Why Horror

The boogeyman. We’ve all seen him as children, hiding under our beds, or peeking at him through a crack in the closet door. Sometimes he visits us by knocking us out of bed, or touching our skin in the small hours of the morning, jarring us from sleep and leaving us in adrenaline-fueled fear until the sun finally drives away the darkness.

The boogeyman is beyond logic. It has no rational basis. It is a creature of folklore and the Jungian shared subconscious. It is little more than a figment of our imaginations run wild, especially to children who never made friends with the dark. Or is it?

I’m not the first to plumb the depths of childhood fears amplified by trauma. Closet Treats, my novel about a psychotic father who teeters on the edge of sanity when he sees a demonic form around the neighborhood, was built on those fears. My own childhood fears of that closet door that never remains closed or the imagined eyes that peered at me from the darkness.

Hundreds of horror movies, television programs, and stories have chronicled a child’s battle with the boogeyman. In some cases, the entity was real. In others, nothing more than imagination. And looking back on some of those terrifying moments as a child, I can dismiss them. For the most part.

But the most terrifying part of being an adult is having your rationality challenged in the most fundamental fashion. It’s the moment when you wake up for no reason and see a shape on the floor that doesn’t belong. Your mind fills in the details it cannot make out, and suddenly a shoe can become a spider, or a shirt, carelessly draped over a chair transforms into a creature with its long arms dragging the floor. No matter how invested you are in logic, no matter how skeptical you count yourself to be, there are those moments where your imagination gets the best of you and leaves you terrified, if only for a second.

Logic and skepticism tell us there’s no such thing as ghosts. Science has been unable to prove the existence of gods, demons, and monsters that go bump in the night. We know there’s no reason to be afraid when the lights go off and we are swallowed by darkness.

I know these things too. But I still wonder. I’ve written many essays before on how loaded the term “horror” is and that it has many different meanings for folks. To me, horror encompasses all those moments I described.

The first time I saw a meteor streak across the night sky, I was both elated and fearful. It should have been an ecstasy of wonder and delight, but instead was tinged with an instant of outright terror. Why?

I think it’s because I have an overactive imagination. My brain immediately began running down all the alternative explanations. It could be a nuke. It could be the start of an alien invasion. It could be the signal for the final battle of humanity. Or maybe, just maybe, it was just a fucking meteor.

Surprising events often send me down endless paths of possibility, and quite often, they are dark, untraveled roads without signs and without a destination. Ghostly hitchhikers, displaying the wounds that ended their lives, line these roads, some smiling with fangs, and others screaming in impotent rage or torment.

The horror interstate runs through every altercation we’ve ever had, every fight or flight moment, every time that for no reason our bodies have broken out in goose flesh when the sun is high in the sky, and a blue sky rains down serenity on the earth. The horror interstate has no explanation. It simply is.

As I grow older, and supposedly more mature, I can see horror for what it is: nothing more than our minds making illogical leaps in an attempt to explain something we don’t understand. It’s the fact that something exists when it should not that threatens to break our tenuous grasp on reality, and some might say sanity. So why the fuck do I choose to immerse myself in this space?

Good question. One might say it’s because of my mental illness. One might also say it’s because I’m not good at creating anything else. But I think the answer is that I’m willing to entertain the possibility that some things defy rational explanation. And because of that possibility, I’m forever jumping at shadows, fearing that shape in the dark, or instantly weary of sounds I don’t recognize.

The world of quantum mechanics shows us that everything we know about reality only exists for us and us alone. The laws of physics, of existence itself, are frequently broken when we venture into the shadowy depths of the world around us. And just as our ancestors ran to their caves in absolute terror when a meteor flashed across the sky, so does our grasp of logic and reality when we are shown these truths.

Maybe I write horror to push these realizations from my mind. Or maybe I write those tales to expose my nightmares for what they are—delusions borne of imagination. Or maybe the voices in my head are actually telling me things no one would believe. That last statement was for dramatic effect.

And regardless of my happy childhood, I can’t quite seem to escape being the child hiding under the sheets and pretending to be dead so the boogeyman passes me over for someone else.

So why horror? Your guess is as good as mine.

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