Sylvie's horror obsession

Background

Growing up, I was fascinated by the supernatural. I adored Halloween and dressed up as a witch every year. But I was also a really sensitive kid, prone to nightmares, and my vivid imagination meant scary ideas felt like real threats that haunted me in every shadow. I shied away from horror movies, finding even previews at the movie theater too frightening.

In high school, my best friend started dragging me to trashy horror movies--I think he thought it was funny how much they freaked me out. I was genuinely terrified of them but also found that kind of thrilling, and while they hit me extremely hard, I started to fall in love with horror movies then. We watched some extremely silly stuff in theaters--a late-series Resident Evil movie, M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening. But we also saw some genuinely scary shit--the home invasion movie The Strangers, which I still think about every time I get into my car alone after dark.

The Hollywood horror movies of the 2000s that formed the foundation of my love for horror tended to take themselves seriously, even though they were often extremely fucking campy. There was so much unnecessary color-grading. There was a lot of shock value and a strong sense of nihilism. I enjoyed the thrill of them, but they were very much just fun for me--the emotional connection there came from how much my best friend and I bonded over watching them, not from the movies themselves.

Around the same time, though, I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which hit me like a fucking truck. I saw myself in the monster. I was a lonely weirdo who had no idea how to engage with a world that forever felt like foreign territory. I wouldn't read much other horror, but I carried that book around with me in my mind everywhere I went.