Horror is a genre I cannot seem to leave behind. I might stray into other territories—comedy, science fiction, even the odd experimental piece—but horror always remains the gravitational centre of my writing. It pulls me back, again and again, in a way that feels almost inevitable, as though some invisible force constantly tugs at my imagination. I have often asked myself why this is so, why I return to fear when other genres promise laughter, insight, or aesthetic satisfaction. I have tried to trace the psychology of it, to chart the sensations it evokes, and the more I examine it, the clearer it becomes that horror is not simply about “liking to be scared.” That explanation, while convenient, is far too simplistic to encompass the depth of its appeal.
Horror operates on multiple planes simultaneously. It engages with the intimate, visceral experience of fear—the shiver down the spine, the sudden startle, the lingering unease in the quiet moments before sleep. It also reflects the broader anxieties of the societies that produce it, acting as a cultural mirror to our insecurities, contradictions, and moral tensions. Beyond that, it is a medium of narrative possibility, a space in which imagination can test boundaries, bend reality, and explore scenarios that would be impossible—or unbearable—in everyday life. It is precisely this convergence of personal fear, social reflection, and creative freedom that makes horror so compelling, so generative, and so inexhaustible.
But horror is more than sensation or social commentary. It interrogates, remembers, and releases. It forces us to confront the vulnerabilities, uncertainties, and moral ambiguities we might otherwise avoid, and in doing so, offers a form of catharsis—a safe rehearsal for the unthinkable, a structured exploration of the uncanny and the unknown. This paradox is what draws me back again and again: horror unsettles, yet it reassures; it exposes, yet it contains. It is not a genre I choose lightly. It is a genre that demands engagement with both the familiar and the unknowable, one that insists upon itself, and one to which I am perpetually, inexorably drawn.
The Uncanny as Foundation
At the heart of my attraction to horror is something Freud once termed the unheimlich—the uncanny, the familiar rendered strange. This concept captures horror’s most enduring and most unsettling quality. When I think of the stories and images that linger long after reading or viewing, they are rarely the scenes of spectacle. It is not the elaborate dismemberments or grotesque monsters that lodge themselves in my imagination. Instead, it is the quieter, subtler disturbances: a doll’s head turned at the wrong angle, an empty chair rocking gently, the familiar corridor that seems too long, or the shadow that lingers in a doorway. These are moments where the everyday ceases to be trustworthy, where what we think we know falters.
This is the uncanny at work in countless horror texts. In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the domestic setting—the house itself—becomes unstable, as familiar architecture twists into an almost sentient menace. In Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959), the ordinary world of a small motel hides extraordinary horror, its mundane exterior concealing unpredictable danger. On screen, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) magnifies this effect: the Overlook Hotel is simultaneously familiar—a hotel, a workplace, a winter retreat—and utterly alien, its endless corridors and shifting architecture destabilising both characters and audience. Similarly, modern TV series like The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) or Channel Zero (2016) explore domestic and suburban spaces imbued with unease, showing how the ordinary can become uncanny through subtle suggestion, visual distortion, and the lingering presence of something unresolved.
The uncanny unsettles because it originates in recognition. A vampire or alien may frighten, but it is an extraordinary presence, clearly outside the bounds of normal experience. The truly disquieting moments, the ones that stay with us, are often those involving things in which we should be safe—family homes, schoolrooms, quiet streets—suddenly appearing strange, threatening, or morally ambiguous. David Lynch’s Twin Peaks (1990) exploits this brilliantly: the small-town setting, so familiar in its rhythms and routines, is undercut by surreal and menacing events that twist the ordinary into something profoundly uncanny. Horror thrives in this contradiction: it takes what should comfort and makes it threatening.
This instability is essential. Unlike genres that reinforce social order or promise resolution, horror insists on rupture. It takes what is known and shows it to be fragile. When I write, I find myself seeking precisely this effect: to take something recognisable—a neighbourhood street, a domestic setting, the safe routine of crossing the road—and imbue it with unease. In doing so, I am not only scaring readers but inviting them to reconsider the stability of the ordinary, much as Jackson, Bloch, Kubrick, and Lynch have done in their works.
The uncanny teaches that horror does not need to overwhelm with spectacle. Sometimes a simple gesture, a subtle shift, or an inexplicable occurrence suffices. In horror texts across media—from Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (1898) to Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) —it is the understated, the liminal, and the recognisably human rendered strange that haunts us most. This is what makes horror endlessly compelling: its ability to transform the familiar into something unforgettable.
Horror as Cultural Mirror
Of course, horror is not created in a vacuum. It has always been a genre that absorbs and reflects the anxieties of the societies in which it emerges. To study the history of horror is to trace the hidden fears of particular times and places. Its monsters, its landscapes, its narrative structures are rarely arbitrary; they function as symbolic articulations of unease, often revealing the unspoken tensions of a culture.
Consider the Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) captures anxieties about unchecked scientific ambition and the consequences of creating life outside natural order. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) reflects fears of invasion, contamination, and the destabilisation of social and sexual norms. Even Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), often considered a dark romance, conjures dread through its landscapes and family hauntings, signalling anxieties about inheritance, patriarchy, and moral transgression. The Gothic haunted house—seen in Richard Matheson’s Hell House (1971) or Peter Straub’s Ghost Story (1979)—is never merely atmospheric; it becomes a space where history presses upon the present, its lingering presences and decaying architecture reflecting broader anxieties about repression, instability, and the persistence of buried truths.
The mid-twentieth century brought new forms of horror shaped by global events. Post-war fears and the atomic age gave rise to monster films such as Godzilla (1954) and Them! (1954), which literalised nuclear anxiety and the threat of technological catastrophe. Meanwhile, American cinema in the 1960s and 70s—films like Psycho (1960) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968)—explored domestic instability and the hidden dangers of suburban life. These narratives often externalised social anxieties: the seemingly safe domestic sphere could conceal murder, conspiracy, or supernatural corruption.
The 1980s ushered in the slasher boom, with films like Halloween (1978) and Friday the 13th (1980) reflecting fears of rising crime, moral panic, and generational tension. Television, too, embraced horror as a means of grappling with societal unease. Series such as Twin Peaks (1990–1991) and later American Horror Story (2011–present) combined surrealism and realism to interrogate cultural taboos, from domestic violence to the dark undercurrents of small-town life.
Contemporary horror continues this pattern, reflecting the anxieties of a hyperconnected, post-digital society. Works like Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation (2014) explore ecological collapse and the unknowable transformations of nature, while films such as Get Out (2017) confront enduring racial tensions and systemic injustice. Pandemic horror, including films like Contagion (2011) and series such as The Strain (2014–2017), speaks directly to fears of contagion, surveillance, and the fragility of social infrastructure. Even ghost stories today—like The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)—often foreground trauma, memory, and the psychological legacies of personal and cultural histories.
This cultural mirroring is part of what keeps me engaged. Writing horror is, in a sense, participating in a dialogue that stretches back centuries: a conversation with other writers, filmmakers, and audiences about the fears of the moment. My stories may be small-scale—a neighbour behaving oddly, a quiet street with an unsettling silence—but they are inevitably shaped by larger currents. They join a continuum, a practice horror has always engaged in: asking the question, what is it, right now, that we fear most? In tracing these fears, horror preserves a record of cultural anxiety, offering both reflection and insight.
Horror as Personal Catharsis
But beyond the cultural, there is the personal. Horror resonates with me not just because it reflects society’s anxieties, but because it allows me to work through my own. Many of the stories in my collection Short Sharp Shock (2024) began not with elaborate plots, but with fleeting, almost imperceptible moments of unease that lingered long after they occurred—a walk that felt too quiet, the vague memory of someone watching from across the street, or the disorienting sense of returning to a childhood place that suddenly felt alien. These were not grand horrors; they were small, persistent discomforts. And yet, when written into stories, they transformed. The private unease became something shareable, a fear that could resonate beyond my own mind.
This process of transformation is central to horror’s cathartic potential. By putting personal fears into narrative form, horror allows them to be examined, magnified, and contained. In literature, Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986) channels anxieties around desire, pain, and transgression into the grotesque figure of the Cenobites, where longing and suffering become inseparable. More recently, Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World (2018) explores dread through moral uncertainty, translating fears of intrusion and apocalyptic belief into a narrative of home invasion and sacrifice. In film, Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019) externalises grief, relational breakdown, and cultural dislocation, transforming the protagonist’s personal trauma and fear of loss into a daylight horror that is simultaneously unsettling and ritualistic. Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) similarly literalises anxieties of adolescence and bodily change through a cannibalistic coming-of-age story. Television, too, demonstrates this transmutation: Hannibal (2013–2015) reflects themes of obsession, intimacy, and identity through surreal, often grotesque imagery, while Midnight Mass (2021) embeds fear of mortality and questions of faith within a story of vampirism and communal devotion. Horror, across mediums, makes the intangible tangible—turning fear, grief, or shame into something both narratively and emotionally graspable.
Writing horror becomes, then, an act of confrontation and containment. The very act of naming a fear, of giving it shape and rhythm, diminishes its invisible power. Once a story exists on the page, the fear no longer belongs solely to me; it becomes a shared space where readers encounter, interpret, and feel its impact in their own way. Horror allows this paradoxical negotiation: the fear is heightened, yet also rendered safe. Films like Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (2018) harness brutality and dread to confront historical violence and personal trauma, transforming visceral fear into a collective reckoning, while still allowing the audience to engage with these anxieties within the structured frame of the narrative.
Moreover, horror’s cathartic function is not purely private; it is inherently communal. The same motifs that emerge from my own small, personal anxieties—uncanny neighbours, empty streets, silent houses—resonate with audiences because they echo universal fears. In The Babadook (2014), the manifestation of grief as a monstrous figure speaks to the very real, often unspoken weight of loss that many experience but cannot articulate. By converting these inner fears into narrative and aesthetic form, horror creates a bridge: a space where individual unease can meet collective recognition.
In this way, horror is not merely escapism or spectacle. It is a rehearsal, a laboratory for fear, where what is deeply unsettling in private life can be explored, exaggerated, and ultimately, contained. It is a genre that allows for the articulation of dread, the encounter with mortality, and the negotiation of trauma, all within a controlled framework. That is why I return to it, repeatedly: horror allows me to confront the darkest corners of both the self and the world, and to transform those confrontations into stories that others can enter, interpret, and, perhaps, survive.
The Aesthetics of Fear
Another reason I continue to return to horror lies in its sheer aesthetic versatility. Horror is not monolithic. It can whisper or it can scream; it can take the form of gothic dread, cosmic unease, psychological disquiet, or stark realism. Its register shifts with ease—it can be bleak, surreal, restrained, or laced with dark humour. Few genres possess such flexibility. Consider, for instance, Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black (1983), where the controlled, almost antiquarian prose slowly accumulates atmosphere until the mundane turns ghostly. Or Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), which fractures narrative form itself, allowing horror to emerge not just from story but from the instability of text and structure. In cinema, Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) achieves raw terror through documentary-like grit and relentless pace, while Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019) entwines psychological tension, isolation, and mythic dread, turning its claustrophobic setting and hallucinatory figures into both allegory and source of terror. Television, too, has demonstrated horror’s adaptability: Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror (2016-present) transforms technological anxiety into speculative dread, while Inside No. 9 (2014-2023) continually reinvents itself, slipping between the macabre, the grotesque, and the absurd. Horror, in this sense, is a genre that refuses containment—it stretches, contorts, and reshapes itself, meeting the fears of its audience in whatever form they might take.
This malleability makes horror endlessly generative for a writer. A story can be gothic and eerie one day, slapstick and absurd the next. It can explore human psychology, cosmic insignificance, or social injustice, all within the same genre. Horror adapts to almost any form and, in doing so, constantly tests its own limits. David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), for example, marries body horror with speculative social commentary, while the cosmic dread in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space (1927) highlights horror’s ability to make the ineffable feel terrifying.
From a craft perspective, horror is also uniquely satisfying. It thrives on tension, rhythm, and revelation. To construct a moment of dread is to orchestrate silence, suggestion, and timing. It is almost musical in its reliance on pacing and delay. Consider how the tension builds in Robert Eggers’ The Witch, (2015) where the isolation of a New England farm and the slow encroachment of paranoia create a suffocating dread that is both visual and narrative. Or the meticulous suspense in Stephen King’s It (1986), where ordinary settings—a small town, a storm drain—become loci of unimaginable terror. As a writer, this precision is exhilarating. The work of planting subtle details, of manipulating atmosphere, of knowing when to reveal and when to withhold—whether it’s the flickering light in a American Horror Story corridor or the slow, deliberate terror in Shirley Jackson’s prose—is the craft of horror, and it is a form of play as much as it is a form of storytelling.
Equally compelling is horror’s paradoxical aesthetic: it can simultaneously repel and attract. The grotesque, the uncanny, the monstrous—these can disturb and fascinate in equal measure. Horror allows for experimentation with tone, perspective, and medium, inviting both writers and audiences to engage with fear in ways that are intellectually stimulating, emotionally charged, and aesthetically inventive. In essence, horror offers a playground of possibilities, one where the language, images, and rhythms of fear can be stretched, twisted, and refined in perpetuity.
Horror and the Question of Death
Perhaps the deepest reason I return to horror is that it refuses to avert its gaze from the questions most of us spend our lives circling around but rarely naming directly: vulnerability, suffering, mortality. While many genres distract us with resolution or reassurance, horror insists that we confront what we would rather avoid. It asks us to live, however briefly, with the knowledge that life is fragile and that death is inevitable.
This confrontation with mortality has been central to horror across media. Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) examines isolation and familial decay, quietly illustrating the inevitability of loss and the shadow of death in everyday life. In cinema, films like The Mist (2007) and Hereditary (2018) confront mortality with unflinching rigour, showing how sudden or incomprehensible deaths can destabilise entire communities and psyches. Even zombie fiction, from George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) to TV series such as The Walking Dead (2010-2022), externalises our fear of mortality through relentless waves of the undead, forcing characters and audiences alike to reckon with the fragility of life in a world stripped of security.
Horror also invites meditation on suffering, both physical and psychological. Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) explores grief and the lengths to which we will go to resist the permanence of death, revealing the moral and emotional hazards inherent in denying mortality. Similarly, films like Goodnight Mommy (2014) juxtapose a serene, isolated setting with intense psychological and emotional trauma, demonstrating how fear and suffering can emerge from intimate relationships and the breakdown of trust within the family. Even stories that centre on the uncanny, such as The Others (2001), layer suspense with the looming presence of death, transforming ordinary domestic spaces into arenas where mortality feels immediate and pervasive.
Engaging with these narratives provides a kind of controlled rehearsal for mortality. Writing or reading horror allows me to confront death in miniature, within the framed safety of a story, film, or episode. The story ends; the book closes; the lights return. The abyss is glimpsed, but it is always mediated, allowing for reflection without total consumption. This act of confrontation is not morbid indulgence; it is, in fact, necessary. It trains empathy, sharpens awareness of fragility, and provides a space in which the darker aspects of life can be explored without overwhelming us.
Perhaps this is why horror has always been vital culturally. Whether in literature, film, or television, it stages a rehearsal for life’s inevitable confrontations with mortality and suffering. It forces the audience to ask uncomfortable questions: How would I react in extremis? What does it mean to survive when others cannot? How do I reconcile the certainty of death with the desire for meaning and continuity? Horror, at its most enduring, does not promise answers, only engagement. And in this engagement lies its deepest appeal: it allows us to stare at the inevitability of death and yet, when the story ends, to return to life with a renewed appreciation of its fleetingness and value.
Returning to the Dark
So why do I keep coming back? The answer, I think, lies not only in fear itself, but in what fear enables. Horror unsettles, yes, but it also reassures. It destabilises the ordinary, revealing cracks in the world we take for granted, yet in doing so reminds us precisely how much we rely upon that ordinary. It holds a mirror to our anxieties—personal, cultural, existential—but it also allows us to laugh, to gasp, to experience a collective thrill that is, paradoxically, comforting. Horror is both intellectual and visceral, solitary and communal, destabilising and consoling; it operates across registers in ways few other genres can claim.
Horror is a space in which contradictions coexist. It is at once intimate and universal. A story that emerges from my own memories can resonate with countless others who have felt their own small, private unease. In that resonance, horror becomes a shared ritual, a negotiation of fear between writer and audience. The reader experiences suspense and dread, but also recognition: this is something I understand, even if only intuitively. That duality—the deeply personal and the broadly human—is, for me, one of horror’s greatest strengths.
It is also, I believe, the genre in which I feel most at home. Horror is, by its nature, the genre of the unhomely, of spaces that are familiar yet untrustworthy, of truths that are often uncomfortable yet impossible to ignore. Writing horror allows me to explore the dark corners of both myself and my culture. It gives form to thoughts and feelings that might otherwise remain fragmented or suppressed. It lets me ask difficult questions—about morality, mortality, identity, and society—without demanding immediate answers. And in doing so, it allows me to create experiences that disturb as much as they delight, that challenge as much as they entertain.
Perhaps this is the true paradox of horror: it unsettles in order to comfort, frightens in order to humanise. It stages confrontation with the unknown, with the feared, with the unthinkable, and in doing so allows us to process it safely. Horror, in its cyclical nature, becomes a rehearsal for life itself: a space in which we can acknowledge vulnerability, face dread, and emerge with a clearer sense of resilience.
It is no wonder, then, that I always return. Horror shows me the abyss—but it also gives me the means to step back from it, to explore its depths without being consumed. Each story, each scene, each imagined terror functions as both a probe and a shield, allowing me to examine what frightens me while retaining the distance necessary to remain myself. And that, I think, is why the genre endures in my life, and why I continue to engage with it not merely as a writer, but as someone seeking both insight and catharsis. Horror is never fully escapist; it demands engagement, reflection, and courage. And yet, in its careful choreography of fear and release, it also offers something rare: the reassurance that, even when confronted with the darkness, we can walk away changed, alert, and ultimately alive.
Gareth Ellis - Author 