This article is an autoethnographic vignette of a schizoaffective sufferer learning about ‘saneness’ from slasher films. In this paper, theories from popular culture as pedagogy, Mad Studies, and cultivation theory, are used to confirm that saneness in motion pictures (specifically slasher films) can be conceptualized as a site of critical pedagogy. In addition, this paper relates the ways in which sane performativity in slasher films is consumable and made educative by inducting a new notion into adult education and Mad Studies: the pedagogy of saneness. This paper concludes that in order for viewers to steady their shattered psyches they have to learn to live with their ‘abnormality’ rather than shirk it into oblivion.
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