Linda L Zukowski

Have you ever gone into a movie and just could not sit through it? I don’t mean because it was boring, but because it upset you so much you could not stand to continue watching it. Or maybe a book you had to put down because the topic hit a little too close to home? Could that have been because it bumped up against some trauma you have either feared or experienced?

I’ll start with my own experience. When I was in my late 30s, I was asked to go to a movie, an outing with my husband, his boss, and his boss’s wife.  It was a thriller; I do not recall the name of it because it stirred up a lot of my own childhood trauma. It wasn’t my cup of tea, but I also wanted to be a supportive wife, so I went.

About halfway through, when the killer had already abducted the child and it was getting to the part where the captor was going to do something horrific to the child, I had to get up and go. I was visibly upset, shaking, tearful, nearing hysterics. My husband (now ex) followed me out, yelling and screaming about how I had humiliated him. He made me wait in the car until the movie was over and had zero sympathy for me on our drive home. You’d have thought I had single-handedly ruined his career.

It took me a long time to work it out with my therapist as to why I had such a strong reaction to this movie. I know from experience that movies, TV, and books that touch on themes that have caused me trauma in the past have actually helped, so why had this one been so different? First, I tried to blame my reaction on my husband’s behavior. But since the inciting incident happened before his reaction, I had to dig deeper. Then it hit me. It wasn’t the jump scare, after all, I loved watching Saw. It wasn’t the abduction, as I have read books where women were abducted by their enemy (enemy-to-lovers kind of books). No, it was because it was happening to a child, and I had been almost abducted as a child.

After many more sessions, I thought perhaps I could watch the movie and not be affected. I couldn’t. I turned it off.  I thought since it was now on DVD and I could watch it from the safety of my own home, and not in the darkness of the theater, that might help. It didn’t. I finally found something that I could not watch. It was too dark, even for a person who writes stories from the bad guy’s point of view occasionally.

I think everyone has a line they can’t cross when it comes to working through their own trauma unguided by a professional. While books and movies may help us begin to heal some of our more surface wounds, we may need a little more help with those deep, dark scars that can linger if our trauma is too much. The trick, I think, is finding out where that line is between surface and deep dive before we jump in.

What do you think of when you think of dark fantasy? Dark fantasy can encompass many different ideas, from complete moral corruption to a teenager falling in love with a 300-year-old vampire. Why is it always a teenage girl? Why not a teenage boy? Perhaps because we think of teen girls as innocent, but not teen boys? I really don’t have the answer to that question, just a hypothesis. But I digress.

I think Dark Fantasy, at least for myself, is a way to deal with real-life traumatic events in a therapeutic way. Hear me out on this, as it may seem a bit unorthodox.

One of my comfort TV shows to go to when the world looks bleak is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Yes, it’s a teen girl falling for a 300-year-old vampire. Yes, if he were an old human male, it would be disgusting, but hey, no matter the age of the female, simply falling for something that is not alive is disgusting, all on its own. Let’s look past this problematic plot point, shall we?

What makes Buffy one of my comfort shows is the mixture of dark themes with humor. Is it dark fantasy? You bet it is. A girl too young to consider a long-term relationship becomes infatuated with someone twenty times her age! He’s dead! She’s forced to fight for all of humanity before she even really knows what life is about. And she’ll never have a normal life. She lives in a world of evil, though some of what we might think of as evil turns out to be the good guys, and some of the good guys turns out to be evil.

Oddly, the show’s themes are right out of real life – you know if we take away the supernatural elements. Girls in particular are statistically more likely to be forced to grow up early, usually due to some form of abuse and/or neglect. We’re thrown into caretaker mode at an early age, sometimes even before we are teenagers, and have no guiding force to show us how to get it done. At least in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy gets a guide on how to handle the traumatic shift from girl to keeper of the world. Most of us do not have a watcher to guide us.

I have personal experience in this area, and perhaps this is why I find the show a comfort show – it gives me a good outcome to something in my life I had no control over. Maybe it’s a bit therapeutic as well, watching Buffy slay all the evil that I did not have a chance to slay. Granted, the evils in my life were not demons or vampires, but it doesn’t make what happened in my life any less evil. And it does it with a dose of humor all while offering me a controlled way to beat the evil – by watching Buffy do it.

It’s this feeling of comfort, a sense of controlling trauma and chaos on the written page, or viewed show/movie that I find when I write. Even the supernatural must find a way through their chaotic world, usually without a guide.

Here is where you’ll find interesting views, books, media, movies, shows, and all things dark and creepy will be located here.