Pathologizing Pop Culture · a column by Sacha McBain, PhD · now broadcasting
Sacha McBain uses stories from film, television, literature, and art to explore the psychology of illness and healthcare. This October, we pulled the darkest ones. Eleven entries, three movements, arranged in the order they will hurt you.
Read at your own risk. Then go watch the films.
When Pathologizing Pop Culture launched, its premise was simple: use the stories we already watch, read, and argue about to explore the psychology of illness and healthcare. Along the way the column became an argument. Stories do not just reflect what illness does to us. They often name parts of it that medicine has not yet learned to name: the fear before a diagnosis, the uncertainty between appointments, the grief for a former self.
Horror, it turns out, is where that argument is loudest. Bodies that transform without permission. Patients who are not believed. Doctors who cannot tell what is wrong, and doctors who know exactly what they are doing. The monster on screen is rarely the thing the film is actually afraid of.
So for October we pulled the column's darkest entries into one place. Three movements. Start with the body. End with what medicine makes and unmakes.
New to the column? Sacha's own account of what it is for is The Benefits of Pathologizing Your Pop Culture.
Horror where the threat is not out there. It is already inside you.
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This is the column's thesis on the genre, and it does not let the genre off the hook: body horror makes us question why we fear bodily difference while using that difference to scare us. Anyone who has lived through illness, injury, or disability will recognize the trap.
"The monster may be intended as a critique of society's prejudice, but the audience is still being asked to experience the body as grotesque."Read the piece
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Cronenberg's transformation story as a chronicle of progressive disease: the slow loss of a body you thought was yours, and the people who have to watch. The scariest scene is not the fingernail. It is Seth joking about a "bizarre form of cancer" before he becomes the patient he was mocking.
"Like illness itself, the fly arrives without regard for merit, virtue, or readiness, disrupting the illusion that achievement or good fortune can protect us from bodily vulnerability."Read the piece
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Nearly fifty years on, the film still works because it understands what every patient waiting on a scan already knows: the body can hide what is wrong long before anyone can see it.
"The film's terror does not emerge solely from gore or violence, but from the recognition that the body can conceal danger long before it becomes visible to others or even to ourselves."Read the piece
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Gregor Samsa wakes up as a giant insect and his first worry is being late for work. Kafka wrote the definitive portrait of chronic illness under capitalism a century before the term "presenteeism" existed.
"The scene would be absurdly comical if it did not so accurately capture the lengths to which people living with chronic illness often push themselves to meet society's expectations of normality and productivity."Read the piece
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Fargeat's film closes the movement where it started, but turns the camera on the system: not the body that fails, but the culture that teaches us to fear it, and the intervention sold at the moment of maximum vulnerability with instructions, a phone number, a locker, and no one to call when it goes wrong. Read it as a film about informed consent.
"It changes the body without changing the conditions that made transformation seem necessary."Read the piece
The horror of being a patient whose reality is overruled by someone else's certainty.
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The devil is the least frightening thing in this film. What lingers is the obstetrician who tells Rosemary not to read books, the neighbors who manage her, and the husband who signs her away. Last October's column entry, and the reason this issue exists.
"The film externalizes the fears many pregnant people face: of being silenced, isolated, and stripped of agency during one of life's most vulnerable phases."Read the piece
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Gilman's 1892 story is Rosemary's Baby without the cult: a physician husband, a rest cure, and a woman whose account of her own mind is treated as a symptom. Read the two back to back and the century between them collapses.
"It exposes patterns of gender-based medical invalidation and asks what happens when a patient's reality is consistently subordinated to someone else's certainty."Read the piece
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A neurosurgeon, a hypnotherapist, and a family who believe they are doing something reasonable. Peele's film is about race first, but its machinery is medical, and its warning is for anyone who works inside a system.
"Harm is often perpetuated not solely by overt malice, but by individuals shaped within systems that normalize exploitation and dull moral alarm."Read the piece
Medicine as creator, medicine as the thing that cannot explain.
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Mary Shelley lost a child before she wrote it. That is the detail that turns Frankenstein from a parable about ambition into a story about what grief does with medical knowledge.
"Frankenstein is a musing of how easily medical advancement and harm can become entangled. Medicine continues to live within that tension."Read the piece
The column's first horror piece, and the one clinicians bring up most. Before the priests arrive, a twelve-year-old is strapped down for a cerebral angiography, and the scene is more disturbing than anything supernatural that follows. The real possession is the workup that finds nothing.
"Widely remembered as a landmark horror film about demonic possession, The Exorcist is, in many ways, also a story about medical trauma."Read the piece
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A reported death by sadness, the cardiology of takotsubo syndrome, and the question of whether the metaphor was ever only a metaphor. Not a horror film, but the most gothic idea in the archive.
"We sometimes reach for emotional explanations because they feel intuitively true. While medicine reaches for physiological explanations because they are measurable."Read the piece
Pathologizing Pop Culture publishes every other Thursday.
Read the full columnAll pieces by Sacha McBain, PhD. Curated by The Collective, October 2026.
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