Why I Love Horror

Hi friends! 👋🏻 When looking through my past Spooky Month schedules, I noticed that I’ve done posts about why I love monsters, vampires, and also horror subgenres, but I’ve never made a post talking about why I love the horror genre as a whole.

I haven’t been a lifelong horror fan because I was an absolute weenie as a child (I blame the undiagnosed autism) and really eased myself into the genre as a teenager. Weirdly, coming up with my reasons for being a horror fan was harder than I expected it to be because once I think of things, my mind goes blank.

horror is cathartic

Admit it, we all love seeing bad people get what’s coming to them, don’t we?  That feeling of relief once all the scary stuff is over and the day has been saved is one of the best ever and nothing can beat it for me. Even if we know that the bad guy is going to come back, at least they’re gone for now so we can get ready for the next time we end up going through the wringer to get to that relief.

horror can be deeper than just blood and guts

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I’m in the mood for a senseless bloodfest and I’m not the kind of person to do the whole “I prefer elevated horror to gore” because I think those arguments are stupid and pretentious.

Some of my favourite horror stories are those that are a metaphor for something that happens in the real world. Frankenstein has numerous meanings, but the biggest reading is that it’s about parenthood and not messing with the natural world. Dracula has a million different readings, but my personal reading is that it’s a comment on imperialism in the same vein as The War of the Worlds – a strange nobleman from a faraway country comes to England to settle and ends up preying on the people there.

I have a lot to say about what monsters (especially vampires) can represent but that’s too much for me to say in this post so we’ll all have to wait for that.

horror helps us to confront our fears

I have a deep-set fear of just being human. Not only does the thought of dying keep me awake at night, but I’m also terrified of my body changing. Getting sick, gaining weight, losing weight, and ageing are all things that absolutely freak me out. I feel like this is something that drew me to the horror genre because seeing other people go through extreme changes can help us to deal with our own fears of change.

We all have our own specific fears, whether those are reasonable or not and seeing someone else go through that can be weirdly comforting at times.

horror is diverse

When I say that horror is ‘diverse’, I don’t just mean in terms of racial, gender, or sexual diversity, I mean in the types of stories that can be told within horror. Horror can be lighthearted and funny, and it can also be heavy and borderline traumatising. The sky is the limit because there are no rules to a genre and anybody who says that there are is a dirty liar who doesn’t get it.

I love a good slasher, but horror always has and always will be more than just masked men murdering horny teenagers.

horror fans are some of the best

Every fanbase has its elitists and weirdos who think that the more extreme and obscure the media they like the better a fan it makes them, but it often feels like horror fans have a bigger sense of community than some other fanbases I’ve been a part of. The horror fandom is often a big family of weirdos who bickers but it’s never malicious.

talk to me!

Why do you love your favourite genre?