There’s no killer in the house but I’m dead tired. My neuromuscular syndrome hammers my brain with pain signals until I can barely focus enough to make a sandwich. Every limb fights me on my way down the hall; at my keyboard, my knuckles are too swollen to type. I need something to calm my mind, even just a little. I collapse on my bed and put on a movie.
To relax, I put on Paranormal Activity.
For decades, horror has been where I’ve gone to unwind. Not a week passes when I’m not reading it, watching it, or playing it. For many, horror is the genre where it is safe to confront dread. For some, it’s where the truth about life’s unfairness gets tallied. But the chief thing I take from horror is companionship.
Take yourself to the early stretch of your favorite scary story. We don’t know what the threats are yet. There’s a family moving into a new house, their chatter and back story distracting them from reading into small omens, like a blur in the corner of their vision, or an unusual sound on the staircase. Are they being watched? Is that a human sneaking through their halls and basement, or something stranger? Only the youngest son notices anything, so is he at greater risk? Every meaningful scene feeds us hints from beneath a vein of suspense.
Because it’s unknown, the threat is ubiquitous. Anything could doom these characters, and they’re cluelessly living their lives under that shadow. They can’t know better. If they’re well-realized characters, they’re preoccupied with their personal dramas that will contrast sharply with the oncoming terror. That’s so relatable that I feel less alone in their company.
I’ve been thrown down stairs in public and nobody stepped in to help me. I’ve lived with abusers. I’ve been disabled for most of my life. I’ve had healthcare coverage yanked away without warning. Cops once stopped me for going on a walk in front of my house. Life harbors dangers we can’t anticipate.
Stories of implausible and impossible threats reflect that reality. A supernatural threat in fiction resonates with how many things we can’t expect in real life. Fictional characters might anticipate a problem that would be dangerous to me, but the fiction casts threats at them that they can’t. It bridges the gulf and makes us alike.
Alfred Hitchcock said, “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
As soon as the veil of mystery drops, whether the threat is revealed to be an obsessive stalker or a six-legged demon, the story changes. The more I understand, and the more certain I am of what I should be afraid of, the less anxious I become. There’s still a lot of fun and terror to be had in the plot bonfire of a fully outed antagonist, with all the loopholes closing. But my sympathy will never be stronger than it was back when the characters and I didn’t know what we were getting into.
Horror fans are territorial about what’s allowed in an ending. That conflict makes sense to me. If you relate to narratives on a profound level, then you’re going to have firm ideas about how they should resolve. For some, it spits in the face of Horror to have it defeated and to let the two families in The Conjuring (2013) escape and be happy. For others, horror offers the greatest possible catharsis, suggesting if we get through this next awful thing in life we’ll be allowed a jagged sliver of relief.
No singular shape of an ending suffices for me. Optimally the field will have so many different kinds of endings that I won’t be able to predict what is coming in the next book I crack open. The unknown will still cast its shadow. Life should leak out of the characters’ choices—the life that horror interrupted now casting a shadow back over horror’s face. Contexts colliding until the friction makes something meaningful crack open. Something I couldn’t see coming unless I went on the journey.
What will that be? I’m uncertain, which is just what I want. I love to land somewhere new out in the dread. Being haunted means you aren’t alone.
