New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘Halloween Kills’ film just another research project for SCSU prof
NEW HAVEN — People often ask history professor Troy M. Rondinone to name the scariest movie he’s seen.
The answer is “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” because it was “so realistic,” said Rondinone, a professor at Southern Connecticut State University.
Rondinone, who has watched hundreds of
movies, has studied and written about the way psychiatry is portrayed in movies, including the “Halloween” series for which a long-awaited installment comes out Friday. He also has written about how such movies can perpetuate stereotypes and prompt change.
“My anxiety was greater than watching the ‘Halloween’ movies,” he said, of seeing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
When Rondinone watches the “Halloween Kills” movie to be released Friday, he’ll be looking for “the quality of scares” but also whether the movie will include any connection to a psychiatric hospital.
He noted in his recent column in “Psychology Today” that he hopes the new movie leaves out the hospital.
For Rondinone, seeing the movie will feel like research, as he’s the author of the book “Nightmare Factories,” subtitled, “The Asylum in the American Imagination” and published by John Hopkins University Press.
The book includes the cultural history of how psychiatric hospitals are portrayed in popular culture — novels, movies, poems and heavily cited is the “Halloween” franchise started in 1978 and its killer Michael Myers.
Rondinone touches on all the other horror movies, as well, in the 2019 book, including “The Silence of the Lambs,” “Night of the Living Dead,” “Friday the 13th” and some older ones such as “When a Stranger Calls” and “The Snake Pit.”
“Even though the book is finished, my work never ends,” he said of interest in seeing the highly anticipated “Halloween Kills.”
When the original “Halloween” was released in 1978, America’s big psychiatric hospitals were beginning to close because they were too expensive and weren’t really working, Rondinone said.
The trend led to unjustified fears of danger for the general public and at the same time “Halloween” was released and the notorious fictional character Michael Meyers escapes a hospital and kills people, Rondinone said. “Here we have this (then) landscape of failed mental hospitals and the idea is they don’t really fix anyone. … At that same moment you’re going to the movie. That reinforces that image of the bad guy not being fixed,” he said.
Through the years at various times in history, psychiatric hospitals also were portrayed negatively in popular culture as being overcrowded, patients mistreated and, at others, run like big prisons with tyrannical leaders, he said.
Rondinone notes how pop culture can reinforce stereotypes but also the issue of policy changes brought about by pop culture affecting people’s perceptions.
For example, Rondinone writes, the 1976 American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting praised the “timely relevance” of the Nicholson movie and hope that it would break down some of the barriers regarding mental health.
Rondinone said in one “Halloween” movie, “The message in that movie is that mental hospitals are horrible places where they mistreat patients.”
“That doesn’t happen in real life,” he said.
Rondinone said characters like Myers are only out of a “screenwriter’s mind.”
Rondinone emphasized that he’s not a mental health expert.
In one excerpt from the book, Rondinone writes: the hospital “breakout scene in ‘Halloween’ is telling of the age of deinstitutionalization.”
The book states: “While Myers’s breakout is not an overt allegory of deinstitutionalization, it speaks to the social forces that wiped out the big state hospitals.”
The book, through history, talks about not only the perceptions of psychiatric hospitals being influenced by pop culture, but also the perception of psychiatrists, treatment and mental health issues in society.
In one of the examples he gives in the book, Rondinone says the famous scene in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” of actor Jack Nicholson receiving electroconvulsive therapy — also known as ECT and shock treatment — actually led to proposed legislation to ban the practice and to actress Carrie Fisher hesitating to get the treatment herself, according to her autobiography.
Rondinone said that in real life people receiving ECT were sedated, but in the movie Nicholson’s character was conscious, convulsing and looked as though he was being tortured.
Rondinone in the book quotes the American Psychiatric Association as saying the movie “did for ECT what Jaws did for sharks.”
Rondinone’s book states Fisher,who played Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” films, talked in her memoir, “Wishful Drinking,” about her decision to receive electroconvulsive therapy.
His book states, “Though a number of psychiatrists had already recommended it to her, (she said) ‘I couldn’t bring myself to consider it as it seemed too barbaric. My only exposure to it was Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which wasn’t exactly an enticing example. From the seizures to the biting down on a stick to the convulsions, it looked traumatic, dangerous, and humiliating.”
Ultimately Fisher decided to get the treatment, he wrote in the book.
No one is sure yet how “Halloween Kills” will play out, but in a recent piece he wrote for “Psychology Today” on the new movie and background of the “Halloween” franchise, Rondinone says, “Presuming this one continues where the last one left off, Michael is out of the institution and already cruising around the neighborhood. We can hope the filmmakers will leave out” the hospital.
While Rondinone will be sure to see the new “Halloween Kills,” he noted, “I won’t be the first person in line.”
“Halloween Kills” is the 12th movie in the “Halloween” franchise and as fans know, the happenings can’t be followed in a straight line because there is none.
Rondinone said he “can thank my insomnia” for his book. He was up late and came across a ghost hunter show in which they said they were at the “most haunted place in America” and it was an abandoned hospital. He said he wondered whether they always had been portrayed that way.
Rondinone started making lists, launched his research and watched more than 250 movies in chronological order.