I’m a psychiatrist who was terrified of horror films – until I learned about ‘cinematic neurosis’

Why do scary movies thrill some viewers and send others running for the hills? Our writer gets to the bottom of his fear of the genre – with the assistance of Freud, clinical researchers and his six-year-old self I am six years old, and I am watching a man turn into a werewolf. The film is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, a 1948 comedy. I am staring up at our black-and-white TV fixated on the werewolf transformation unfolding in slow motion and I begin to scream so inconsolably that my parents must carry me upstairs to calm me down. That night was the beginning of my lifelong fear of horror films and of the supernatural, of darkness and of being alone in a house. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/nwdHRqF via IFTTT

Last Breath review – thrilling underwater survival drama

Woody Harrelson and Simu Liu star in a terrifyingly well-constructed adaptation of a documentary about a nightmarish accident

It does not take much to convince that, as an opening title card for Last Breath states, the job of a saturation diver is one of the most dangerous on earth. The facts, also summarily listed in the survival thriller’s introduction, speak for themselves: thousands of miles of pipeline traverse the ocean, dependent on human divers to maintain them; said divers spend days in pressurized chambers to reach depths of more than 1,000ft (300 meters), in near-freezing darkness. It may as well be outer space, as the fiancee of one diver bluntly but correctly puts it.

Thankfully, Last Breath, Alex Parkinson’s feature film adaptation of his 2019 documentary of the same name, lets the divers’ work – a maze of levers, pulleys, gas valves, imposing machines and the human capacity to detach from existential risk – largely speak for itself as well. And luckily for viewers, such work, baffling to anyone with a reasonable relationship with adrenaline, is fascinating even if nothing goes awry.

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