Loving horror for all the wrong reasons

 As it turns out, simply starting is a lot less simple than I'd realized. Who knew?

For several weeks, I stared at my laptop with a sense of dread. The sheer idea of having to open it up to write something truly inspiring had me stuck before I could even start. I wanted to write something that would be witty and imaginative. Creating pieces of content that would have the elite readership adjust their glasses as they memorized quotes to deftly introduce in conversation at their next charity gala. An article that wouldn't feel out of place in the New Yorker, shared obsessively on several social media platforms. 

It does feel like a moral has snuck in here, past my keen eyes.

So I decided to go back to the basics - to think about what I like to write. This isn't a difficult question - I know exactly where my allegiances lie. I love writing scary stories. Horror blends beautifully with several other genres, giving us books, movies, and television shows that are truly terrifying. As an enthusiast of all things spooky, I absolutely adore the thrills, chills, and the undeniably strange, sometimes odd, twists that leave us all wanting more. Whether it's a gothic horror tale from Edgar Allan Poe, a truly campy, jump-scare-filled movie like Evil Dead, or the everyday existence of ghosts in The Haunting of Hill House, I find it strangely calming. 

To the casual observer, this may seem strange and possibly worrying, but let me explain myself. The world is not a nice place. It is filled with people who are out for themselves, willing to go to extreme lengths for a payday or worse, for their own pleasure. I remember reading somewhere that given the right circumstances, people can be capable of the most horrific things. 

What we label evil beyond our imagination is just another person's Tuesday. 

However, with a horror movie, you discover that the offending character was a demon, ghost, or some other obscure entity. It was something inhuman all along. We find that the person was just a vessel - a mere conduit for something far more devious. And whether the entity truly disappears at the end of the story or not, we tell ourselves that it's fine because, after all, only something supernatural could be capable of such terror. And it's why the scariest movies and stories are when we discover that it was the human all along.   

That is one of the reasons I love horror. It's a scapegoat for the worst of us. It gives us the thrills, the chills, and the twists we need to distract ourselves from one horrifying yet undeniable fact. Humanity is not always a good thing.