Embracing the Horror

I used to hate the horror genre for the longest time. I could hardly even stomach the thought of it, with just the miniscule, lingering idea of monsters creeping outside the house or clowns lurking in the sewers being enough to keep me up at night. When YouTube started showing horror movie trailers as ads at the beginning of their videos, I installed an adblocker.

The worst of it all wasn’t the jump-scares (which, granted, I do still hate, only now because I think they’re a cheap and lazy horror device) or the bloody gore of it all—I’m not particularly squeamish or skittish. I was born on Halloween (the irony isn’t lost on me) and so like to think I was primed for that sort of stuff since Day 1. The worst was the uneasiness.

It’s the feeling you get from just behind your shoulder when you sit with your back facing a window, like you’re being watched. It’s the figure you think you caught a glimpse of in the mirror right when you opened your eyes after rinsing your face. It’s the footsteps you hear faintly when you could have sworn you were home alone. It’s the too-wide smile of the waitress at the off-road diner.

I hated those uneasy, eerie feelings I’d get after watching a scary movie, once everyone’s left the theater and gone home for the night. Because that was when I was finally left alone with my thoughts, and when the uneasiness came flooding in. Without getting too couch-therapy about it, I think I used to be afraid of horror because I used to be afraid of the uncertainty of fear. I couldn’t stand not knowing whether there really was a figure behind me that disappeared when I turned around, no matter how ridiculously implausible the horror movie that put that idea in my head was. Our brains are wired to be afraid of the unknown–it’s why we so often cling to the familiar. But when confronted with questions of what lurks in the unknown through horror stories, and when those questions are never answered in real life, all we’re left with is the fear. The monster in the dark stays there, leaving you to wonder: what happens next?

Nobody likes to live with fear, but the problem was that once I started thinking about it, I couldn’t stop. And so, I decided adamantly that I hated horror.

This hatred persisted throughout all of my childhood and adolescence, up until just a few years ago, when I first came across one of my favorite TV shows today. The Haunting of Hill House is a 1-season horror series that was created by Mike Flanagan in 2018, based on the book by the same name by author Shirley Jackson. The story centers around 5 siblings that grew up in a haunted house, Hill House, together, each scarred in a different way by the traumatic events they endured living in the house. As adults, the siblings are distant, but brought closer together when events lead each of them back to Hill House. The story is horrifying, but also beautiful and heartbreaking, encompassing themes of trauma, grief, family, mental illness, and love.

Normally the horror label slapped onto the show would have caused me to avoid it like the plague, but after seeing Victoria Pedretti's performance in You and completely falling in love with her, I couldn’t resist watching anything and everything else she had been in, which included Hill House. The fear I felt didn’t disappear, but instead made the experience of watching much more impactful. With it, I learned to embrace the horror of it all instead of trying to overcome it; going into horror now with this mindset has allowed me to gain a greater appreciation for the genre and start to really understand why people love telling these stories.

I think what now draws me the most into horror isn’t the scares, but the way horror can be used as a metaphor. The Haunting of Hill House was my first real exposure to that, where the characters being haunted and terrorized by literal ghosts ends up symbolizing how one can experience grief, and how families can be affected by collective trauma. It’s easy to say these things on paper, but it’s difficult to show the feelings one experiences after loss. Repackaging those feelings in a horror context, where the rules of reality can be bent and broken (Hill House plays with the idea of time not being linear, for instance) is a way to express them in a way people can understand. For me, horror became a way for me to connect with others and an outlet to process my own grief.

When I hated horror, I couldn’t see past the surface of it—the scares stuck with me and I didn’t care to confront or analyze them any further. Now, I can’t help but see every horror story as a metaphor for something, which made the fear more bearable, and even helpful. I learned to love how these stories make you feel like your gut is being twisted into knots, because that’s so often the point. Movies like Get Out that are built to show the internal feelings of horror experienced through black oppression are reimagined through futuristic brain transplants and a hypnotism-induced mental prison. Even more campy horror movies like Jennifer’s Body end up symbolizing sexual assault trauma through a virgin-sacrifice-gone-wrong and the maneater demon that arises from it.

Allowing myself to see horror through a different lens changed the way I experienced the genre as a whole and gave me a more full understanding of why people tell these stories. In the span of a few years, I’ve gone from hating horror with a burning passion to loving it more than probably any other genre of media. While I’ve yet to see many of the classics, and so the list below is lacking anything pre-2000s, here are a few recommendations of some of my favorite scary shows, movies, and one painfully underrated podcast:

TV shows:

• The Haunting of Hill House (2018)

• Midnight Mass (2021)

• Interview with the Vampire (2022-present)

Movies:

• Get Out (2017)

• Jennifer’s Body (2009)

• Midsommar (2019)

Podcast:

• The Magnus Archives (2016-2021)

Happy watching (or listening)!

Hanna P.