It is often asked of me how such a "nice" person loves the horror genre as much as I do (the 'nice' is in quotation-marks just to point out that yes, occasionally other people find me pleasant). I do indeed try hard to make sure I'm making the right choices, causing the least amount of harm, and maximizing the good I put out into the world. In other words, I do hope I am not being pompous, but I do consider myself a nice person and am flattered that other people concur. But their question remains: how can a person who would never harm another being (I am not against hunting, but could never kill a living creature myself unless absolutely necessary) enjoy an entire genre devoted to malevolent forces that wish harm upon the entire human race?

The truth is multi-faceted. The first aspect of it is that I think even the best of us are not 100% nice. We try to choke down our baloney as much as we can because the majority of people realize at a very early age that acting purely on impulse leads to some pretty mean actions, but just because we acknowledge this does not destroy the impulse. I'm not saying I picture being the monster smashing through and causing devastation, I'm just saying I understand that impulse, and I believe firmly that everyone has it within them, even if they will never once express it in their entire lives. 

However, this is still only one side to a very dimensional state of being. Enjoying what I refer to as the "creepy-crawly side to things" also has a contradictory philosophy behind it, and that is: I enjoy bashing or ignoring traditional values of beauty. I see beauty in the grotesque, in the forgotten and misunderstood. I think a lot of us feel misunderstood at some point in our lives, and thus a lot of us can relate to the misguided attempts of the movie villain or hero. 

And that last point brings out another aspect of the genre: the heroics. It is one thing to stand strong for the sake of love, but quite another to survive in the face of horror. I think we as a species value the strong, who can look the horrific visage of pinhead and survive it without being driven mad. And not only survive it, but battle it head-on, even in the face of intense fear.

There is analogies in real life that expose this heroics. Like the Canadian troops in Rwanda during the events depicted in Hotel Rwanda-- a film filled with horrors of a very human nature-- who refused to bring weapons on a peacekeeping mission (having talked to some of my friends and family who were a part of said peacekeeping mission, I can verify that Hollywood did not exaggerate this point).  I can only imagine that the same horror went through their heart-- but the same determination-- as the protagonists of, say, the Hellraiser series. Only instead of a mythic creature, they had to face almost certain death at the hands of human cruelty.

Sometimes the love of horror is the love of the brave souls that can face such fear and not let it cool their hearts; in this way, the monster becomes a tool of human communication: the metaphor. An abstract version of everything that could potentially chill our heart and open us up to inhumanity, but the beauty of the story is that it never does, our hearts keep beating with warmth and passion, and we prevail as heroes.

That is the beauty of a horror film in my eyes-- there are so many different layers. On the one hand, the grotesque abominations can be seen as the beautiful part of our creativity on the outliers, the anomalous missed note that makes the song all the more beautiful for being imperfect. They also represent our fears, and the hero our attempts to conquer them, to laugh in the face of what scares us so that we can continue to live our lives free from fear-- and indeed, through horror movies, even those with relatively mundane lives can feel like they've confronted fearsome forces, terrible foes-- and survived!

Or, at our very worst days, it can be a cathartic release of our animosities, directed at a fictional creature-- the emotional equivalent of firing blanks. Nobody gets harmed, we feel a release, and we can take a deep breath and move on from whatever risks tainting our good nature. 

There are so many reasons I enjoy horror; some of them are personal (I remember fondly having movie nights with my aunt, mother, and sometimes sister, and they were often horror movies-- bringing with them a warm and probably eccentric association). Others are psychological (I enjoy the fact that horror movies attempt to show you precisely what you fear and do not want to see-- making you, in turn, want to see more; this absurdity is such an interesting twist that it has consumed my thoughts from time to time); but the truth is, I just think that there is beauty in the saturated colour-scheme of the haunted, there is humanity in both the heroes and the monsters (see: Frankenstein for the latter point); and in this world of mixed metaphors and elaborate constructions, there is just something universal about the tone. Romance movies might come and go in our esteem, depending on our current romantic situation; comedies might seem trite and too superficial depending on how much depth we require from our storytelling; but horror often encompasses all of these other genres. Bram Stoker's original tale of Dracula was essentially a testament to what one man could endure in order to save the woman he loves; there is something deeply funny about the idea of a giant prehistoric/radioactive creature smashing through our cities, especially when the monster is so obviously a man in a rubber suit. And even Hellraiser is essentially a series about the lines we cross when we confuse passion with love, and the consequences therein. 

The truth is... I just simply find the dark haunted forests and creaky doors, that try so hard to send shivers down my spine, entertain me much more than the same tale without these 'creepy-crawly' elements.