On the subject of horror and why it is my cocaine

There are many different ways to look at the horror genre

It's cheap, it's dumb, it's full of jumpscares (when something pops into your face and says 'Boo', in short). It's a work of art, a genre that is ever-evolving, and a genre that is the most fascinating way to look into the horrible things in all of our brains.

When I first began to love it, I was four or five. My parents didn't give two shits about age appropriate anything, so they let me sit up til midnight to watch the Twilight Zone movie; I didn't sleep well for weeks after. Not because I was scared, mind you, but because I was fascinated. A movie with cockroaches pouring from a man's mouth, a monster on the wing, a werewolf in a crate -- oh my God, I was in love. It's something that would take me over a decade to learn.

I was easy to scary in the years before that epiphany. I got scared at the monster under the bed in a freaking episode of Rugrats, for example (fuck that thing). I saw Stanley Kubrick's The Shining when I was eight or so. I couldn't appreciate it then, but I knew that Room 237 traumatized me for years after.

Then, along came System Shock II. The echoing, cruel voice of SHODAN and The Many still haunt me. Again, I couldn't understand why.

See, when you grow up in a house with people who were not fit to be parents, there's a chance you might become a little morbid. I've been called creepy, I've been called weird, but it's sort of irrelevant. I read Junji Ito -- if you're a horror fan, you really do need to see his work -- and couldn't put it down.

But why?

I think, when it comes down to it, we all have a monster in us. It's that thing that really wants to tear someone who pissed us off apart. We don't know what it looks like and we often don't indulge it, but it's ours. Horror gives the monsters of the world form. It's beautiful that way. It reminds us that inside our fragile shell lies something with the capability to do unspeakable things.

Some people like getting scared. Many others do not. They don't want to think about spiders, clowns, creepy dolls, etc.

Me, I like to use my writing to bring them to life. It's the best way to let my own monsters run free.

Indulge your imagination once in awhile. Get scared. It's a wonderful thing.