out and terrorize us,

where we wash out our guilt from making scary inventions that we created.

We also feel supremacy when we turn this guilt into hope and destroy Godzilla.

Godzilla, my friend, is a guilt, that Americans committed in the rights of Japan,

dropping an atomic bomb that killed hundreds of thousands of people in a blink.

This guilt grew into a monster, and destroyed buildings so we killed it,

and we feel a relief that we killed it because it was evil,

although we were the ones that created it!

We, with our technology and science, that made this wild monster!

So is the metaphor.

Just like we saw Emma John's story who decided to deal with the disease

that affected the closest ones to her without any readiness or preparation,

by getting caught up in stories that are filled with dangers around the protagonist,

without readiness or preparation.

But she sees the protagonist facing these dangers and living off survival instinct.

In 2019, when COVID-19 hit,

and life started turning into an actual horror movie,

people remembered a movie called "Contagion" in 2011.

A basic film with a ranking of 270 in Warner Bros. Pictures' movie list,

but during the pandemic became the eighth movie in the list!

Because it's about a dangerous pandemic,

that started from China and originated from animals like pigs and bats.

What does it remind you of, my friend?

Oh my God, Abo Hmeed, the Plague?

No, my friend, a disease that had number 19 in it,

then there was 20 and other updates.

During the outbreak, people ran to watch a movie that doesn't just predict a pandemic,

but takes it too seriously and presents a scenario more disastrous than real life.

In the movie, the film kills 26 million people in its outbreak.

The irony, my friend, is that when the movie came out it was criticized

for having found a vaccine too quickly.

They said it was unrealistic and sci-fi.

While in real life, the COVID vaccine took only one year to be produced,

one of the most prominent scientific achievements in history.

We produced a vaccine in one year!

People saw in that movie a scenario way worse than the one they saw in real life,

where also protagonists found a way to survive.

This made many people write to Scott Z. Burns, the writer of the movie,

to thank him that the terrifying scenario he wrote

helped them overcome reality.

This wasn't just a cinematic coincidence, my friend,

it was a fact proven by science.

In a study in 2020 done by The University of Chicago along with other universities,

that said, and focus,

that people who watch and love horror movies,

were more flexible and manageable to the psychological pressure during COVID,

more than people who don't like horror.

This, my friend, is because one way or another,

they went through all what we said,

they were tensed, afraid, terrified, and freaked out,

and were on the verge that someone would kill a loved one,

their morbid curiosity and creating scary scenarios,

living the tragedy second-hand, and seeing its resolution,

in the end of the movie where the danger is gone,

and leading to catharsis,

this feeling that assures man that he can face the catastrophe,

and come out with the sweetness of victory.

In all the movies we talked about,

people try to convert real fears hidden within them

to stories about harder and bigger fictional fears.

Monsters, ghosts, pandemics, and radiation.

People tried to escape from the nightmares they can't control

by creating frightening nightmares because in turn they create positive feelings,

feeling of supremacy, that is created when you overcome your fears,

the sweetness of victory, that we feel when we experience a horror movie,

that after it ends, we feel grateful to our zombie-free reality.

I felt this gratitude after the movie "Camp",

I'm thankful that no guys do this in reality.

Monsters are better.

Freud considered that mental health comes from understanding our subconscious,

the feelings, desires, and fears, that we fear expressing,

achieving the balance between them with our civil conscious persona with others.

That's because according to him:

Unexpressed emotions remain buried alive,

to come out later in uglier ways than they really are.

I have dog buried alive within me by mistake.

If we didn't willingly face the nightmare hidden in our subconscious,

and decided to ignore it and sweep it under the rug,

it'll appear and resurface but in an ugly uncontrollable way.

That's why we have to surprise it, and control its emergence ourselves,

even if it was a psychologically painful process.

Just like how Freud started psychoanalytic based on diving into the subconscious,

that lies in dreams and slips of the tongue,

horror movies that people might think are sadistic and scary entertainment,

a part of them is actually therapeutic.

A therapeutic method to be ahead of our nightmares, control, and overcome them.

Abo Hmeed, I don't like horror do I have to now?

No my friend, you don't have to love or hate them, but to understand them.

To understand why people decided to create their own nightmares.

At the end, my friend, humans are complex creatures,

some of us are motivated by happy dreams of a bright future,

while others are motivated by scary dreams of a terrifying future

that makes them grateful for everything in his own reality,

and ready for any danger in the future.

The human mind is marvelously designed,

like a cinema, to give you dreams and nightmares,

hope and fear, optimism and terror.

And as much as they're contrary,

but at the end they serve the same goal, the oldest biological process,

survival and defeating the enemy.

Even if these enemies are our fears.

Most importantly to remember, that the nightmare without an end,

is to bury your fear without facing it, my friend,

until it grows into a monster that you can't control.

That's all, my friend.

While you face your fears, help me face mine

that you don't watch the previous and new episodes,

or look at the sources,

or subscribe on the channel if you're on Youtube.

Don't.

My friend, please remember,

that you're the reason for all what happened and will happen.

This isn't Eldaheeh's room, this is Room 206,

right next to Room 207, all good.

That's all, I'm off to sleep,

pray for me to be a bun tonight,

I want to have a burger with tomato, lettuce and mayo-cheese within me,

because being a bread-stick is so tiring in dreams,

they keep dipping me in scolding hot tea,

while I melt down with the dregs.

Abo Hmeed, your fears smell so fresh, hot and with sesame!

Subtitled by: Habiba Hazem