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

Peter Watkins, Oscar-winning director of The War Game, dies aged 90

Radical English director who clashed with the BBC over his ‘horrifying’ film about nuclear war, was forced to look abroad to continue working

Peter Watkins, the radical British film-maker who won an Oscar for his controversial drama-documentary The War Game, about a nuclear attack on Britain, has died aged 90. In a statement, his family said he had died in hospital on Thursday in Bourganeuf, close to the small town of Felletin in central France, where he had lived for 25 years. They added: “The world of cinema loses one of its most incisive, inventive, and unclassifiable voices. We would like to thank all those who supported him throughout this long and sometimes solitary struggle.”

Watkins was an uncompromising figure who clashed with the BBC after the latter failed to show The War Game on broadcast TV, and subsequently led a peripatetic film-making existence, looking overseas for backing. He was wary of the press. In a rare interview he spoke to the Guardian in 2000, saying he was “someone who has been working for 30 years to help shift the power balance between public and TV”. He added: “Had TV taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just.”

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