Horror Films as a Reimagined Space for Healing, and books too

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
August 17, 2023

I was searching for a way to prove a point to someone about my Ministers Of The Mystery series when I found this article. Horror Films as a Reimagined Space for Healing on Neuroscience News. It supports my view that #PTSD is a lot like a horror movie. We don't choose to buy a ticket to view it because it is just too damn expensive. Paying a price for surviving until we begin to heal can cost us everything we have. The thing I tried to show in the books is that we don't have to pay the fee for life.

From the day we survive we can begin to heal but we waste a lot of time waiting to "get over it" and then searching for the wrong ways to cope with the changes in us that we don't understand. I swear they should give every trauma survivor a class on healing so that we don't needlessly struggle.

Most of us don't even know the basics but don't feel bad about that since I knew more than most as a researcher without being able to acknowledge as a survivor of multiple events, I was also a member of this club no one wants to belong to. When I finally reached out to a couple of psychologists I know about what was going on, they said it sounded like I had a rare form of it. Now that made a lot of sense to me because I never could understand how I could understand others with PTSD so easily. We were all fighting the demons.

That's why I wrote the books. The article summarized the books perfectly and was written before I wrote them. I had no idea I was on the right track. Head smack moment for me because in an effort to prove a point to someone else, I proved a point to myself. 

But her story doesn’t stop there – in some ways, a whole new life, overshadowed by trauma, has only just begun, Ohio State University graduate student Morgan Podraza posits in an article published in the journal Horror Studies.

This was addressing the movie Halloween but it could have been about one of the main characters in the series. Grace Falls was fighting PTSD in The Scribe Of Salem but while some will just assume she had it from being an Orlando FL motorcycle police officer, it is not until the third book, 13th Minister Of Salem, does the reader discover it began many years before she comes back into Chris's life. 

“The way this film specifically deals with cycles of trauma and their connection to the experiences of survivors was really important to me because I think it is indicative of how we talk about trauma and survivors of trauma even today, and ways that people are spoken about negatively – their trauma is not acknowledged or they’re not given an opportunity for healing,” Podraza said.

Cycles of trauma are exactly what they go through, all the characters. They were all judged by others that did not understand and then helped by those who did.

Podraza cites scholarship in her article noting that survival of trauma itself is a crisis, that moving forward with life after a traumatizing event is also traumatic. The Laurie Strode character shows how this might look: Her obsession with protecting herself and others is tethered to her survival, and her outlook on life – a life saved by her own hand – remains grim because she’s convinced she is subject to a continuing threat.

And that last part was the point I was trying to prove.  The horror movie is not one we can walk away from as if it never happened. The thing is, our lives do not have to be one horror movie after another. We get to see love stories, victories, and yes, even comedies. As we heal leaving the horror movie no longer leaves us checking the back seat of our car to make sure the threat didn't follow us out. Yes, I did that after I saw the first Nightmare On Elm Street.

Authors struggle to weave their stories into something that will cause readers to enjoy or learn from them. The following just made me cry because this review is beyond what I hoped for. (Linkedin) 

Reviewed by K.C. Finn for Readers' Favorite
Penned by Kathie Costos, 13th Minister Of Salem is a work in the supernatural horror, suspense, and gothic drama subgenres, forming the third installment in the Ministers Of The Mystery series. It is best suited to mature adult readers owing to its dark content and adult situations. In this profoundly intriguing continuation of the series, we find ourselves back with Chris as word of his achievements and talents has spread, but this only leads to more trouble for our hero. Trying to get married would be hard enough without the constant death threats from the cult of the now-defeated Haman Cain, let alone the Master’s warning that his end-time is drawing near.

Kathie Costos brings us back into the world of gothic suspense, deep drama, and a chilling thriller with a bang in this third installment in the series. I found myself deeply involved in Chris’s psychological storyline. We see the painfully realistic damage that his adventures, battles, and triumphs have left him with over the events of the first two novels. I felt his pain, isolation, and pressure deep in my soul; such is the efficacy of Costos’s intimate narrative, thought, and speech portrayal. The darkest elements of the work are also well-handled to avoid being gratuitous but remain chilling to the core. I recommend 13th Minister Of Salem to fans of the existing series as another accomplished paranormal chiller to devour.

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