I love this scene from Friday the 13th 1980 (SPOILER ALERT). Imagine you’re a camp owner just walking in the isolated woods late at night after a rain storm and then someone suddenly flashes into your face a piercingly bright white light. You realize it’s the camp cook who hasn’t worked for you in 23 years.

If Pam had survived she might have been taken to a mental hospital to see if she were fit to stand trial for her killing spree. The original WAIS would have been administered since the WAIS-R was not published until a year after the events of the film.

Perhaps the great David Wechsler himself would have given the test, or at least analyzed the results. Wechsler felt his scale not only provided a reliable IQ, but rich clinical information, so he would have been looking especially hard at Pam’s scores on general knowledge vs verbal abstract reasoning. Usually these two tests correlate highly because it requires verbal inference to accumulate knowledge, but when the former is much higher than the latter, Wechsler suspected schizophrenia.

For example, Wechsler might ask Pam (or commenters Pill & Mug of Pee) “what 3 things do the sun and the moon have in common?” (not an actual item) and instead of giving the 3 correct answers, they would say something bizarre like “they’re both hard to photograph in Boston this time of year”.