People sometimes look at me strangely when I tell them I enjoy horror movies, scary TV shows and novels featuring vampires, demons, ghosts, psychotic killers and assorted things that live in basements and really should remain there.
Apparently, willingly frightening yourself is considered odd.
These same people will happily spend three hours watching a Hallmark movie in which an attractive big-city marketing executive returns to her hometown, falls in love with a rugged Christmas-tree farmer and learns the true meaning of gingerbread. But I'm the disturbed one.
Fortunately, science has come to my defense.
Researchers have actually studied why people enjoy horror and discovered that we are not, as previously suspected, dangerous sociopaths plotting your demise from behind the hydrangeas. Horror fans tend to possess something psychologists call "morbid curiosity," which sounds bad until you learn it basically means we're interested in understanding dangerous, frightening and mysterious things.
Research has also suggested horror fans may be better at dealing with uncertainty and, in at least one study, demonstrated greater psychological resilience during the COVID pandemic.
So there.
We are curious. We are resilient. We exercise our imaginations.
I am going to extrapolate from this research that horror fans are also unusually intelligent, compassionate, generous, excellent dancers and probably more likely to help an elderly person cross the street.
Admittedly, science has not established those last few things yet. But give it time.
My fascination with the macabre began early. In middle school, when our reading program was presumably designed to introduce children to wholesome literature, I was inexplicably drawn to Edgar Allan Poe, Shirley Jackson, Henry James and anyone else capable of making me afraid to turn off the bedroom light.
Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" scared the bejesus out of me.
Naturally, I loved it.
My teachers probably wondered why this otherwise relatively normal child kept selecting stories involving murder, insanity and supernatural evil. I like to think I kept them on their toes.
Then, when I was about 16, my mother dragged me grocery shopping.
This was before teenagers had phones with which to anesthetize themselves during parental errands, so I was skulking around the checkout area when I noticed a paperback on one of those spinning wire racks.
The cover was shiny black. Embossed on it was the face of a young girl with a single red tear running down her cheek.
The book was called "Salem's Lot," written by some guy named Stephen King.
I read the back cover. Vampires.
I hadn't read a vampire novel since "Dracula," so I bought it.
And that was that.
It began a lifelong love affair with King. I've read virtually everything the man has put to paper, with the exception of his sword-and-sorcery stuff and "The Dark Tower" series, which seems like something the nerds on "The Big Bang Theory" would spend an entire episode arguing about.
I have standards.
I also have standards about vampires, which is why I remain bitter about what the "Twilight" movies did to them.
Vampires are supposed to be terrifying creatures of the night. "Twilight" turned them into prissy, brooding pretty boys with complicated romantic lives. Werewolves didn't fare much better. They became angry Bernese mountain dogs.
Give me Christopher Lee baring his fangs any day.
Television fed the obsession, too. As a kid, I loved those creepy black-and-white shows — "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits" and "One Step Beyond."
"The Outer Limits" was especially unnerving because every week the narrator announced that they had taken control of my television set.
They controlled the horizontal.
They controlled the vertical.
I was a kid. I believed them. Why weren't my parents doing something about this?
My favorite "Twilight Zone" episodes tended to involve Death personified. In one, a very young Robert Redford played Death and charmed his way into the apartment of an elderly woman terrified of dying.
This was not yet the Robert Redford who would become the Sundance Kid and spend the next several decades being impossibly handsome.
Another episode featured Death as a mysterious hitchhiker who kept appearing along the highway as a woman drove across the country.
That one stayed with me.
Years later came "Supernatural," in which two brothers drove around America killing ghosts, demons and monsters. This was right in my wheelhouse until later seasons brought in angels, God and the apocalypse and the whole thing jumped the shark, landed on another shark and then continued driving around in a ‘67 Chevy Impala looking for additional sharks.
Movies, however, remain my favorite delivery system for terror.
I prefer the slow psychological burn to the slice-and-dice slasher movie, although slashers can be amusing, particularly because the victims apparently have never watched a horror movie themselves.
There are rules, people.
If a homicidal maniac is chasing you, do not fall down.
If you knock the homicidal maniac unconscious, FINISH THE JOB. Do not drop the fireplace poker beside him, turn your back and wander away to check on your friends.
If you're a teenager, don't rent a cabin in the woods.
Actually, nobody should rent a cabin in the woods. There are perfectly good hotels.
And if you're home alone at night and hear a mysterious noise downstairs, do not — and I cannot emphasize this enough — go downstairs.
Nothing good has ever been downstairs.
Originality is what separates good horror from the endless sludge filling streaming services. I've watched countless movies that begin brilliantly, establish an intriguing mystery and then, somewhere around the third act, dissolve into a convoluted mess involving ancient cults, childhood trauma, parallel dimensions and somebody's dead grandmother.
Spend an evening browsing the horror section on Tubi. You'll see what I mean.
Among my classics are the original "The Wicker Man" — not the Nicolas Cage remake, which is frightening for entirely different reasons — "Midsommar," "Rosemary's Baby" and, of course, "The Exorcist," which remains the genre's standard-bearer.
"Rosemary's Baby" is nearly the perfect slow burn. By the time you realize just how much trouble Rosemary is in, you're already trapped in that apartment with her.
More recently, I adored HBO's "Weapons," which managed the increasingly rare trick of being original, unsettling, well-written and cleverly constructed, with terrific performances.
It's reassuring to know somebody out there is still trying to scare us creatively.
Stephen King once compared imagination to a muscle: If you don't exercise it, it atrophies.
That's the explanation I'm going with.
When people look askance at me because I enjoy spending my leisure time with demons, vampires, haunted houses and serial killers, I no longer feel defensive.
I feel sorry for them.
Their imagination muscles are weak.
Mine are ripped.
And that's the funny thing about horror. A book or movie can terrify me while I'm experiencing it, but when it's over, it's over. I turn off the television, close the book, and move on with my life. I don't lie awake worrying about vampires outside the window or demons under the bed.
My thoughts quickly return to normal, everyday concerns.
Like how the Mets did last night.
Which can be much scarier.
Bob Dumas is editor-at-large for Halston Media. When he was a kid, he once thought he saw a ghost. Turned out to be a pile of laundry on a chair and not the widow of a Civil War solider. You can send him your ghost stories at dumas@halstonmedia.com.
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