A Taste For Blood- How life in my 30’s changed my love of the Horror Genre- maybe forever.

Generally, I hate when people start listing off a horror-fandom pedigree. You know what I mean, just an endless ramble of titles and franchises that they’ve seen or loved or become an expert on, as though being a horror fan requires some ‘proof of investment’. Or worse, those internet lists with such disparaging titles as “If You Haven’t Seen These 10 Movies, Are You Really A Horror Fan?”

(The answer is yes, by the way. If you like horror then you are by definition, a fan).

For the purposes of this essay, however, I feel I have to give a little background into my fandom. Set the stage if you will for the change that is to come, the shift that will affect how I engage with my favorite genre- maybe forever.

I belong to that strange generation of Elder Millenials — the first ones to hold a Gameboy, the last ones to own a landline phone in their apartments, the ones who grew up with Jason and Freddy and Michael instead of Dracula and Wolfman and Frankenstein. We grew up with ‘kiddie horror’ on TV in the form of The Crypt Keeper and Goosebumps, and at night we might sneak in with our parents to watch The X-Files. In fact my earliest horror memory is of coming down the stairs in my grandparents house, into the basement that was our playroom but also a dark and creepy 70’s style basement bar. Nickelodeon was always the channel in vogue and between episodes of Salute Your Shorts, 7 year old me caught a teaser for a new show called Are You Afraid of the Dark?.

I was.

I still am.

That was the beginning. But I couldn’t handle the TV show, something was just too scary for my little heart to handle. So I turned to my elementary school librarian and my first love -books- to help get that fix I needed, that thrill and chill I had felt watching that teaser.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark turned into Goosebumps evolved into Christopher Pike novels expanded into Stephen King and Shirley Jackson and Ursula K Leguin -The Lottery and The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas still trouble me to this day. Eventually I caught up with film, and the 90’s were rife with nightmare fuel (Atreyu and Artax, anyone?). After a while I found myself able to engage with the scary visual fare. Though I confess I was in my early 30’s before I finally settled down to watch all the Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

And no one knew. On the outside I was a clean-cut, straight-A prep headed for Great Things in the Big World. The casual observer would have pegged my favorite movie as The Dead Poets Society or maybe Legally Blonde. No one would have guessed that I watched Silence of the Lambs until the VHS tape almost wore out. My mom had suspicions, and in her epic mom way, she made sure that every Halloween was special. She would decorate my car while it was parked at school and surprise me with some 5 dollar horror DVD on my dashboard, which is how I stumbled onto the original Creepshow. Thanks, mom. I love you.

So it continued into my 20’s. I had an ill-advised early marriage and a very damaging divorce. Horror movies were somehow sustaining. I’ve heard across a lot of the horror podcasts I listen to and I wholeheartedly believe it to be true, that to watch horror is to practice empathy and catharsis. As Stephen King puts it, “ to feed the crocodiles” in our psyche. It was easier to deal with the horrors of my own trauma by curling up with a bad 80’s slasher than it was to have awkward conversations with friends who didn’t know what to say about my overwhelming depression. It will surprise no one that this period coincides with my binge-watch of every season of Supernatural.

Let the blood rain down! Let the viscera fly! For a few hours each evening I could take off my mask of normalcy and engage in heart-pounding terror and suspense. I was never a gorehound, but now I sought out deeper scares, darker places to go on a screen. I got into indy horror movies, strange little international flicks, and took suggestions from the Horror Internet on films that weren’t as mainstream. I watched Session 9 with the lights off. I forced myself to look for more and more hardcore films. And to be clear, it was helping. It put my pain in some perspective. It’s hard to navel-gaze when you have Funny Games to fill you with existential dread and hold up a mirror to your coping mechanisms.

But then, in the way it sometimes does, life got better. I moved back home. I reconnected with my childhood best friend. I married him. We settled into a beautiful life, I found financial and emotional stability, I started letting go of the old hurts and let the healing begin.

“Wonderful!” You cry. “Good for you, author! Get it girl! Obviously that’s when the genre changed for you and you stopped liking it, you didn’t need the scary stuff to get through your difficulties! Great essay, thank you, good luck to you.”

Ah-ah-ah, not so fast Reader. This is actually the part where I got even more into horror. This is also where I started running out of things to watch, so I started finding things to listen to. I tuned into podcasts like ‘The Faculty of Horror’, ‘Castle of Horror’, ‘Evolution of Horror’, ‘The Hysteria Continues’ and ‘Gaylords of Darkness’ (I am an avid listener and Patreon patron of these, cannot recommend them highly enough, go check them out). Every night I was watching a new scary movie so I could keep up with the podcast discussions. Every day when I had time or was doing chores, I was listening to podcasts about scary movies. In the spring of 2019, I taught a high school class called “The History of Horror”. It got to a point of obsession where my husband actually started to get a little worried and asked me if I was ok.

Again, I’m outwardly relatively normal. ‘Indiana Jones’ Pinterest board’ is how I describe my decor. My Halloween decorations are very classy. I won’t even set foot in a haunted house (they scare the pants off me). So when all his relatively normal wife wanted to do was watch movies that made him question whether or not he should sleep with one or several lights on every single night, he started to get concerned.

I have a theory about all this. My tastes got darker and more widespread because I was happy. Suddenly the trauma was receding and I had nothing I needed to ‘deal with’. And because there was now an empty space in my psyche where dark and painful things no longer lived, something had to fill it- nature abhors a vacuum. I picked up reading Stephen King again (Revival was just MEAN, Uncle Steve. We’ll get to why in a minute). I made inroads on H.P. Lovecraft’s mind-boggling oeuvre. I was deliriously happy and more horror-obsessed than ever.

And then it happened.

I hadn’t seen Candyman in decades, and there were rumors floating around about a modernized remake/sequel thing, so I thought I might sit down and watch it. “What a fun romp back in time this will be!” I thought.

I was 6 months pregnant.

I had forgotten about the scene (SPOILER ALERT) where the playpen is full of blood and eviscerated dog. Where the movie makes you think that terrible hook has been employed on the sweetest little angel baby ever committed to celluloid. Where for a heart-stopping instant your mind says “They killed the baby. And you are looking at all that remains” while his mother screams and weeps and screams.

My heart stopped cold. I was going to have a baby. A baby that could die. A baby that could be ripped to shreds by a dog. A baby that could perish if I didn’t watch it like a hawk. A baby that I could put down to sleep as safely as possible in its own crib and it could still for literally no reason that we can figure out, die. I shook. I wept a bit. I was as scared as I had ever been in my life and it had almost nothing to do with the film.

I finished the movie. I shook it off. Hormones, right? I was weepy and overly emotional all the time now. You would be too if you couldn’t see your own swollen feet over the curve of your belly. I was fine. This was fine. Once the baby arrived I would be back to my normal self and enjoy all the things I had formerly enjoyed.

HA!

Rosie was two months old when my husband and I settled down to watch Mother!. I was so excited. We finally had a quiet evening, the babysitter was upstairs putting Rosie down, we could finally snuggle up and watch a scary movie.

I’m not going to spoil this one for you if you haven’t seen it, but if you have you will know exactly what I am talking about. There is a loud CRACK!. There is horrendous violence. I started hyperventilating. My husband went upstairs and took the sleeping baby from the sitter. We held her together as we finished the movie and I sobbed in fear. My husband looked at me wide-eyed and pale. Ten months earlier, a year earlier, I would have been chomping on popcorn discussing all the allegorical nuances of the film and its statements on God, the Church, etc. Instead, we were both quaking messes who vowed to vet all movies from here on in before we watched them.

And then like idiots we watched Hereditary without checking it out first.

I had nightmares for weeks. I would wake up in the middle of the night and spend the rest of it in the nursery sleeping in the chair. Toni Colette was robbed, she more than deserved an Oscar for that movie. I know because the sounds she makes in that movie are the sounds my own heart made when Rosie fell out of her crib once and scared me half to death.

I heard someone say once that to have a child is to take your heart out of your body, and put it in another body that has absolutely no sense of self-preservation. Couldn’t put it better myself. That’s exactly what it is. All these years of watching horror movies and terrible things happening to small children had never phased me.

Gage Creed? Whatever. “It’s just an actor” I would think. “I wonder how they train child actors to do that. Is it like working with animals? Do they feed them treats?” (I have since been disabused of that notion by my own inability to get my toddler to do what I ask by offering her treats).

Now I check every movie before I hit play. I screen the suggestions of friends by asking if a child dies. Child death. I can’t handle it anymore. Not even in books (Again, Revival. That was so MEAN, Stephen)!

Am I still a horror fan? Oh yes. I listen religiously to those podcasts while I’m doing a million pieces of tiny laundry or vacuuming goldfish crackers from under my couch. My movie watching has slowed down considerably, and now I pick and choose carefully what I want to watch. Martyrs is off the table for the moment, though I’ve heard it’s amazing. Now our evening watching- at least until bedtime- mostly consists of Frozen, or Fancy Nancy, or Mickey And The Roadster Racers. And instead of turning on something spooky after the little one goes to sleep, we find ourselves relaxing to episodes of M.A.S.H., or The Great British Bakeoff, or my new favorite, Somebody Feed Phil.

I don’t have the mental real-estate I once did for horror. Much like Bruce Banner and his anger management style — it’s not that I’m not afraid anymore, it’s that I’m afraid all the time. And before any of you start in on “well of course you feel that way you’re a woman” let me be very clear that my husband feels exactly the same way. Down to his toes. It is almost impossible to make space for truly frightening movies when you live in the reality of a global pandemic with the most precious, tiny child in your care.

Other horror fan parents assure me that I’ll get it back. As she grows older and gains more autonomy, as my every waking moment isn’t consumed by the fear that she’ll walk into a pool or wander off with a stranger or become coyote food when I’m not looking, I’ll be able to watch children-in-peril again. But I find….I don’t know if I want it back. I’m not in any rush to get back to watching it all, and psychologically/storytelling wise putting kids in danger is a cheap shot anyway (looking right at you, A Quiet Place, which now I will never ever watch). But lest you worry that I’m going to lose my love for the genre forever, let me tell you that there’s one more kicker to this tale.

Rosie’s favorite movie for a long time when she had just turned 2 was Peter Pan. I know because this was the beginning of all the trouble at bedtime.

“Momma,” she would whimper, as I turned on the nightlight. “I scared.”

“What are you scared of my baby?” I whispered.

“Captain Hook. He’s so scary. And crocodiles. They will eat me.”

“You are safe Rosie-posey. Captain Hook isn’t real. He’s just pretend.”

“Crocodiles are real. I saw one.”

“Where?”

“Under my bed. Momma, I scared!”

“It’s ok to be scared baby. Sometimes it’s even fun to be scared. But you don’t have to be scared of Captain Hook or crocodiles, they aren’t going to get you. You are safe, momma is right here.”

She started to sniffle, a signal for me to pick her up and hold her.

“Ok baby. That’s all right. Next time we won’t watch Peter Pan.”

“But I want to,” she says. “I want to watch it again, tomorrow. With you!”

I looked into her eyes. I knew that light. She looked up at me with all the anticipation and delight I used to feel when I popped in the newest and scariest VHS tape from the local video store.

Yep. She’s my kid all right.

How young is too young for Coraline? Asking for a friend.