Your heart pounds in your chest as you run through the dark woods, trying your best to make it to your car or just to safety. You can feel him gaining on you, the sound of crunching leaves signaling his every move, but your legs just aren’t fast enough. You stumble over a conveniently placed log and fall to the hard ground. The tension builds, the unseen orchestra using more strings. Someone in the theater’s audience screams for you to get up and run. Out of breath, you try to scramble away only to be met with the eyes of your ultimate doom. …Sherlock Holmes? It’s more likely than you think. Whether one loves them for their creepiness, hates them for their cliches, or laughs at them for their silliness, tropes in horror movies are not uncommon, and one of the biggest tropes
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Thomas Widiger, a UK professor I spoke with who specializes in psychopathology, Holmes isn’t the only potential psychopathic hero; Breaking Bad’s main character Walter White falls within the same gray category. “[Walter White is] a meth dealer,” he began, “but he was the hero of the story and everyone wanted him to succeed, even as a meth dealer, which is very strange because he was hurting a lot of people’s lives with dealing this meth.” Such a complex relationship with the silver-screen psychopath is likely due to society’s own inability to cope with the idea that they are “not the captain of their own ship”, as stated by Dr. Widiger, and are instead controlled by psychological forces outside of their control. This inability to understand their own psychological limitations may also stem from misinformation by various psychological organizations which state that only 20-30% of people will experience some form of psychopathology, also known as mental or behavioral disorders, of which Dr. Widiger believes “frankly adds to the stigma because it gives the idea that the vast majority of the population has no psychopathology, and that we’re all extremely healthy
Thomas Widiger, a UK professor I spoke with who specializes in psychopathology, Holmes isn’t the only potential psychopathic hero; Breaking Bad’s main character Walter White falls within the same gray category. “[Walter White is] a meth dealer,” he began, “but he was the hero of the story and everyone wanted him to succeed, even as a meth dealer, which is very strange because he was hurting a lot of people’s lives with dealing this meth.” Such a complex relationship with the silver-screen psychopath is likely due to society’s own inability to cope with the idea that they are “not the captain of their own ship”, as stated by Dr. Widiger, and are instead controlled by psychological forces outside of their control. This inability to understand their own psychological limitations may also stem from misinformation by various psychological organizations which state that only 20-30% of people will experience some form of psychopathology, also known as mental or behavioral disorders, of which Dr. Widiger believes “frankly adds to the stigma because it gives the idea that the vast majority of the population has no psychopathology, and that we’re all extremely healthy