Bug (2006):

Seems all we ever talk about is bugs. But I guess I’d rather talk with you about bugs than nothing with nobody.

– Ashley Judd, as Aggy, In Bug (2006).

Horror that deals with the psychological breakdown of the mind is more cutting than any of the creature-features simply because mental illness is real and it can happen to any of us. Like the paranoia and bugs that are the themes of this story, mental illness can be insidious; it can creep up on us slowly and eat away at our reason and sense of reality.
Bug, based on Tracy Letts’ play (who also wrote the screenplay) and directed by William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection), is a powerful and stylish horror that improves with each viewing. The cast give perfect performances and the tension builds from a relaxed opening to a nightmare climax.
Ashley Judd plays Aggy, a waitress leading a lonely existence in a rundown Oklahoma motel room. She’s also a cocaine addict, plagued by a ringing telephone, and her violent ex-con ex-husband, Jerry (Harry Conick Jr.), while grieving over the abduction of her six-year-old son.
Desperate for love and companionship, Aggy latches on to Peter (Michael Shannon), a nervous drifter who confides in her that he’s on the run from the army after they had experimented on him by implanting hybrid bugs into his body and pumping him full of drugs.
Aggy rejects the attempts of her only true friend, R.C. (Lynn Collins), and the mysterious Dr. Sweet’s (Brian F. O'Byrne) attempts to “rescue” them from their destructive situation. He describes Peter as “a delusional paranoid with schizophrenic tendancies”.
Now closed off from the world, Aggy and Peter hole up in the motel room and wage war against the infestation.
The power of this story is in its ability to raise questions in the viewer’s mind. What is really going in with Aggy? Are the bugs and Peter’s conspiracy theories real or shared delusions that Aggy comes to accept as her sanity crumbles? Is it a case that it’s not really paranoia if (they) are really watching you? Are the titular bugs really insect or in fact a new form of surveillance? Are Aggy and Peter the subject of a cruel experiment? Could it simply be that Aggy and Peter, fuelled by cocaine, paranoia and irrational fears, are both mentally ill and they drag each other down into the abyss? Are Peter and Dr. Sweet real or just Aggy’s hallucination?
It’s a telling detail near the climax of the movie, at the moment when Jerry attempts to break into the motel room. From the inside we hear the thunderous roar of a helicopter, the room shakes violently, and powerful search lights shine in through the windows. However, outside the door, from Jerry’s perspective, there are no helicopters.
Madness breeds madness.

Whose Life Is It Anyway?, by Brian Clark:

Central character, Ken Harrison, is a successful sculptor with a beautiful girlfriend. After seeing one of his own pieces erected as a public work of art, he is involved in a car wreck. He wakes up in hospital, to find himself paralyzed from the neck down.
As the months drag by, he becomes psychologically tortured. He is after all an intelligent and creative artist, whose passion and self-expression comes through working with his hands. Above all else, he lives to sculpt. Now that ability and freedom is gone forever. Finally, he decides that life isn’t worth living if he can’t live on his own terms – the way he wants.
Some of the nurses are sympathetic, while the inflexible doctor has a God-complex and sees death as an enemy to be beaten and life as survival no matter what. His own argument is that if someone has not reached their allotted three score years and ten – then they have no business dying!
Harrison, after thinking over his situation, the prospect of the years still to come, able to do nothing apart from being locked inside a paralyzed body, decides on a plan: to be released from the hospital so that he can be allowed to die.
He breaks off his relationship with his girlfriend and employs the services of an attorney to fight his case.
The doctor then fights back and attempts to have Harrison committed under the mental health act.The movie version was released in 1981 and stars Richard Dreyfuss as Harrison, with Christine Lahti, John Cassavetes, Bob Balaban and Kenneth McMillan. It’s under-rated and has since been largely forgotten, but it deserves recognition as a topical re-release.
This could have been both depressing and maudlin, but the script is written with a dry wit to reflect Harrison’s intelligence, sense of humor and sensitivity.
A thought-provoking play on self-euthanasia.
As the title and argument states: whose life is it anyway?

Equus, by Peter Shaffer

Psychiatrist Martin Dysart is almost sleep-walking through middle-age on the downward slope to his twilight years. His marriage is passionless and empty. He goes to work at the hospital every day and helps the patients in his care.
At the behest of his friend, Hester Salomon, a magistrate disturbed by the case of Alan Strang, a young man who’s been arrested for blinding six horses, Martin agrees to take him on as his patient and becomes embroiled in discovering Alan’s motivations for his crime.
The psychiatrist turns investigator as he switches questions from the patient to his parents and uncovers Alan’s difficult upbringing in a home tainted with twisted religion and sexual repression. Rejecting his mother’s suffocating idea of God, Alan creates his own in the form of the horse, Equus.
But Alan’s God is a jealous God: “I am yours and you are mine.” And this inevitably is the driver for his heinous crime.
The more Martin learns about Alan, the more he is made aware of the bitter truth of his own existence and the role he plays in society. Martin finds himself in a dilemma; jealous of the all-consuming passion Alan has experienced in his life – even as deranged and twisted as it was – and realizing that he has never known a passion as deep, his own life is empty and he has no faith.
He confesses his envy to Hester:

“But that boy has known a passion more ferocious than I have felt in any second of my life. And let me tell you something: I envy it. …
That's what his stare has been saying to me all this time: 'At least I galloped! When did you?'”

As Alan worshiped his pagan idol and exulted in his passion and pain, Martin numbed himself with work and his studies of relics and mythical Greece.
Martin is left in doubt as to his expertise. Will he cure the boy, or simply remove his source of worship and ecstasy and make him like everyone else? In doing so, he knows that he himself will sacrifice the boy’s passion to the god of Normal. Passion, as he sees it, can only be destroyed by a doctor – not created, with the conclusion that the removal of passion turns people into ghosts.
In one section, Martin states the following as part of a self-deprecating monologue:

"The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes – all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills – like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest."

 

The 1977 movie, based on Peter Saffer’s play, is a powerful adaptation and one of Richard Burton’s best roles, with exceptional acting from Peter Firth, as Alan Strang, and Jenny Agutter as Jill Mason.
 
Equus is a dark, poignant and haunting drama that explores the nature of man, the passion and desire that drives him – sometimes to extremes, and the need for faith.