Why claustrophobia is our worst nightmare and a fictional favourite

Night. Lowering my feet to the floor brings a creeping awareness of bony fingers beneath my bed, stretching towards me the darkness. But it’s not the monster that terrifies me, it’s being grabbed, pulled into the Underbedworld, because that breathless space itself is the source of my nightmares. I’m one of those people who hyperventilates in lifts if floors take too long ticking past. I understand why the worst punishment our society has is incarceration.

Experts say five to ten percent of people suffer from claustrophobia. I’ve been glued to the confined space of my TV by news before: by wars, terrorist attacks, trapped miners (Beaconsfield) or cavers (Thai soccer players). I’m not alone. Before their deaths were known, the tight submarine captivity of five men chasing the Titanic horrified me. Connecting the hubris of the doomed liner with the extreme wealth of the Titan’s passengers was irresistible. James Cameron, director of the film Titanic, told American ABC News he was “struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself, where the captain was repeatedly warned”.

But the passengers’ entrapment captured our attention, far more than their wealth. The Titanic sank in water so deep its pressure is not just psychological, it is beyond what humans can endure. Our worst nightmares and most compulsive entertainments are claustrophobic. And often involve water. Hannah Kent’s recent Devotion and Kate Grenville’s The Secret River both take readers aboard disease-riddled ships bound for Australia. For much of Phillip Noyce’s film Dead Calm, Sam Neill’s character is trapped in a sinking boat, not knowing if Nicole Kidman, cast as his wife, can survive. Claustrophobia is part of our cultural heritage, as terrifying as being confined to a bathroom attempting to escape a bushfire.

But it’s not unique to Australia. In The Premature Burial Edgar Allen Poe’s narrator has a terror of being buried alive. He has his family vault redesigned so he can unlock it from inside. He orders a coffin “warmly and softly padded”. In checking that quote, I stumble upon an 1896 tome by a Dr Tebb and a Colonel Vollum called Premature Burial and How it May be Prevented. They’re distrustful of listening for a heartbeat with a newfangled stethoscope. Instead, they suggest we make sure our dead can’t possibly recover. For instance: poisonous embalming fluid or cremation. The oblivion of death is better than confinement. But only fiction can take us there. In George Sluizer’s 1988 Dutch film The Vanishing, Rex wants to know what has happened to his missing wife. I hope it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that by the end, he finds out, in the worst way possible.

We all leave our most primal confinement in being born. Miki, in Jocelyn Moorhouse’s recent TV series Savage River, returns from prison to her hometown. After her bus emerges from a tunnel-like bridge, she finds work in a meat-processing plant. In one horrifying scene, a fellow worker laughs as he locks her in a cold storage room full of strung-up carcasses. Miki escapes, only to face death again, trapped beneath the collapsing body of a murder victim.

Similarly, the five-year-old narrator of Emma Donoghue’s Room has to learn what it means to be free and alive. Outside the captivity he’s shared with his kidnapped Ma, he actually yearns for the safety of Bed, not understanding that this safety was never real. We can’t perceive things correctly in captivity. We become how other people want to see us. “We are people in a book,” Ma tells Jack, and their captor “won’t let anybody else read it.”

Loading

Writer Paul Sheldon, in Stephen King’s Misery, is “locked” in a bed of darkness and agony. King admits his Misery warder is a stand-in for cocaine and it’s certainly not just kidnappers that can imprison us. In Fiona McFarlane’s The Night Guest, elderly Ruth’s pain makes her back “too unpredictable”. Her only escape from her house is into memories of her younger self. An interloper takes over Ruth’s life, but Ruth is mostly trapped by her age, her overactive imagination, and her declining cognitive skills. We are all on our way there, if we live long enough.

According to the Australian Psychological Society, claustrophobia is a “situational phobia” that can be treated by exposure therapy. Do films and novels count as exposure? Internet keyboard warriors have strong opinions about whether horror movies are helpful. Perhaps they desensitise us? With phobias, we want to be desensitised.