What the Darkness Carries Out of Me

 
I have recently started the process of rediscovering my love of horror in all of its forms. Looking back at what I used to enjoy, I have realized that I never paid much attention to the sub-genres of my favorites. I considered it all simply horror and moved on. That may be part of why I often found myself struggling to find more of what I actually liked. I know I loved the main genre, but I had never learned the shape of my own taste. 

There was also a certain amount of shame tangled up in it. During my peak horror-consumption era, I considered myself a HUGE horror fan, but I still had not watched many of the mainstream franchises people treat as required viewing. I never made it through the accepted syllabus. Instead, I gravitated toward low-budget movies that were grimy, gory, and honestly...exploitative. I spent an embarrassing amount of time hunting through lists of the "most disturbing films ever made," only to find myself bored by many of them. 

Books on the other hand always worked better for me in this realm. I was never really sure whether written horror could simply go further, or whether my imagination was better at filling in the gaps with exactly the level of intensity I wanted. Maybe it was a bit of both. 

This woman's books...

For years, nearly all the media I consumed consisted of wrestling, horror, and...for some reason, Pretty Little Liars. Then I did what I often do: I analyzed my life, decided I needed to broaden myself, and wandered off into more than a decade of science fiction, fantasy, thrillers, mysteries...and K-pop. 

Now I seem to have come full circle. I am reaching for darker stories again and searching for films with just the right amount of messed-up shit happening. But I am also returning with a new question. I used to think I knew my taste because I knew what I watched. However, I am beginning to realize I was not building a horror canon. I was hunting for a particular emotional experience without having the proper language to describe it. 

The obvious assumption is that a horror fan watches horror to be scared. I don't. 

In fact, very little horror has ever genuinely frightened or even creeped me out. When I look back at what I loved the most, I find a suspicious amount of torture and gore. Neither disturbed me. Something about it fascinated me, but violence alone was never enough. Gore for the sake of gore does nothing for me. Killing for the sake of killing does nothing for me. If a supposedly disturbing movie has no emotional charge underneath the spectacle, I get bored. 

The handful of movies that have truly scared me belong to an entirely different category.

The American version of The Ring is permanently off-limits, not because of anything in the movie itself, but because the universe apparently thought it would be funny to pair multiple viewings with traumatic events in my real life. My nervous system has filed that film under ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT, and I see no reason to challenge its decision. 

The Descent took me several attempts to finish because claustrophobia and the possibility of being trapped underground reach straight past entertainment and hit the alarm system. I love the idea of caves and even enjoy watching videos of others exploring them. I am also convinced that if I enter one, it will collapse and bury me alive. I need an exit to exist at all times, and I need to know where it is. 

The Blair Witch Project (contain your chuckles) made me afraid to sleep with my window open as a teenager. It no longer bothers me, but that first viewing left me with a ridiculous amount of anxiety. The forest is open...perhaps too open. Have I mentioned I also struggle with agoraphobia? Even the boundary between outside and inside stops feeling secure sometimes. 

This is called a hell to the fuck no. 

Then there the two exceptions that are technically not horror at all: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and The Wizard of Oz. I have been teased for both, but each contains the sort of dreamlike wrongness that can burrow deeper into me than explicit violence ever has. Apparently, I can watch someone be graphically dismantled with detached fascination, but distorted whimsy and unreliable exits are where my brain draws the line. Also...fuck those monkeys. 

The things I enjoy watching and the things that genuinely frighten me are almost completely separate categories. 

So if I am not looking for fear, what am I looking for?

Release, I think. 

I have spent much of my life swallowing anger because expressing it has rarely felt safe, useful, or permitted. There was always another consequence to consider, another person whose reaction had to be managed, another reason to remain reasonable. Horror offers a world where anger does not have to remain reasonable. It can become excessive, ugly, physical, and impossible to ignore. Nobody asks it to calm down or explain itself politely before it is allowed to exist. 

I have always been drawn to stories where I can root for the villain or at least understand the emotional logic beneath what they become. After all, horror villains are often corrupted victims who have finally fucking had it. I do not have to approve of what they do to recognize the sentence underneath it: I have had enough. They stop absorbing the cruelty and or violence. They stop complying. They refuse to continue to play the role everyone else assigned them. 

There is a particular satisfaction in watching an unlikeable character get ripped to shreds (sometimes literally). It is not morally enlightened, but it therapeutic. Horror can take rage, resentment, humiliation, helplessness, betrayal, and injustice and make them physical. It gives consequences a body. Real life rarely offers such clean or spectacular reversals, which is probably why the fantastical version works as a pressure valve.

I do not watch horror because I want to be scared. I watch horror because I need somewhere for certain feelings to go. 

But the fantasy still has to have a believable core. The story does not need flawless logic, and the events do not need to be likely, but they need to feel possible in the way something in a true crime book can feel possible. Random cruelty is empty. I need recognizable human motives underneath it: obsession, betrayal, desperation, corruption, revenge. I need enough fantasy to make the outlet safe and enough realism to give the catharsis teeth.

Easily could of been besties with May.

This may be why polished formulaic horror so often leaves me cold. I am not searching for the cleanest execution of a familiar pattern. I want stories that feel grimy, intimate, unpredictable, and disturbingly human. I want darkness that seems to have grown out of something rather than being dropped into the story because the genre requires a body count. 

All of this has made me want to conduct a completely unnecessary study of my own relationship with horror. I want to revisit the films I considered favorites in my twenties and ask what they were actually giving me. Do they still hold up? Have my tastes changed? Was I responding to the sub-genre, or to something less tidy underneath it? Which stories entertain me, which satisfy me, and which truly frighten me?

The answer ultimately matters to no one but me and my curiosity, which, naturally means I now need to know. 

For more than a decade, I treated broadening my tastes as a form of personal improvement. Perhaps some part of me believed moving beyond horror meant maturing beyond the person who needed it. While I don't regret taking time to discover other spectrums that have become equally as important to me, returning to horror feels like finding a room in myself that I abandoned before I understood what it was for. Additionally, I have learned that I don't have to lock myself in one room at a time. I can build a house...and even neighborhoods. 

I have also finally accepted that it is okay to exist on the fringes of a genre. There is no such thing as a correct kind of horror fan. 

So I am going back. I am revisiting the grimy, violent, frequently questionable films I loved in my twenties. Not to complete anyone else's syllabus, but to finally understand my own. I want to know which ones still open that pressure valve, which ones were only feeding an appetite I no longer have, and what new forms of darkness might speak to the person I have become. 

I am no longer trying to prove that I qualify as a "real" horror fan. I am trying to discover what kind of darkness feels honest to me and what, all these years, it has been carrying out of me. 

☾⋆⁺₊ 🖤 from my weird heart to yours 🖤 ₊⁺⋆☽