September 9, 2025 • 18 mins
Brian A. Sharpless, author of Monsters on the Couch: The Real Psychological Disorders Behind Your Favorite Horror Movies (Chicago Review Press, Paperback). I believe, Dr. Sharpless would be an excellent guest for a Halloween show. The book is fun and engaging.Monsters on the Couch examines the underlying psychological conditions that drive horror movie characters and plots. Dr. Sharpless, with extensive clinical and research experience, offers a unique perspective on psychology and pop culture, making complex concepts accessible.An expert in various disorders, including rare conditions such as exploding head syndrome, Dr. Sharpless has been featured in The Atlantic, BBC, The Boston Globe, The Cut, Men's Health, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Psychology Today, Time, The Washington Post, and other notable publications.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good afternoon, doctor. How are you doing today.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hi, I'm mister Collins. I'm good. How are you? Absolutely
it's fine by the way.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I go okay. You know only because one of my
mentors in life, he was a doctor at wake Force
University and he would say, my name is doctor Ronald,
and so that's always want to make sure that I
address people the right way. I'm excited to share a
conversation with you because my first my first question or
observation is really connected to several years of what parents
(00:26):
are doing, like to their young kids, because we are
in this age of a lot of scary movies and
when they're taking their their preteens and even younger to
the conjuring what is that really doing to us psychologically?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Boy, that's a big question. Well, I can tell you
I was watching very scary movies when I was very young,
So I might not be the best person to ask,
but it really depends, like anything, the age appropriateness and
to know your kid. Just as having a heavy conversation
with your kid about something like death, you really want
(01:02):
to know what your kid is capable of understanding and
capable of tolerating, and that you could hit them sort
of at the right appropriate level. So I think horror
would be the same thing. You wouldn't want to needlessly
scare scare a poor kid and traumatize them, but if
they have an interest in sort of the darker aspects
of the human experience, and you know, it might be
a good foray into other deeper conversations that could actually
(01:25):
get you and your kid to get closer together.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Who knows absolutely, And there's so many different styles of
monsters these days. I swear there's more today than I've
ever had in my entire life, because today, I mean
it's you know, a movie that features the Joker. I
sit there and go, okay, well, this is going to
be a head movie. Then it's going to get inside
my head and I'm going to believe it's real.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, it's amazing. You've got the more body horror, which
is really grizzly and gorey, and then you've got the
suspenseful stuff that I think Alfred Hitchclock would be very
familiar with.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And one of the things that you kind of deal with.
I chuckled like a child, is that your next in
exploding head syndrome.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, there aren't too many of us that study it,
but I'll take the compliment. Yeah, so this is a
fascinating condition. It's not as dramatic as it sounds, or
else my office would look really ghastly. But this is
the experience of either going to sleep or waking up
and you hear a massively loud noise or feel a
sense of explosion in your head. It's been described as
a gunshot, like a bomb going off. One person described
(02:28):
it as like a wiley coyote trying to hit the road,
run there with the piano, and not surprisingly, you wake
up in the start. You're sweating. Some people, a small
percentage of people actually are so scared they report forgetting
how to breathe. Oh God, and they're left to wonder
what just happened in my environment? How did what is
going on? The good news is it's a relatively harmless condition,
(02:52):
but it can cause people some problems. I've worked with
folks that have it five to seven times every night,
so they're getting startled awake multiple times every single evening.
Not fun.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So now let me ask you a question. What is
it about a horror film that we're so attracted to?
Is it the element of escape or is it that
We just love being on that adrenaline of the rush.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, it's interesting because the same chemicals are released when
you're watching a horror film as if you were out
in the woods and ran into a mare. But when
you're in the safe confines of a theater, the experience
shifts and it actually becomes pleasurable. One author I described
as hijacking the fear response, and so you end up
feeling enjoyment, and if you're with somebody, you will actually
(03:36):
get additional feelings of closeness. So if any of your
audience is up for a first daid idea, take them
to a horror movie. You might increase your chances of
getting a second date.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
So funny you say that, because it's amazing that when
you come out of the theater how many people gather
and have conversations afterwards. It's almost like we're reassuring each
other that we're going to be okay.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, And I mean, Hollywood is great. It doesn't always
get the specifics of the real disorders, right, that's going
to shock your audience, I know, But it's really good
at creating relatable characters. I mean, you can find yourself
relating to a vampire who literally goes around killing people.
It's just shocking if you think about it, or if
they tap into universal domains like our fear of death.
(04:14):
Are fantasies of what it would be like to be immortal.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Or to be a zombie.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, yeah, that's less fun. I find myself it's harder
to relate to zombies than wear wolves for me.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
But aren't you in essence inside your book Monsters on
the Couch, it gives us that opportunity to take a
closer look as to what really could be wrong with
this person, as to what is making almost like an
armchair psychologist.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, well, I was just shocked. I mean I had
some semblance of the idea, because that's why I wrote
the book, but really going into the weeds of some
really rare disorders, I was shocked how common some of
them are. So I'm sure all of your audience has
seen or heard of invasion of the body snatch. Here's
the Stepford Wives films like that. There is a real
world condition called Capgra syndrome from the French neurologist Joseph Capgra,
(05:06):
and it consists of the delusional belief that one or
more people in your life has been replaced with an
identical looking duplicate, so it doesn't go the whole city
of San Francisco as it would like invasion of the
Buddy Centers. But you might believe that your husband and
your wife looks exactly like your husband and wife, but
it's not them. And even worse, you have the belief
(05:28):
that the duplicate might actually have kidnapped your real loved one.
And this is going to this was shocking, but seven
to ten percent of patients with Alzheimer's will have this delusion,
And if you have Lewis body dementia, you've got a
one in five chance of having this. So it's really
found on the silver screen, but you see when you're
(05:48):
seeing it in your personal life. It's tragic because these
people are relying on people to take care of them
who they don't believe are the real people.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I wish and would have known that when my mother
had dementia, because I mean, it would help me understand
you know why it is that she was making the
accusations that she was. But you know, because you're sitting
there going, oh, please, let's change the subjects here.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Oh wow, so she actually had that with you?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Well, yeah, because even with my grandmother, I mean she
she's sitting there thinking I was totally somebody else, and
it was like, yeah, yeah, and what you're trying to
do is it? Then you're biting your tongue and you
don't want to say anything because you don't you know.
And I didn't understand at the age of seventeen what
Alzheimer's even was for my grandmother. I just knew that
it was like, you have no idea who I am?
What's going on here?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah? Yeah, And it's it's just as devastating for the sufferers,
for the family as you know, like, well, how do
you process this person who you love and who knows
you is acting like they don't. Sincerely, I'm sorry I
had to go through that.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Do authors and directors do they step into a world
of darkness to better understand horror in real time?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Some do, some don't. I really doubt that the director
of Invasion of Body Snatches was reading about captor syndrome.
But if we look at movies about sleep paralysis, for instance,
so the director Rod Rodney Asher, who's done A Room
two thirty seven and The Nightmare, which was all about
sleep paralysis, he actually suffered from sleep paralysis himself Reasi,
(07:09):
and so in his documentary he not only interviewed a
number of people with chronic and severe sleep proalysis, but
he had a real, firsthand, visceral understanding of how scary
that experience it is. And for your audience, this is
where you're going to bed or waking up, you find
yourself completely unable to move. You're not just heavy in
your limbs, you are completely paralyzed except for your eyes,
(07:31):
and you're aware. You're not asleep. You can look around
your room in most cases, but you're having dreams while
you're awake a lot of the time, and eighty percent
of the time they're very, very scary.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Is that like opening up your eyes while you're sleeping
and you take note of the world.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well, you're not technically sleeping, you have conscious awareness, you
can think just like you can think right now, but
you're paralyzed and you're seeing, you're having hallucinations, but you're
having really dreams while you're awake. And this is probably
the best naturalistic explanation for why otherwise healthy saying people
believe they were legitimately abducted by aliens visited by ghosts.
(08:07):
If you look at the narratives of alien abductees, it
maps almost perfectly on to sleep paralysis.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
What is the psychology behind People don't like change, So
Hollywood continues to change the monsters. Does that? How do
people deal with that when the monster keeps changing?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, I think some of them do and some of
them don't. I mean, the one of the earliest Werewolf
film I think goes back to nineteen thirteen. Wow, And
then you know Robert Eggers is producing one right now
that's going to come out this Christmas. So some of them,
I think, some of those core experiences that really tap
into human psychology, like the idea you can turn into
(08:44):
an animal, I think they've They've been going on for
thousands of years. You can even see cave paintings that
depict people that are half animal half human. But then
some of the more modern ones, certainly, some of the
more psychologically driven ones, I think, I think, do shift
over time. You know, there was a spate of multiple
personality disorder what we now called dissociative identity disorder harror
(09:07):
movies that came out, and you know, and you could
see that in Psycho as well. But I think some
of those things shift over time, and in sleep paralysis,
the hallucinations seemed to shift over time. So I did
a study of young undergraduates, and I was expecting to
see demons and aliens and things like that that they
(09:28):
were hallucinating. But the number one figure was a shadow
person what which I wasn't even that familiar with. But
they're believed to be either these interdimensional beings or time
travelers who can't quite manifest on our plane fully, so
you see them just as these shadowy, quasi transparent figures
like the hat Man slender Man would sort.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Of be in there.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
But that's a real clear instance of how this experience
is being interpreted differently in twenty twenty five versus you know,
the nineteen eighties when some of these some of the
first research on this was going on.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Please do not move. There's more with Brian A Sharpless
coming up next, the name of the book Monsters on
the Couch, The real psychological disorders behind your favorite horror films.
We're back with Brian A Sharpless. Does it bother you
when millions of people consistently flock to a Freddy Krueger
store just to buy a T shirt? I mean I
(10:21):
always said back and go, My god, people please understand
that's a serial killer that you're supporting.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
It's even worse Freddy Krueger. And the original original script
was a pedophile murder.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh my good.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. Yeah in the remake they played that up. The
remake shoot. I can't remember the actor's name, but he
played Rorshack and the Watchman. I thought it was a
pretty good remake, to be honest. It got a lot
of flak, but yeah, yeah, we're attracted to the dark recesses,
the transgressive, and I think, you know, we all have
(10:53):
a dark side. We just don't like to admit it.
And the sad thing is if we don't admit it
to ourselves, we would be more likely to act upon it.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, you were talking about that Werewolf movie coming out
on Christmas. That doesn't shock me. That seems to be
the new theme right now. Every Christmas there's got to
be a scary movie.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty popular. And then they are the
Christmas horror movies. Oh yeah, we have like Sana carrying
an axe.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, and we accept that. It's like, yeah, that's a cool, dude,
I want him come on down my chimney buddy.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I would not want him to give me a gift.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
What is it about psychology that invites pop culture to
the dance? Because I mean, I know that you're studying
everything that we're doing. You're a people watcher or what
I call a silent watcher, but there's something about our
culture that really captivates your attention and then we learn
from that.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, I mean, for years, whenever I'd lecture, i'd i'd
incorporate horror movies. It's a really great way to teach
people about psychopathology, which is the scientific study of mental disorders.
But more generally, clinical psychology has a lot to teach
us about monsters, both on the silver screen and you
know in real life. You know, you hear a lot
of very interesting things when you're a clinical psychologists, either
(12:09):
in therapy or in research, and people will open up
to really the very uncomfortable urges they have, the things
they've done that they're not proud of, and you know,
you really get a window into what people really think
that they might not want to share at a dinner party,
for instance. And that's what really attracted me to the field,
(12:31):
is really getting a deep insight into somebody it's nice
to help people, but if I'm being completely honest, I'm
just fascinated by people. I really like to understand what
makes them tick and why they do the strange things
that they do.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
A modern day monster that I don't think I'm ever
going to get over. Squid Games the girl, you know
that where they were, they they're trying, they can't move
and so therefore, I mean, she then shoots them down
on the spot. It's that gigantic thing with a gun
in the center of it.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I don't think I saw that episode.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Actually, Oh my god. Well it's like this just jig
a machine and inside of it are the guns and
so the So what happens is is they have to
play basically a game of frozen tag. Basically they can
only go so far and when everything stops and if
you're moving, please you're gone. That's a monster.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, yeah, terrifying stuff. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So then how do you deal? How does when it
comes to somebody coming to you that says, hey, look,
I'm I'm in a real situation. These horror films are
scaring me. It's really starting to affect my life. How
do you get people to calm down and find a
peaceful path.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's actually never happened, relieve it or not. I've never
had somebody come in that that was really the problem.
I mean a lot of people will kind of have
interesting associations with the horror movies. You can actually use
horror films to help treat certain phobias. If you have
someone with the blood phobia, for instance, you could more
safely expose them to a fear of blood by showing
(13:52):
them pictures and images of blood rather than you know,
take them to a hospital or we're going to get
their blood drawn. But yeah, I actually never happen anybody
that's come to me with that problem. But certainly some
of my patients, especially after the book came out, We're
bringing horror movies in because they knew I was kind
of interested in them.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
See see, So now is there has there been anything
that has caught you off guard? Where you go? WHOA
didn't see that one coming?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
In terms of patients or movies.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
How about let's both of them because I'm well, I mean,
because I mean, if Hollywood is really mimicking real life,
I guess it's connected to real people.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, I mean doing research on the book, I found
a case of a person who had the delusion that
they turned into a gerbil, not a wolf, but a gurbil. Yeah, no,
I'm serious, as a peer review Dusty Old Psychiatry journal.
And the guy he started sleeping under his bed and
his nose actually started wiggling like in a cute way
(14:52):
that the rodents do. There was a case in Belgium
just a couple of years ago of a woman who
believes she turned into a chick. So we were only
able to a colleague in the Netherlands and I were
only able to find seventy seven cases of people that
legitimately believe they turned into animals and acquired their characteristics.
The posh term for that's clinical theory entropy. But in
(15:14):
his case, in his practice, he works at a psychiatric
hospital in the Hague and he sees a case of
this about once every one to two years, so it's
not like a major public health threat, but it's more
common than you would think just looking at the literature.
We only found seventy seven cases, and I'm very proud
of the fact I might have been the first person
(15:34):
to do inferential statistics on wear wolves.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
See and of course right away I'm thinking through Native
American spirituality and shamanism. That's a shape shifter.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, yeah, it's all over the place. You see. You
see beliefs of human animal transformation in places that don't
even have wolves. You have wear tigers, wear crocodiles, wear lions,
wear bears, and like I said, you can see in
cave paintings. But we don't know what they mean. We
don't know. Do people think they actually turned in animals
(16:02):
or were they kind of making a psychological comment I'm
as brave as the lion. Or were they kind of
wearing animal prints like we might wear a sports jersey today.
We have no idea because all we has the paintings.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Wow, you talk about the were wolves, the wear lions,
where tigers? Where is Bigfoot? He's got to be a
part of this.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh Bigfoot, He's totally real. I spent some time. I
spent some time in the Pacific Northwest. I went squatching once.
Fourteen percent of the population believes in Bigfoot. Yeah, I'm
open to the possibility, but I'm more skeptical on that.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Wow, where can people go to find out more about
you and jump on everything that you're doing? Because I
love where you are with this.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Oh, thanks, Yeah, I have a lot of fun. I
am rarely bored at my job. You can find out
where I give talks and my publications on my website
Briansharplist dot com. I give a lot of public lectures.
I'm giving a chat on the psychology of conspiracy theories
next Sunday in Richmond, virgin Yeah. So list my speaking
engagements and my books, and you can find my books
(17:06):
on all my books on Amazon. I have three outs
from Oxford University Press that are more nerdy psychology books,
and then the one you've been asking me about is
put out by Chicago Review Press. Wow, And it's all
available wherever weird books are sold.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Are you getting any clients or anything like that coming
in there about Alien Earth? Because that's I mean, now
that the aliens have come to Earth, that right there
is freaking me out. I would have to see somebody
a professional too, you know, because it's freaking me out.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. I haven't had those cases come by me yet,
but those cases of people who believe that their loved
ones have been replaced, I've seen three cases of that. Yep.
And just wait till the reptilians get popular.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I came out of the premiere that night, and everybody's going,
you know, how close we are to this really happening.
Don't see that to me, don't see that kind of stuff.
We can't be that close. Oh we're that close, and
so it really scarce me.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
I hear a lot of scary stuff in my job.
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Well, please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you. Brian.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Oh, thank you so much. I had a great time.
Will you can I say You've got a fantastic voice
for radio. I'm very jealous.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well, it's not mine. It's actually it's like I always
tell people, it belongs to radio station consultants and program
directors that spent many hours with me sitting down saying
say it this way, say it this way.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Make sure the ws.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Oh god, when I was at when I was at
light one o two point nine, it was light one
oh two point nine, not light one or two point
And of course when I was at cook it was serious.
Oh yeah, it was k oh okay, not k okay.
So oh yeah, they work with you big time. Oh yeah,
they are the monsters of radio. Do your research. They exist.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Well, I think your book can be the sequel.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
You'd be brilliant today. Okay, hey, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Cheers,
Good afternoon, doctor. How are you doing today.
Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hi, I'm mister Collins. I'm good. How are you? Absolutely
it's fine by the way.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
I go okay. You know only because one of my
mentors in life, he was a doctor at wake Force
University and he would say, my name is doctor Ronald,
and so that's always want to make sure that I
address people the right way. I'm excited to share a
conversation with you because my first my first question or
observation is really connected to several years of what parents
(00:26):
are doing, like to their young kids, because we are
in this age of a lot of scary movies and
when they're taking their their preteens and even younger to
the conjuring what is that really doing to us psychologically?
Speaker 2 (00:40):
Boy, that's a big question. Well, I can tell you
I was watching very scary movies when I was very young,
So I might not be the best person to ask,
but it really depends, like anything, the age appropriateness and
to know your kid. Just as having a heavy conversation
with your kid about something like death, you really want
(01:02):
to know what your kid is capable of understanding and
capable of tolerating, and that you could hit them sort
of at the right appropriate level. So I think horror
would be the same thing. You wouldn't want to needlessly
scare scare a poor kid and traumatize them, but if
they have an interest in sort of the darker aspects
of the human experience, and you know, it might be
a good foray into other deeper conversations that could actually
(01:25):
get you and your kid to get closer together.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Who knows absolutely, And there's so many different styles of
monsters these days. I swear there's more today than I've
ever had in my entire life, because today, I mean
it's you know, a movie that features the Joker. I
sit there and go, okay, well, this is going to
be a head movie. Then it's going to get inside
my head and I'm going to believe it's real.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Yeah, it's amazing. You've got the more body horror, which
is really grizzly and gorey, and then you've got the
suspenseful stuff that I think Alfred Hitchclock would be very
familiar with.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
And one of the things that you kind of deal with.
I chuckled like a child, is that your next in
exploding head syndrome.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, there aren't too many of us that study it,
but I'll take the compliment. Yeah, so this is a
fascinating condition. It's not as dramatic as it sounds, or
else my office would look really ghastly. But this is
the experience of either going to sleep or waking up
and you hear a massively loud noise or feel a
sense of explosion in your head. It's been described as
a gunshot, like a bomb going off. One person described
(02:28):
it as like a wiley coyote trying to hit the road,
run there with the piano, and not surprisingly, you wake
up in the start. You're sweating. Some people, a small
percentage of people actually are so scared they report forgetting
how to breathe. Oh God, and they're left to wonder
what just happened in my environment? How did what is
going on? The good news is it's a relatively harmless condition,
(02:52):
but it can cause people some problems. I've worked with
folks that have it five to seven times every night,
so they're getting startled awake multiple times every single evening.
Not fun.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
So now let me ask you a question. What is
it about a horror film that we're so attracted to?
Is it the element of escape or is it that
We just love being on that adrenaline of the rush.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, it's interesting because the same chemicals are released when
you're watching a horror film as if you were out
in the woods and ran into a mare. But when
you're in the safe confines of a theater, the experience
shifts and it actually becomes pleasurable. One author I described
as hijacking the fear response, and so you end up
feeling enjoyment, and if you're with somebody, you will actually
(03:36):
get additional feelings of closeness. So if any of your
audience is up for a first daid idea, take them
to a horror movie. You might increase your chances of
getting a second date.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
So funny you say that, because it's amazing that when
you come out of the theater how many people gather
and have conversations afterwards. It's almost like we're reassuring each
other that we're going to be okay.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, And I mean, Hollywood is great. It doesn't always
get the specifics of the real disorders, right, that's going
to shock your audience, I know, But it's really good
at creating relatable characters. I mean, you can find yourself
relating to a vampire who literally goes around killing people.
It's just shocking if you think about it, or if
they tap into universal domains like our fear of death.
(04:14):
Are fantasies of what it would be like to be immortal.
Speaker 1 (04:18):
Or to be a zombie.
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, yeah, that's less fun. I find myself it's harder
to relate to zombies than wear wolves for me.
Speaker 1 (04:27):
But aren't you in essence inside your book Monsters on
the Couch, it gives us that opportunity to take a
closer look as to what really could be wrong with
this person, as to what is making almost like an
armchair psychologist.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, well, I was just shocked. I mean I had
some semblance of the idea, because that's why I wrote
the book, but really going into the weeds of some
really rare disorders, I was shocked how common some of
them are. So I'm sure all of your audience has
seen or heard of invasion of the body snatch. Here's
the Stepford Wives films like that. There is a real
world condition called Capgra syndrome from the French neurologist Joseph Capgra,
(05:06):
and it consists of the delusional belief that one or
more people in your life has been replaced with an
identical looking duplicate, so it doesn't go the whole city
of San Francisco as it would like invasion of the
Buddy Centers. But you might believe that your husband and
your wife looks exactly like your husband and wife, but
it's not them. And even worse, you have the belief
(05:28):
that the duplicate might actually have kidnapped your real loved one.
And this is going to this was shocking, but seven
to ten percent of patients with Alzheimer's will have this delusion,
And if you have Lewis body dementia, you've got a
one in five chance of having this. So it's really
found on the silver screen, but you see when you're
(05:48):
seeing it in your personal life. It's tragic because these
people are relying on people to take care of them
who they don't believe are the real people.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I wish and would have known that when my mother
had dementia, because I mean, it would help me understand
you know why it is that she was making the
accusations that she was. But you know, because you're sitting
there going, oh, please, let's change the subjects here.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
Oh wow, so she actually had that with you?
Speaker 1 (06:09):
Well, yeah, because even with my grandmother, I mean she
she's sitting there thinking I was totally somebody else, and
it was like, yeah, yeah, and what you're trying to
do is it? Then you're biting your tongue and you
don't want to say anything because you don't you know.
And I didn't understand at the age of seventeen what
Alzheimer's even was for my grandmother. I just knew that
it was like, you have no idea who I am?
What's going on here?
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Yeah? Yeah, And it's it's just as devastating for the sufferers,
for the family as you know, like, well, how do
you process this person who you love and who knows
you is acting like they don't. Sincerely, I'm sorry I
had to go through that.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Do authors and directors do they step into a world
of darkness to better understand horror in real time?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
Some do, some don't. I really doubt that the director
of Invasion of Body Snatches was reading about captor syndrome.
But if we look at movies about sleep paralysis, for instance,
so the director Rod Rodney Asher, who's done A Room
two thirty seven and The Nightmare, which was all about
sleep paralysis, he actually suffered from sleep paralysis himself Reasi,
(07:09):
and so in his documentary he not only interviewed a
number of people with chronic and severe sleep proalysis, but
he had a real, firsthand, visceral understanding of how scary
that experience it is. And for your audience, this is
where you're going to bed or waking up, you find
yourself completely unable to move. You're not just heavy in
your limbs, you are completely paralyzed except for your eyes,
(07:31):
and you're aware. You're not asleep. You can look around
your room in most cases, but you're having dreams while
you're awake a lot of the time, and eighty percent
of the time they're very, very scary.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
Is that like opening up your eyes while you're sleeping
and you take note of the world.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well, you're not technically sleeping, you have conscious awareness, you
can think just like you can think right now, but
you're paralyzed and you're seeing, you're having hallucinations, but you're
having really dreams while you're awake. And this is probably
the best naturalistic explanation for why otherwise healthy saying people
believe they were legitimately abducted by aliens visited by ghosts.
(08:07):
If you look at the narratives of alien abductees, it
maps almost perfectly on to sleep paralysis.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
What is the psychology behind People don't like change, So
Hollywood continues to change the monsters. Does that? How do
people deal with that when the monster keeps changing?
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, I think some of them do and some of
them don't. I mean, the one of the earliest Werewolf
film I think goes back to nineteen thirteen. Wow, And
then you know Robert Eggers is producing one right now
that's going to come out this Christmas. So some of them,
I think, some of those core experiences that really tap
into human psychology, like the idea you can turn into
(08:44):
an animal, I think they've They've been going on for
thousands of years. You can even see cave paintings that
depict people that are half animal half human. But then
some of the more modern ones, certainly, some of the
more psychologically driven ones, I think, I think, do shift
over time. You know, there was a spate of multiple
personality disorder what we now called dissociative identity disorder harror
(09:07):
movies that came out, and you know, and you could
see that in Psycho as well. But I think some
of those things shift over time, and in sleep paralysis,
the hallucinations seemed to shift over time. So I did
a study of young undergraduates, and I was expecting to
see demons and aliens and things like that that they
(09:28):
were hallucinating. But the number one figure was a shadow
person what which I wasn't even that familiar with. But
they're believed to be either these interdimensional beings or time
travelers who can't quite manifest on our plane fully, so
you see them just as these shadowy, quasi transparent figures
like the hat Man slender Man would sort.
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Of be in there.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
But that's a real clear instance of how this experience
is being interpreted differently in twenty twenty five versus you know,
the nineteen eighties when some of these some of the
first research on this was going on.
Speaker 1 (10:00):
Please do not move. There's more with Brian A Sharpless
coming up next, the name of the book Monsters on
the Couch, The real psychological disorders behind your favorite horror films.
We're back with Brian A Sharpless. Does it bother you
when millions of people consistently flock to a Freddy Krueger
store just to buy a T shirt? I mean I
(10:21):
always said back and go, My god, people please understand
that's a serial killer that you're supporting.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
It's even worse Freddy Krueger. And the original original script
was a pedophile murder.
Speaker 1 (10:32):
Oh my good.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Yeah. Yeah in the remake they played that up. The
remake shoot. I can't remember the actor's name, but he
played Rorshack and the Watchman. I thought it was a
pretty good remake, to be honest. It got a lot
of flak, but yeah, yeah, we're attracted to the dark recesses,
the transgressive, and I think, you know, we all have
(10:53):
a dark side. We just don't like to admit it.
And the sad thing is if we don't admit it
to ourselves, we would be more likely to act upon it.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Yeah, you were talking about that Werewolf movie coming out
on Christmas. That doesn't shock me. That seems to be
the new theme right now. Every Christmas there's got to
be a scary movie.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty popular. And then they are the
Christmas horror movies. Oh yeah, we have like Sana carrying
an axe.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, and we accept that. It's like, yeah, that's a cool, dude,
I want him come on down my chimney buddy.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I would not want him to give me a gift.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
What is it about psychology that invites pop culture to
the dance? Because I mean, I know that you're studying
everything that we're doing. You're a people watcher or what
I call a silent watcher, but there's something about our
culture that really captivates your attention and then we learn
from that.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Yeah, I mean, for years, whenever I'd lecture, i'd i'd
incorporate horror movies. It's a really great way to teach
people about psychopathology, which is the scientific study of mental disorders.
But more generally, clinical psychology has a lot to teach
us about monsters, both on the silver screen and you
know in real life. You know, you hear a lot
of very interesting things when you're a clinical psychologists, either
(12:09):
in therapy or in research, and people will open up
to really the very uncomfortable urges they have, the things
they've done that they're not proud of, and you know,
you really get a window into what people really think
that they might not want to share at a dinner party,
for instance. And that's what really attracted me to the field,
(12:31):
is really getting a deep insight into somebody it's nice
to help people, but if I'm being completely honest, I'm
just fascinated by people. I really like to understand what
makes them tick and why they do the strange things
that they do.
Speaker 1 (12:43):
A modern day monster that I don't think I'm ever
going to get over. Squid Games the girl, you know
that where they were, they they're trying, they can't move
and so therefore, I mean, she then shoots them down
on the spot. It's that gigantic thing with a gun
in the center of it.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I don't think I saw that episode.
Speaker 1 (12:56):
Actually, Oh my god. Well it's like this just jig
a machine and inside of it are the guns and
so the So what happens is is they have to
play basically a game of frozen tag. Basically they can
only go so far and when everything stops and if
you're moving, please you're gone. That's a monster.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
Yeah, yeah, terrifying stuff. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
So then how do you deal? How does when it
comes to somebody coming to you that says, hey, look,
I'm I'm in a real situation. These horror films are
scaring me. It's really starting to affect my life. How
do you get people to calm down and find a
peaceful path.
Speaker 2 (13:31):
That's actually never happened, relieve it or not. I've never
had somebody come in that that was really the problem.
I mean a lot of people will kind of have
interesting associations with the horror movies. You can actually use
horror films to help treat certain phobias. If you have
someone with the blood phobia, for instance, you could more
safely expose them to a fear of blood by showing
(13:52):
them pictures and images of blood rather than you know,
take them to a hospital or we're going to get
their blood drawn. But yeah, I actually never happen anybody
that's come to me with that problem. But certainly some
of my patients, especially after the book came out, We're
bringing horror movies in because they knew I was kind
of interested in them.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
See see, So now is there has there been anything
that has caught you off guard? Where you go? WHOA
didn't see that one coming?
Speaker 2 (14:20):
In terms of patients or movies.
Speaker 1 (14:22):
How about let's both of them because I'm well, I mean,
because I mean, if Hollywood is really mimicking real life,
I guess it's connected to real people.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Yeah, I mean doing research on the book, I found
a case of a person who had the delusion that
they turned into a gerbil, not a wolf, but a gurbil. Yeah, no,
I'm serious, as a peer review Dusty Old Psychiatry journal.
And the guy he started sleeping under his bed and
his nose actually started wiggling like in a cute way
(14:52):
that the rodents do. There was a case in Belgium
just a couple of years ago of a woman who
believes she turned into a chick. So we were only
able to a colleague in the Netherlands and I were
only able to find seventy seven cases of people that
legitimately believe they turned into animals and acquired their characteristics.
The posh term for that's clinical theory entropy. But in
(15:14):
his case, in his practice, he works at a psychiatric
hospital in the Hague and he sees a case of
this about once every one to two years, so it's
not like a major public health threat, but it's more
common than you would think just looking at the literature.
We only found seventy seven cases, and I'm very proud
of the fact I might have been the first person
(15:34):
to do inferential statistics on wear wolves.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
See and of course right away I'm thinking through Native
American spirituality and shamanism. That's a shape shifter.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
Yeah, yeah, it's all over the place. You see. You
see beliefs of human animal transformation in places that don't
even have wolves. You have wear tigers, wear crocodiles, wear lions,
wear bears, and like I said, you can see in
cave paintings. But we don't know what they mean. We
don't know. Do people think they actually turned in animals
(16:02):
or were they kind of making a psychological comment I'm
as brave as the lion. Or were they kind of
wearing animal prints like we might wear a sports jersey today.
We have no idea because all we has the paintings.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
Wow, you talk about the were wolves, the wear lions,
where tigers? Where is Bigfoot? He's got to be a
part of this.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Oh Bigfoot, He's totally real. I spent some time. I
spent some time in the Pacific Northwest. I went squatching once.
Fourteen percent of the population believes in Bigfoot. Yeah, I'm
open to the possibility, but I'm more skeptical on that.
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Wow, where can people go to find out more about
you and jump on everything that you're doing? Because I
love where you are with this.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Oh, thanks, Yeah, I have a lot of fun. I
am rarely bored at my job. You can find out
where I give talks and my publications on my website
Briansharplist dot com. I give a lot of public lectures.
I'm giving a chat on the psychology of conspiracy theories
next Sunday in Richmond, virgin Yeah. So list my speaking
engagements and my books, and you can find my books
(17:06):
on all my books on Amazon. I have three outs
from Oxford University Press that are more nerdy psychology books,
and then the one you've been asking me about is
put out by Chicago Review Press. Wow, And it's all
available wherever weird books are sold.
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Are you getting any clients or anything like that coming
in there about Alien Earth? Because that's I mean, now
that the aliens have come to Earth, that right there
is freaking me out. I would have to see somebody
a professional too, you know, because it's freaking me out.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Yeah. I haven't had those cases come by me yet,
but those cases of people who believe that their loved
ones have been replaced, I've seen three cases of that. Yep.
And just wait till the reptilians get popular.
Speaker 1 (17:46):
I came out of the premiere that night, and everybody's going,
you know, how close we are to this really happening.
Don't see that to me, don't see that kind of stuff.
We can't be that close. Oh we're that close, and
so it really scarce me.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
I hear a lot of scary stuff in my job.
Oh my god.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
Well, please come back to this show anytime in the future.
The door is always going to be open for you. Brian.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Oh, thank you so much. I had a great time.
Will you can I say You've got a fantastic voice
for radio. I'm very jealous.
Speaker 1 (18:11):
Well, it's not mine. It's actually it's like I always
tell people, it belongs to radio station consultants and program
directors that spent many hours with me sitting down saying
say it this way, say it this way.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
Make sure the ws.
Speaker 1 (18:24):
Oh god, when I was at when I was at
light one o two point nine, it was light one
oh two point nine, not light one or two point
And of course when I was at cook it was serious.
Oh yeah, it was k oh okay, not k okay.
So oh yeah, they work with you big time. Oh yeah,
they are the monsters of radio. Do your research. They exist.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Well, I think your book can be the sequel.
Speaker 1 (18:50):
You'd be brilliant today. Okay, hey, thanks so much.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Cheers,
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