A Reflection on Horror

      So I spent my Valentines day watching The Conjuring with one of my good friends, and all the while they were acting the way people usually act when they watch something scary (holding breath, hiding behind hands, reacting to jump scares, etc), I was calm. Afterward I told my friend that the movie did not scare me, for which I was bombarded with a barrage of “whats” and “hows”. I told them that the concept of the movie was scary, but in general the execution of horror movies just don't scare me anymore. When they went home for the night I couldn't help but wonder why that is, and this is what I came up with.

     I used to hate horror movies. When I was Zeke Jr. I was unable to even walk through the horror section of a video store without freaking out. See when I was little I remember see a child's play trailer (Chucky the killer doll for those who didn't know) and from then on I hated dolls and horror. Being in the dark terrified me, dolls terrified me, and horror movies would just induce anxiety. My mom used to always watch scary movies with friends over and I just hide in my room until the movie ended, sometimes having to brave my house to go the kitchen and get good while ignoring the sounds of terror coming from the TV.

     Over the years I have started to notice a change. It was when I went on retreat with interact my senior year that I really noticed it. We were showing scary movies late at night (as is custom), and the movie was of course: Child's Play. The whole room was gasping and hiding their faces, scared of this foot tall ginger doll, but I was just laughing. This caused me to start reading more horror novels, play horror games, and brave my age old fear of watching horror movies. As people around my looked at horror as something that made them physically scared, I used it as an escape. Now I'm not saying that I am a horror movie aficionado or anything, but I just love the genre now.

     My own personal theory is that as life has put my through the ringer it let me take more solace in these dark worlds. The serial killers, demons, and monsters on the screen on in a book are pixie's compared to the real life obstacles like uncertainty, aging, and the future. I'm not ashamed to admit that I have been in a downward spiral recently, I've had to go to the hospital for my depression and that is something I am working through now. All this being said I have come to respect horror for what it is, how people like me write about their lives. People who write and make horror, for the most part, are timid individuals whose minds are abnormal and twisted in ways that society might deem crazy. So they write, like rappers write to escape their lives, and theorists write to make a change.

     Coming to understand my fixation on the horror genre has actually helped me learn a lot about myself, I am even dabbling in writing stories with a horror tone for my radio show. Along with my love of comics, video games, dance, etc. it has just shaped a big part of my personality and helped me relate to those like me. So the reason you wont hear me scream in a horror movie theater isn't because I am some macho dude who is unafraid of anything, quite the opposite. To me the world of scary stories is simply a picnic compare to the real world that haunts us everyday.

     So what are you really scared of?