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Can a TV movie about ghosts traumatize people for over 20 years? Yes.

Francisco Miraval

According to a recent article published in the British Medical Journal, a TV movie about ghosts aired in 1992 traumatized some children in such a way that even 20 years later some of those persons are still dealing with the consequences of their post-traumatic stress disorder.

It seems one of the reasons for the negative emotional impact of Ghostwatch (aired on Halloween day two decades ago) was, according to the researchers, the fact that, even when the movie was clearly just a work of fiction, the movie was presented as a real case of investigators inside a haunted house.

The movie blurred the limits between reality and illusion and, in doing so, created such a panic among youngsters watching the movie that for several of them the experience was so traumatic in real life that they are still recovering.

There is the specific case of a boy who, after watching the movie, suffered from panic attacks, was unable to sleep alone or with the lights off, suffered from nightmares and flashbacks, and refused to go to school unless her mother was with him.

It seems almost ridiculous that a TV movie could cause such an emotional state that it will take years to recover. However, it is true.

Something similar happened on October 30, 1938, when millions of people on the East Coast of the United States sincerely thought they were facing a Martian invasion, because they were listening to a radio broadcast of Orson Wells reading an adaptation of War of the Worlds.

As it was the case with Ghostwatch, War of the Worlds was presented as a real event, in spite of being just a work of fiction. (It is good to note that there were frequent announcements during the broadcast saying it was just fiction.)

It seems it is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction (or illusion). In a sense, that distinction is perhaps irrelevant. According to an article published in 2006 by the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, many people experience in real life very real emotional distress when their favorite TV show ends or when a TV character they like “dies.”
According to the authors of the paper (Keren Eyal and Jonathan Cohen), people establish “significant emotional relationships” with those imaginary characters, even when people know those characters are just imaginary.

When that “relationship” ends, because the show is over or because the character “dies,” people experience many of the same symptoms they would experience when losing the relationship with a real person. The relationship with TV characters could be imaginary, but the emotional, social, and mental consequences are not.

What is the meaning of all this? It means that if people are ready to believe Martians or ghosts are invading because that is what the heard in the media, then they are ready to believe almost anything presented by the media. In a sense, that thought of people believing almost everything is even scarier than the scariest movie ever broadcast.

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