Why Do I Love Horror Movies?

Horror movies are the best, and I will hear no arguments to the contrary!

Photo by Elti Meshau on Unsplash

I love horror movies because… well… I’ve never actually thought about it before. Why do I love horror? It’s not just movies, either. Books, graphic novels, creepy curio shops, and haunting souvenirs also grab my attention. But movies are special.

When I was a kid, science fiction and action cartoons, TV shows (hello, A-Team, Knight Rider, and Magnum, P.I.), and movies ruled the family television. I remember watching old kung fu movies and trying to do those kicks — with some success — and flips in the house. I never sought out scary content in movies or TV. Sure, Scooby Doo and Ghostbustershad ghosts, but the ghost was either an old, greedy white man in a mask, or something funny in Ghostbusters. Scary movies just weren’t my thing as a kid.

Scary books, though, were on the menu. My first memory of scary books came in the third grade, during a class trip to the library where we were supposed to learn how it all worked. I can remember the teacher explaining a bunch of nonsense that I can’t recall, but then she highlighted this collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories by saying they were creepy and dark. Once she let us loose to choose the books we wanted, I went straight for that creepy Poe book. I read it and was hooked. I didn’t understand half of what I read, but I loved it. The Tell-Tale Heart… The Masque of the Red Death… The Pit and the Pendulum…. Later in elementary school, in a book fair at the school, I came across the classic, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and similarly fell in love with it.

But… that still didn’t get me hooked into horror movies. My parents weren’t really into them, so I just didn’t get exposed to such works as A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, The Exorcist, or any number of fantastic horror films most other kids in the 80s saw.

I have a few formative memories watching Elvira introduce old horror movies — one of which I buried my face so I couldn’t see the last kill. I think it was some movie from the 1970s with a kid who went evil and started killing everyone, except the deaths looked like accidents. This is long before Macaulay Culkin and Elijah Wood brought us the wonderful — and similar — movie, The…