Kelly Warner

When I first fell in love with the power of film, the thing that drew me in was that ‘sense of wonder’ of seeing something awe-inspiring on the big screen. Spielberg’s adventure stories, Godzilla trashing cities, intergalactic sci-fi, etc. Movies could take me away, show me something more than what the world had to offer. And though I’ve come to enjoy more dramatic and grounded stories over the years, the thing I still appreciate most about film is the ability to escape into a visual story.

I came to enjoy the horror genre later than most fans. I didn’t have a family member or friend that loved horror and so I sort of made my way through those dark halls on my own. Where I started was much the same as where I started with film in general: the escape to somewhere otherworldly and strange. Horror can be psychological and introspective if it wants to be, but my favorite will still be those that offer some escapist wonder in walking with monsters and tripping down portals to underverses. If sci-fi is a day at the beach where we may escape the world and ponder all the endless possibilities, then horror is a dive into the deep end.  The feeling of safety is gone and you can’t touch the bottom. It’s escapism with a side of dread.

Alyssa Miller

The earliest memory I can recall is pretty offbeat. I am sitting on my parent’s couch, my tiny legs barely dangling over the edge of the cushion, looking up at the ancient television. I heard “Jesus wept” as Frank was torn to pieces by the Cenobites, and I screamed.

After that, the only nightmares I ever had were ones based in real life. I was raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by two young parents who split up shortly after I was born. Sexual, physical, and mental abuse ran rampant under my father’s custody. I spent my younger years in a very dangerous city, walking to the drugstore with my shoulders held high, looking every passerby in the face as if to say “Don’t fuck with me, I’ll scream.”
I learned a lot of hard lessons at a very young age.
The one consistent thing I had was my movies. My mother and I would curl up on the couch after my brother fell asleep and watch whatever she had rented from the library that week. And the main theme was almost always the same- the tough girl would survive, beat the monster/murderer, and come out alive for the sequel. I saw myself in Heather Langenkamp in Nightmare on Elm Street 3, a survivor that lives on to help other people. I found inspiration in Carol Kane in When a Stranger Calls Back, living a normal life despite the trauma she had suffered. Once I got older and saw the gravity of my childhood experiences and realized how hard life for me actually was, my entire world was upside down. I didn’t know where to begin in the healing process. But I knew if I kept fighting, I’d survive.
As a young adult, I was hospitalized three times for my PTSD and BPD. I hung onto life, even if I didn’t want to. I moved across the country, I built a new life from the ground up, and even as I was dumpter diving for food in San Antonio, I held on. And at 26, I have become the final girl that I always looked up to. I escaped my monsters, and came out alive…just in time for the sequel.

Chris Vander Kaay

Horror means an open playing field. Every genre has its boundaries, the things which make it distinct to that genre. Westerns, Science Fiction, Romance, Comedy, Drama, they all have their boundaries. The boundaries of horror are nebulous. Horror has comedy and drama, it can contain the locale of a Western and the technology of a Science Fiction film. It can have romance, a mystery, anything. And yet it never stops being a horror movie. It’s the only genre that never becomes different when it is combined with something else. Though there are many bad horror movies, the genre of horror has the highest potential for greatness because there are no boundaries on what can be in a horror film and still have it be a horror film. The possibilities are truly endless. That’s what horror means to me.

Paul Farrell

When I was fairly young, I saw a clip from Child’s Play on television at a relative’s house.  The scene in question was the one where Andy’s mother finds the Chucky doll and realizes it’s working without batteries. I should also mention that the sequence played right after a news promo. So it was that in my confused exhaustion, I believed the clip to be tethered to the aforementioned news report.

To put it bluntly, I believed I was seeing footage of a real doll coming to life to murder people.

Suffice it to say, I abandoned my MY BUDDY doll the next morning along with any interest I might’ve had with the horror genre. Still, film had a power over me, an inexplicable emotional sway. The visual image had a surreal and visceral way of sparking my imagination, allowing me to critically and creatively explore my mind in a way I had never experienced through any other medium of artistic expression.

I didn’t watch any of the horror classics growing up like most genre fans. Whenever horror movies would come on at a sleepover, I would simply turn my attention elsewhere. Sure, I saw a few of the big horror films here and there, if only by circumstance due to their total permeation of the pop culture lexicon, but that was about it. The viewings were generally passive and when I did manage to connect to one, it wasn’t until years later that I truly appreciated the experience. I caught things like Scream, Candyman, and A Nightmare on Elm Street and enjoyed them. However, I never fully embraced how it was they made me feel. I wrote the notion off as a momentarily thrill, turning away from what it was I had been running from for years- the adrenaline brought on by fabricated fear.

During my first year of college, one of my professors showed the opening tracking shot to Halloween as a treat on October 31st. I was blown away. It was gorgeous, from the blocking to the tone to the unnerving way in which the culmination of the sequence subverted audience expectations. It was one of the best shots I had ever seen in a film… and it was in a horror film. Right then and there, I began to wonder: what else had I cut myself off from by ignoring horror?

Months later I sat down in a theater to watch Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever, a film that was receiving a lot of attention at the time of its release. As was typically the case with me back then, I was there because the film was being talked about and I wanted to be a part of the conversation. It had been a while since I had watched a horror film and thought I’d give it a shot. The familiar, sinking feeling in my stomach struck as the title sequence played, red saturating white while flies buzzed loudly and incessantly in the background…

Maybe it was because I was older. Maybe my tastes were changing. Maybe the curiosity had always been there, dormant but fervent, cowering deep inside of myself, still terrified of that killer doll on the evening news. Either way, as I sat there watching Cabin Fever I was struck by one, specific notion: I don’t get it.

It wasn’t the narrative I didn’t understand, it was the feeling. Roth was clearly channeling specific references, films and a brand of cinema that almost felt like a culture unto itself. The fluidity of the constantly shifting tone, the character oddities, the visceral terror which bounced back and forth between the cartoonish and the comic was altogether intoxicating and infuriating. There was something to all of this and I wanted to know what it was.

I remember searching the internet that night, researching interviews with Roth. I jotted down notes, titles of films that Roth had been influenced by. Titles I had heard dozens of times and had always written off. Suddenly my appetite for them was voracious. I needed to see them. I needed to understand.

Before long I was submerged in the work of George A. Romero. Night of the Living Dead changed everything. I finally understood at least a modicum of what it was I couldn’t grasp before, the value of the genre I had always turned my back on: horror had the power to unmask the world around us and face the unfiltered reality of who and what we really are. Horror is, in many ways, every genre pushed to its furthest extent- an extremity of cinema that allows for true character drama by way of overtly untrue conceits and yet requires no explanation for its exploits.

I remember finally gathering up the courage to watch Child’s Play for the first time, all of those years later. I was nervous; my leg was shaking. As the viewing concluded, I came to a realization.

Horror taps into something carnal, a fight or flight mechanism that is rarely exposed anymore. The best films in any genre forgo control in lieu of submission, requesting that their audience allow the art to drive their emotional state. It’s easy to turn away from such an idea or to misunderstand its intent, but what I’ve found is those that face the genre and embrace it are happier, more fulfilled movie goers.

Horror is present in all great movies, whether it lies in the shadows or not. Great horror allows us to experience fear, pain, loss, anger, anxiety and every other conceivable emotion in a safe space, while giving us the same emotional journeys offered in any drama.

I once turned my back on horror because of how it made me feel, but, in some ways, I’m grateful for the experience. After all, it takes true reverence to actively dislike and it takes even more to admit what such childish ambitions meant, deep down, all along.

After all, in the absence of batteries lies imagination.

Rachel Bolton

I love horror, but to be perfectly honest, I am a late bloomer coming to the genre. I know many fellow horror lovers who can tell me that they watched Halloween at age five or were reading Stephen King novels in elementary school. Not me! I was the scaredy cat who watched Scooby-Doo from behind the sofa and cried in haunted houses.

But I got over my fears as I got older, sorta. There are so many different types of horror and the more I consumed, the more horror I wanted to experience. I have to thank my dad for buying the first season of Rod Serling’s other classic show Night Gallery. It was thanks to that show that I got hooked on horror. When I was 12 I would get up early in the mornings on weekends to watch it. Yes, the sometimes-corny 70’s show scared me, and sometimes I’d be peeping at the tv from around my pillow.

But the show introduced me to H.P. Lovecraft and other writers. It made me want to pay more attention to storytelling in horror. Now that I’ve written and published my own horror stories, I give my respects to Night Gallery for leading me down that path.

I’ve been watching and reading horror stuff I feel I’ve missed out on due to my frightened early years. I finally got around to reading Stephen King, and Halloween was even better than everyone said it would be. Now I found I belong in the horror genre, I’m going be sticking around.

Zack Long

Every other year a new headline proclaims that the “thinking man’s horror is now here.” Reading between the lines one gets the distinct impression that all previously released horror cinema, in the eyes of the popular media, is nothing more than a river of a shit. While this path of thinking might be worth exploring within affect studies, it couldn’t be further from the truth or, rather, my truth.

Throughout my life, the one unwavering constant has always been horror. This sometime came in the form of comics and novels, but most often it has been cinema. As I’ve grown my tastes have migrated from subgenre to subgenre, but the core has always been the horrific, the vile, the absolutely terrifying. And, clearly, this obsession with the darkness captured on celluloid isn’t mine alone; Letterboxd lists 18,732 films within their horror category, while IMDB lists 101,748.

What is it that draws me into the shadows? Cathartic release? A twisted and deranged psyche? Perhaps both? I can’t say for sure. What I do know is that it isn’t just me, alone, or the generations that have sat wide eyed on the edge of their seats since Georges Méliès first introduced cinematic horror in Le Manoir du Diable in 1896. The urge to scare within storytelling – one of our key topics of exploration here at Scriptophobic – can be traced back through our earliest tales and oral histories, which suggests that before alphabetic or pictorial language systems, the audience, in the form of the tribe around the campfire, were readily devouring works with elements of “horror.”

Those early tales, the ones that have managed to remain extant, are “moral” lessons hidden within fantastical narratives. I say moral in quotes because morality is a fluid system of values that is shaped by contemporary values and many moral lessons have fallen from grace. However, the fact that a lesson is at the core of these stories is the important aspect to take away and to apply to our modern storytelling: Cinema. There are lessons hidden within the horror film that cover the entire spectrum of political, historical, moral, and philosophical thought.

Why do I love horror? I don’t know, I inserted the needle too young to have thought to explore the why behind my interest. But I’ve come to enjoy it not just as an audience member along for the thrill but as an explorer of its themes, its history, and the power it holds.

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