Why Horror?

Like many of us hardcore horror fans, I watched my first horror movie at a very early age. 

Unlike many of you, I suspect, I didn’t like it.

I was a tremendously scared child. Not of any one thing in particular—not clowns or kidnappers or ghouls—but more a general sense of anxiety about the world and my place in it. That feeling wouldn’t go away until I was in my early twenties and still reappears from time to time to nip at my heels, but it was especially strong during my school years, when I was bullied to the point of self-loathing and couldn’t see any way forward. 

So when I stumbled across my first horror film—John Carpenter’s Halloween—before hitting double digits, I didn’t immediately recognize it for the escape it was. Friends recount with fondness how their first taste of horror made them feel less alone—how they began renting all the tapes they could, smuggling them into sleepovers, reading Fangoria under the bedcovers with a torch.

But not me. I was terrified. I thought Michael Myers was hiding in my closet with a knitting needle through his neck for a month. 

I vowed never to watch such a horrible movie ever again. 

That all changed, of course, but it happened gradually, tentatively. My first horror experience had planted a seed, but it would be years before it grew into the beanstalk I needed to break free. I climbed it leaf by leaf: picking up an R.L. Stine novel because I couldn’t get the cover art out of my head, then buying Point Horror books by the pound from charity shops and car boot sales; graduating to Stephen King after reading the back covers obsessively whenever I visited my older cousin’s house; breaking away from my parents in the supermarket to look at the pictures on the DVDs while they shopped; scouring the TV guide and circling every scary movie before, finally, plucking up the courage to sneak down after dark and watch one from behind the fragile safety of a sofa cushion. 

[Baby’s first horror collection, circa 2013]

There were certainly people who helped water the beanstalk: the babysitter who showed me The Others and told me not to tell my parents; the Girl Guide leader who told my troop a chilling ghost story about a dead child in the community center where we met; the friend who introduced me to a whole world of foreign horror cinema I’d never even imagined before. But by and large, my early horror journey was a solo one, and that was a good thing. It meant that when my college dorm experience proved no less alienating than high school, I now had the fully grown escape plan I’d been missing during those long, painful years. And when I eventually found my horror community, it felt like an added bonus. Horror had already saved my life. Now it was just showing off. 

That’s why I started this site: to make up for the time I lost. To keep watering that beanstalk, nurturing it, because I’m no longer scared of what awaits me at the top. It’s the people with the pitchforks on the ground you’ve got to worry about.

Perhaps along the way it will also help me answer the inevitable question I’m always asked by family and colleagues: “Why horror?” I want to tell them that it’s a genre for the misfits and survivors, the final girls and boys whose unkillable boogeyman isn’t a hulking mute man in a boilersuit wielding a kitchen knife but rather depression, trauma, and self-doubt. That it encourages us to keep going, keep climbing, even when we’re tired.

But I also know that some things have to be experienced to be understood. So maybe I’ll just continue to answer the question “Why horror?” with the simplest answer: “Why not?”