Paranoia Attack

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt proclaimed, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he probably didn't realize that he'd written a potential tagline for every paranoia-driven movie to follow that speech. The fears of paranoid characters are constructed, either by themselves or others around them, but our best filmmakers allow us to see the world from these fragile perspectives. Let's immerse ourselves in the unsettling terror of the mind.

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The Innocents

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Naughty children and dirty secrets can drive a woman mad. Based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Innocents stars Deborah Kerr as the governess of young Miles and Flora at a lavish country estate. Disturbed by the flirtatious charm of young Miles and tales of her predecessor’s suicide, the governess is plagued by visions of ghosts. In her mind, the only solution for this curse is forcing the children to confess that they also see these apparitions. Her desperate attempts prove both self-destructive and dangerous to those around her. As with most great paranoia cinema, the horror comes from the uncertainty of whether these ghosts truly exist or merely linger as projections of the governess’ psychic state. Laced with shocking sexual tension and lavishly shot in black and white, this adaptation continues to shock 50 years after its original release.

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Repulsion

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Because of Roman Polanski’s controversial private life, many might be surprised that the director helmed an insightful exploration of a woman’s fear of sexuality and rape. A meek manicurist, Catherine Deneuve’s Carole Ledoux is repulsed by her suitor Colin and her sister’s married boyfriend. The repressed virgin’s fears are not completely groundless - two men make forceful advances on her - but her fears turn her sister’s apartment into a haunted prison. Hands emerge from cracks in the wall, and Carole envisions men breaking in to rape her at night. Using numerous POV shots to align us with Carole’s perspective, the film blurs the line between reality and mere visions. It's a true nightmare in which nothing is certain and all should be feared.

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Memento

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If paranoia is defined as a baseless fear of one’s own creation, Memento is perhaps its most literal narrativization. Writer and director Christopher Nolan structured his breakthrough feature in reverse order, with each sequence depicting events that occurred prior to what we have already seen. This backwards storytelling allows us to sympathize with Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby whose medical condition has left him unable to store new memories. On a mission to avenge the rape and murder of his wife, he can only rely on his photographs and notes to keep him on track. Just as Leonard’s condition makes him fundamentally unable to trust everyone around him, the narrative structure leaves the audience in a constant state of skepticism, only sure of the fact that Leonard must be doing something wrong.

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Dogtooth

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Not all of cinema’s paranoid characters are necessarily victims of internal conflict. The fear in Yorgos Lanthimos’ deliciously perverse film is grounded in parental totalitarianism. Three young adults--two women and one man--have been raised in complete isolation from the world, and their parents feed them constant lies to keep them close. The parents convince their children that they will only be ready to enter the outside world when they lose a “dogtooth.” When the son encounters a cat for the first time, he stabs it to death with hedge clippers out of terror. The parents make the best of this situation and convince their children they must get on all fours and bark to scare away these dangerous creatures. Pitch-black comedy, this haunting film depicts how individuals employ fear to control others.

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The Shining

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Supernatural forces and a serious case of cabin fever exacerbate familial dysfunction and incite murderous appetite in Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 masterpiece. Jack Nicholson is violently nutty as Jack Torrance, the winter caretaker of the Overlook Hotel. Snowed in with his wife Wendy and son Danny, played by Shelley Duvall and Danny Lloyd, Jack is convinced by a ghostly apparition that he must “correct” his family. More than some of the other films in this collection, this adaptation of Stephen King’s novel accepts the haunting visions of the characters as absolute truth. Still, the Overlook Hotel illustrates the manner in which Jack’s own failings and frustrations are projected onto the individuals closest to him. The wide-angle lens cinematography of John Alcott creates a sense of distortion that suggests how Jack’s environment damages his psychic state.

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Paranoia Attack

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