Why Horror When So Much Horror?

It started in April 2020. Did that give you a little shiver, just seeing that date?  

I was trying to build something normal. Or at least normal-adjacent. I spent a week getting my 2nd grader and 5th grader going in their new remote learning classes on freshly issued Chromebooks. I set up little workspaces, one at the top of the stairs, one at the dining room table. I was just a few feet away, trying to figure out what work was anymore, hearing our three voices, and the voices of other children in other houses with other parents and other siblings and other remote classrooms and other work calls. 

This link didn’t work, this window closed, this battery died, this person isn’t muted. Fixing one thing and then another. Then snacks then lunch then snacks again and then dinner and then bedtime and then repeat the whole thing again tomorrow with everyone in an even worse mood than the day before. 

When I needed to, and I needed to a lot, I would go in my room, shut the door, and cry. I wanted a moment of peace, like any parent trapped in a house with their children. But those moments alone in my room weren’t peaceful. Any moment of quiet or calm was still a moment where I worried about everyone I had ever known or loved dying horribly. 

Then, after days of this slow torture, the children were gone. They went to spend a week with their dad and I was alone in the house. I had been alone before, I was used to the whiplash of having the kids with all their motion and noise and then the total silence when they left. But this was different. This was ominous. 

Now that I had no one to care for it became apparent that there was also no one to care for me. Somewhere, behind closed doors in other houses were people who cared about me, but they were in those other houses, caring for the people in there with them. My phone was mostly quiet, barely a phone call or a text. If I stopped breathing, no one would know it until the kids came back. 

Seven days. 24 hours each day. Each hour unbearably long. Even if I got a full night’s sleep (unlikely) there was so much time to fill and the last thing I wanted to fill it with was all my thoughts and fears and worries. 

I sat down on my couch. I turned on the television. 

I asked myself, What do you want to watch? and was immediately stricken by the question. I had sat down and asked myself this question thousands of times before, barely thinking about it. Sometimes the answer was immediate and sometimes I lazily browsed. That day was different. I had no answer. More than that, I didn’t know how to answer because I couldn’t remember how to want anything. I just wanted to make the time go away, the hours upon hours of today, followed by even more hours tomorrow. 

I browsed hoping something would catch my interest. Nothing looked interesting. What did interesting even mean? After a while I saw that HBO had all of the Alien movies. It would take more than 8 hours to get through them. An entire day. 

Did I have anything better to do? I did not.

This was the beginning. The Alien movies did not make time move any faster, but they did fill the time. It wasn’t that they made me happy, I wasn’t even sure I could feel happy, but there was something rather soothing and satisfying, watching this shiny, snub-headed creature move through these vastly different tonal universes. Happiness was inaccessible, but fear and dread and awe and tension were all still there, a little muted but palpable. 

I didn’t want more, exactly, because wanting was still impossible. I just felt a clear path forward, the dark and the weird and the frightening was correct. Appropriate. Fitting for the strange, terrible times I was stuck in.

So I continued. It went on for months. At first it was series: all the Saw movies, all the Scream movies, as many of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies as I could tolerate. Then I started to curate little collections. The work of a single director or as many movies as I could find from one country (I had a nice long run of 00’s J-Horror that was the apex of the entire stretch). I made very good use of my Shudder subscription.

Every now and then I would try something else, but I always ended up going back to horror movies, one after the other, my watchlist stretching longer and longer.

I watched more than 100 horror movies by the time 2021 rolled around.

There were lots of reasons to do it. It felt good to have some direction, where a long stretch of time by myself did not have to mean worrying or ruminating. I had a watchlist to get through. I have always enjoyed checking off a checkbox.

It was good to feel something, to get an adrenaline rush from a well-executed scare. There was even some enjoyment in the bad ones, letting my brain start to pick them apart, figuring out exactly what they were doing wrong. 

There were so many different kinds to watch, I could go through dozens with no two feeling similar. Different countries and cultures. I watched films where people spoke in Indonesian, in Turkish, in Finnish. Ghosts, zombies, vampires, and dozens of variations on every kind of monster, every kind of trope. 

Some films had a clearly defined set of rules. You should not buy that house, I would say out loud to the people on my TV. You should not go down those stairs. You should not follow that man. It was nice to be in a world where actions had such clear consequences. Even if the characters could not see that they were making the wrong decisions, I could. I knew and the film knew and we could sit and feel a little smug together.

Other films had stories that refused to be contained, where no matter what you did you could not outrun the evil that was coming for you. It was coming for everyone. It could not do anything else. I had always had a soft spot for this kind of bleakness, and it turned out that during the bleakest times I had ever known, I still did. 

Hundreds of people died horribly on my television screen. Millions of people died horribly outside my window. Now the nihilism of these films was not just a pleasurable kind of fucked up. Now it was also wise. 

I have thought about those months of nonstop horror–the real horrors and the fictional ones–often in the last few months as we have worked to bring Darker Times to life. The world right now still feels worryingly close to those dark months in 2020, and yet here I am putting my time and energy into starting a website about horror, about fictional darkness and death. Was it the right subject? Was it the right time? Way to go, I’ve told myself, you picked the most stable time in history to start a media company. 

War in Iran, genocide in Palestine, ICE terrorizing the US, horrors everywhere. Surely people will ask, Why turn to horror at a time like this? 

You have to turn to something. This is what works for me.

People can be judgmental about it. That’s fine, it’s not for everyone. On the spectrum of high to low art, society has decided horror is pretty close to the lowest end of the spectrum. Consuming horror isn’t a virtuous choice in the world’s view. I don’t really care so much about that.

But I do understand why some people may want literally anything else except horror. Why seek out something we already have in so much abundance? 

All stories offer an escape. I understand why people want a story from another time or another world, characters with different problems and worries, stories with low stakes and happily ever afters. Horror is not that kind of escape. The endings are often far from happy, and those that are are bloody and hard-won. The stakes are life and death. I understand that those stakes may feel too real, too close, too much. The thing is, for me it is comforting. 

Romance is a genre I struggle with, because it has rules that demand a happily ever after. Part of me can never surrender to that. Part of me stays skeptical, always questions. I want the possibility that it all goes to hell and can’t be salvaged and there will be a terrible breakup but someday they’ll both look back on it and each wonder what happened to the other. Even when the focus is supposed to be the promise of perfect love, I look for the darkness.

Underneath any horror story is fear, and choosing horror is choosing to look at the fear instead of looking away. Even the silliest slasher with a bad script and worse special effects is still a constant drumbeat whispering death, death, death.

Horror lets us take these things and play with them in a little sandbox. It is a dollhouse we can open and close when we choose to. And even when it is fun, even when we laugh, it still whispers death, death, death. 

I am incapable of surrendering enough to imagine a reality where that little whisper isn’t there in the background. Maybe it’s a lack of imagination. Maybe it’s pessimism. Maybe it’s my ever-growing disillusionment that humanity is worth saving. Whatever it is, I am comforted by the whisper death, death, death. It makes me feel human. It makes me feel alive. 

Being scared makes me feel alive, too. I enjoy the way my body takes over. Okay, I might not enjoy it while it’s happening. But what is more joyous and visceral than the sigh of relief after a scare, when you made it to the other side, when you remember that you are safe, that you are sitting in a comfortable chair watching a fictional story? 

Horror takes our fears and opens them up. Isolation. The unknown of space or ocean or untamed land. Monsters. Children. Ghosts. Never being able to fully know someone. Never being able to fully protect someone. Powerlessness. Impossible choices. Choices that are not choices at all. It acknowledges that life is full of pain, that just when you think the pain is done it can somehow find a way to return for yet another sequel. Sometimes you’re the final girl and sometimes you’re killed off in the first five minutes. It dials it up, it makes the color deeper, it makes the knife sharper. And the relief after the chase completes the cycle once more.

It is its own kind of optimism. That after the fear, there will be a moment of release, a sigh. You can sink back into your seat and know you’re okay. 

If this is exactly what you dislike about horror, then I will breezily send you on your way. Go have your happily ever after, your monsters that can be vanquished, your questions that can be answered. I don’t begrudge you your choice of escape! I’ll just be over here continuing to stare into the void.

If you want to stare with us, then welcome. There’s plenty of space here on the edge of the abyss – let me just scoot over a little. 

Jessica Woodbury (she/her) started blogging in 2001. She’s worked in media for several years including staff roles at Vox Media, The Wall Street Journal, and McClatchy Media, and written as a freelancer for HuffPost, The Toast, and Book Riot. She was featured in the anthology The Book of Queer Mormon Joy. She loves going to the movies alone and is always reading too many books at once. She is excited to be the in-house grump who doesn’t like anything. She has a lot of opinions about folk horror; social horror; gender and sexuality in horror; the overlap of horror with mystery and true crime; and the ever-important plot-to-vibes ratio.