Horror as Relief

Horror tends to be one of those polarizing things. You can love it or loathe it, but I’ve only met a handful of people who react neutrally to the concept. When you ask someone, “Do you like horror?” you’ve either just met a new best friend or you’ve truly disappointed someone, who will go on to tell you the negative things that happen when you consume fear recreationally.

Perhaps it’s my Scorpio Pluto in the first house, or having two Gemini wounds in the 8^th, but horror, to me, has always seemed like clarity. A genre that embraces the existential dread of life on Earth without pandering or whitewashing. A genre that has subgenres to reflect the different fears that afflict us based on our lived experience – feminist horror, black horror, white horror. Or you can subgenre by source of dread – psychological horror, body horror, slasher, monster movie.

One of my earliest realizations was that there was a profound lack of safety on Earth. I remember the first time I was spanked, the first time I was yelled at, the first time my father swore at me, the first time I was threatened to behave or else. These moments landed loudly in my psyche, constantly inviting the inquiry, if I’m not safe with my parents/teachers/caregivers, who seem like the only ones in charge of my well-being, then where am I safe?

Obviously, this inquiry can’t stay at the forefront of a child’s conscious mind, because it would incapacitate you. So, I kept busy – hiking through the woods, playing in the creek or reading books in a neverending stream like a chain smoker going for a world record.

But the horror didn’t stay out. It kept creeping in. Because as I got older and spent time at friend’s houses I learned other things quickly. At April’s* house we had to hide from her dad when he came home late smelling of liquor. At Jaden’s* house food was a precious resource and snacking would be punished. At Grace’s* house you steered clear of the pill bottles and her mother.

I felt so fucking helpless. In my own life, and in my friend’s lives. I tried to tell my parents what I was seeing and the concerns I had but they told me that was none of their business. It seemed that everyone’s home was a fiefdom, and even when you visited you were to leave them as you found them, unchanged and unremarked upon. Years in, I would come to question whether my reactions were hysterical, whether I could see things clearly or make sense of things (ah, those Gemini wounds creep up again).

If I was consistently freaked out by what I was seeing and experiencing, but no one else even wanted to talk about it, was I the crazy one? This was less a conscious inquiry and more of a lived knowing to keep my thoughts and inquiries to myself, with my only community support coming in the form of psychological horror: A genre that explores the unreliable narrator, unintended self-harm and the torment of not being able to trust your own sense of reality. I felt so seen watching those movies, and even as my taste for horror expanded, they were the only ones that could truly get under my skin. Had I become the crazed person brandishing a knife while telling a group of unarmed strangers to put down their weapons? The cognitive dissonance of what I felt I knew and what others were willing to confirm was loud enough to haunt me.

I’ve often assumed this was why marginalized people – women, BIPOC, queer, disabled – tend to be the primary audience for such films. Marginalization is a profoundly clarifying experience, because when you’re pushed out of the narrative you can examine it from a distance. Suddenly the patterns reveal themselves, and what’s been seen cannot be unseen.

There have been quite a few times though, in the last decade especially, where I cannot stomach my favorite genre. When the real world is screaming so loudly that to add more terror into my nervous system would be catastrophic. Times when I consume romance or fantasy or just forego screens and remember what it’s like to watch the wind kick up leaves. It happened when Trump won his first term, for a period after my son was born, when Roe v Wade was overturned, and again more recently.

Sometimes there’s enough clarity without hyper fixating on the pain.

But I always find my way back. Drawn by the creeps, the chills, even the aesthetic. It feels familiar and refreshing to let the scary parts have the spotlight, shake off the feeling of complacency from everyday life and watch shit truly hit the fan. Like ah, yes, I knew I wasn’t alone in this feeling. This person has been there, they’ve felt what I’ve felt, and they turned it into art. What a gift.

*Names changed