On horror movies, psychological resilience, and the delicious terror of the unknown.

Some of my fondest childhood memories involve sitting beside my grandmother on the couch, watching Friday-night horror double features.

There was something wonderfully contradictory about it. On television, terrible things were happening to unsuspecting people in dark houses, deserted streets, and places they should never have entered in the first place. Meanwhile, I was perfectly safe beside my grandmother, enjoying every deliciously terrifying minute.

One of the first stories I remember genuinely frightening me was an episode of The Twilight Zone called The Hitch-Hiker.

A woman is driving alone when she notices a man standing beside the road. She passes him and continues driving. Miles later, there he is again.

The same man.

Standing beside the road.

How in the hell did he get there?

She keeps driving. And there he is again.

I remember watching that and thinking, My God. What IS this?

He hadn’t chased her.

He hadn’t threatened her.

He was simply standing somewhere he couldn’t possibly be.

And I was absolutely captivated.

I’ve watched every single episode of The Twilight Zone. Twice. And I’d happily watch them all again.

Rod Serling understood something about fear that I think a lot of modern horror filmmakers have forgotten. You don’t have to show people something monstrous to frighten them. Sometimes you simply have to make the familiar world behave in a way that it shouldn’t.

I’ve loved horror movies for as long as I can remember, although gore has never done much for me. There’s only so much entertainment I can derive from watching someone’s internal organs become external organs.

I prefer the kind of horror that gets inside your head and makes itself comfortable.

Give me the slow creak of a floorboard. A shadow that might have moved. A photograph with something terribly wrong about it.

Give me ambiguity.

Give me atmosphere.

Give me the terrible possibility that something is wrong without explaining precisely what it is.

Because the most frightening thing in the room is often the thing we cannot see.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Kevin doesn’t understand my fascination with horror movies. He cannot, for the life of him, understand what I find so entertaining about them.

Of course, he’s an Aquarius and I’m a Scorpio, arguably one of the most spectacularly mismatched pairings in the zodiac.

He’s perfectly content to let a mystery remain a mystery. Meanwhile, I’m determined to drag it out of the darkness, interrogate it, psychoanalyze it, and probably write a dissertation about it.

Which is why we frequently end up watching television in separate rooms.

Probably for the best.

And here’s what I find particularly amusing: If something goes bump in the night at our house, guess who’s getting out of bed to investigate?

That would be me.

Kevin may be six-foot-three in stature, but I’m six-foot-three in courage.

Perhaps I inherited a little of that from my four-foot-eleven grandmother.

What interests me about psychological horror is the way it exploits our instinct to make sense of things. Our brains are constantly trying to interpret incomplete information, and when something doesn’t fit, our imaginations are more than happy to supply the missing pieces.

Consider The Changeling (1980).

A little ball bouncing down a staircase shouldn’t be particularly frightening. It’s a child’s toy, for heaven’s sake. But put that ball in the right house, surrounded by the right silence, and suddenly it’s one of the most unsettling images in horror cinema.

Nothing leaps out of a closet. Nobody loses a limb.

A ball simply comes bouncing down the stairs.

And something inside us knows that it shouldn’t.

A jump scare is a reflex.

Dread is a psychological experience.

The Honey Badger

I wouldn’t describe myself as fearless.

It’s that I seem to utilize fear differently.

I’ve studied criminology and the psychology of fight, flight, and freeze responses. I understand that fear can produce radically different reactions in different people, often without conscious choice.

In my own experience, danger tends to produce an initial surge of adrenaline followed by an extraordinary calm. My senses sharpen. My attention narrows. The unnecessary noise disappears.

I become an impenetrable tower.

I discovered something about this when I was twenty-four, at my very first Halloween haunted house.

Someone jumped out at me, and before I even had time to register what was happening, I jumped right back at them.

Not away from them.

AT them.

The poor person actually stumbled backward.

Apparently, my nervous system had decided that if something was going to leap out of the darkness and scare me, we were going to return the favor.

Some people jump back.

Evidently, I jump forward.

And that’s when I first met my spirit animal.

I used to tell my mother, “God help the person who ever attacks me and doesn’t knock me unconscious, because I’m coming at them like a honey badger.”

And I meant it.

I’ve also never understood those women in horror movies who run screaming through the woods, trip over absolutely nothing, and then lie there sobbing while the murderer leisurely approaches.

For the love of God, woman, GET UP!

If I hit the ground, it would only be to gain momentum for the launch back onto my feet.

I was recently watching When a Stranger Calls (1979), and there’s this woman who walks what seems like thirty miles to her home from a bar.

In high heels. At night.

First of all, who walks that far in heels? And second, why go to a bar? She’s not meeting anybody. She’s not even talking to anybody once she gets there.

I’m sitting there thinking, Jesus, woman, buy yourself a bottle of wine and stay home. At least take your damn shoes off.

And then she has to walk all the way back.

In the same heels.

Frankly, by the time the murderer shows up, I’m more concerned about the condition of her feet.

Walking that far in high heels? That’s a horror movie in and of itself.

Of course, I understand that freezing is an involuntary survival response, not a character flaw. Real victims deserve compassion, not criticism.

But sitting on my couch watching a horror movie? I’m practically coaching the woman through her escape.

And I do know what it’s like to be genuinely frightened.

I remember seeing The Conjuring (2013) in a theater and thinking afterward that perhaps I’d made a terrible mistake. That movie frightened me for days.

And I loved it.

A particularly good horror movie follows you home.

It’s crouching behind the driver’s seat as you make your way through the dark. It’s in the rearview mirror when you glance up, half-expecting to see something that wasn’t there a moment ago.

It follows you through the front door, down the hallway, and into your bedroom.

And even after you’ve turned on every light in the house, you can’t quite convince yourself that it didn’t come inside with you.

Now that’s a good horror movie.

Fear doesn’t always diminish us. Sometimes it sharpens us. Sometimes it makes us pay attention.

Where some people experience fear as paralysis, I tend to experience it as propulsion.

I don’t want to live a life in which my primary objective is never to be afraid. I want to live a life in which fear doesn’t get to make all my decisions.

What Creates a Monster?

Some of my favorite horror films make us question whether the monster exists outside the character or somewhere inside the mind.

Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) is a particularly disturbing example.

As Carol’s psychological world deteriorates, the apartment around her becomes increasingly threatening. Walls seem to lose their solidity. The familiar turns grotesque. Reality, memory, and perception begin to bleed into one another.

The film doesn’t simply frighten us with what happens to Carol. It makes us inhabit the uncertainty of her experience.

The Sentinel (1977) and Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971) accomplish something similarly unsettling. They make us question what we’re seeing and whether the people experiencing the terror can trust their own senses.

What happens when the mind—the very instrument we depend upon to interpret reality—becomes unreliable?

A monster outside the window is terrifying.

But what if you can no longer trust the window?

There’s another reason Repulsion has stayed with me, although it’s one I find increasingly difficult to reconcile.

Polanski made a film in 1965 about a young woman whose psychological deterioration is intertwined with sexual trauma and violation. Twelve years later, he would sexually assault a thirteen-year-old girl.

Rather than remain in the United States to face sentencing, he fled.

I recently tried watching The Tenant (1976), another of his psychological horror films, and couldn’t finish it.

Not because the film frightened me.

Because I couldn’t stop thinking about what its director would do just a year after its release.

I’ve always believed that it’s possible, at least sometimes, to separate the artist from the art. A film can be extraordinary even when the person responsible for creating it has done something terrible.

But where is that line?

Perhaps having a thirteen-year-old daughter makes it more difficult for me to approach that question with the intellectual detachment I might once have had.

I found myself thinking about that girl. Not the fictional woman on the screen, but the actual child whose life was affected by the actions of the man behind the camera.

And suddenly I wasn’t particularly interested in analyzing his symbolism.

What troubles me most is the contradiction. Here was a filmmaker capable of portraying the psychological devastation of violation with extraordinary artistic sensitivity, yet capable of committing a violation himself.

How does someone portray suffering so convincingly and still inflict it on another human being?

I don’t know.

And perhaps that’s what makes the question so disturbing.

Understanding is not absolution. Appreciating someone’s art does not obligate us to look away from what they’ve done.

Sometimes the most disturbing thing about a horror movie isn’t what happens on the screen.

It’s what we know about the person behind it.

Morbid Curiosity Is Not a Personality Disorder

People sometimes assume that enjoying horror means enjoying suffering.

I don’t think that’s true.

There’s a meaningful difference between being fascinated by frightening subjects and wanting terrible things to happen to actual people.

Psychologists study something called morbid curiosity: our interest in dangerous, disturbing, or threatening aspects of life.

Research by psychologist Coltan Scrivner and colleagues has found associations between horror fandom, morbid curiosity, and aspects of psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings don’t establish that horror movies make people resilient, but they raise an interesting possibility: perhaps frightening fiction gives us opportunities to mentally rehearse uncertainty and danger.

Other research on recreational fear has found that people visiting haunted attractions tend to enjoy being frightened most when the experience reaches a certain sweet spot.

Too little fear is boring. Too much becomes unpleasant. Somewhere in between, terror can be exhilarating.

Apparently, there’s an actual science to enjoying the shit being scared out of you.

Research has also challenged the stereotype that horror fans necessarily lack empathy.

Which makes perfect sense to me.

My fascination with the darker corners of human psychology isn’t limited to horror movies.

I remember writing one of my graduate school essays on serial killers while listening to Black Sabbath’s Psycho Man.

I believe in having an appropriate soundtrack for academic research.

But what interested me wasn’t simply what these people had done.

It was why.

What combination of personality, childhood experiences, environment, opportunity, and individual choices produces someone capable of extraordinary cruelty?

And perhaps more importantly, why do other people endure terrible circumstances without becoming monsters themselves?

I’ve never been particularly satisfied with the explanation that someone is simply evil. It may describe our moral judgment of their actions, but it tells us remarkably little about how they came to commit them.

I’m not fascinated by suffering. I’m fascinated by what creates it.

I want to understand the psychology of fear, certainly. But I’m even more interested in the psychology of the thing we’re afraid of.

I don’t particularly care how many people the monster kills.

I want to know what created the monster in the first place.

Leave the Light Off

Which brings me back to my grandmother.

When I think about those Friday-night double features, I don’t remember being traumatized by what I watched.

I remember feeling safe.

The television flickering in the dark. My grandmother beside me. The delicious anticipation of whatever terrible thing might happen next.

Fear and safety existed together in that room.

And perhaps that’s the paradox at the heart of my affection for horror.

We can be frightened and still feel secure. We can confront something disturbing without being destroyed by it.

But I also think some of us are simply born with a particular kind of curiosity.

Not every fascination with the darker corners of life needs to be explained by trauma or some unresolved psychological conflict. Our experiences certainly shape us, but I suspect some temperaments are there from the beginning.

I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.

When I was in fifth grade, we went to the school library once a week. And every single week, I checked out another Nancy Drew mystery.

I wanted the clues, the suspects, the secrets, and that wonderful moment when all the pieces finally fell into place.

Apparently, I’ve been interrogating mysteries since I was ten years old.

I didn’t study psychology and criminology and suddenly develop an interest in what makes people tick.

I studied psychology and criminology because I already wanted to know.

And not much has changed.

I will turn over every rock, examine every clue, question every motive, and entertain every possibility until I understand what happened and, more importantly, why.

That’s what I love about psychological horror. It doesn’t hand me the answers. It makes me work for them.

Nancy Drew simply grew up, studied psychology and criminology, and developed a rather questionable taste in movies.

I want to know whether those footsteps in the hallway were real. I want to understand what’s wrong with the photograph on the mantel. I want to catch that fleeting expression on someone’s face and spend the next twenty minutes figuring out what it meant.

And sometimes I want to be frightened enough that I regret watching the movie in the first place.

Only to watch another one the following night.

Because perhaps the darkness isn’t simply where some of us go to be frightened.

Perhaps it’s where we go looking for answers.

Sometimes, the answers are far more disturbing than the questions.

And some of us have exquisite taste, found only in nightmares.

 

The Tell-Tale Heart

 

Some things are better left buried. Others are worth digging up.

It’s a perfectly rainy October day, and I can’t imagine a better way to spend it.

Autumn has settled in, the house is quiet, and for once, I’m entirely alone. Outside, the rain taps against the windows. Inside, I’m roasting beets, writing recipes, and contemplating murder.

Fictional murder, of course.

October is my favorite month, and there’s something positively delicious about a rainy afternoon when the house is empty and the world beyond the windows looks a little gray and mysterious.

The perfect setting for a psychological horror movie.

Or, as it turns out, a recipe inspired by Edgar Allan Poe.

And what better story to bring into the kitchen than The Tell-Tale Heart?

Poe understood something about the human mind that I’ve always found fascinating: sometimes the most terrifying thing isn’t what we’ve done, but what our minds refuse to let us forget.

In The Tell-Tale Heart, a murderer meticulously conceals his crime beneath the floorboards, only to be undone by the relentless beating of a heart that may exist nowhere but inside his own head.

Guilt, obsession, paranoia. All the ingredients of a good psychological horror story.

And, apparently, the inspiration for a rather beautiful plate of beets.

This dish is my culinary nod to Poe’s masterpiece. Thinly sliced roasted beets, arranged in overlapping crimson layers, are dressed with a glossy pomegranate gastrique. A quenelle of whipped cashew chèvre adds richness, while toasted pistachios provide crunch and a scattering of micro-greens brings a welcome touch of freshness.

There’s a whisper of rosemary, too. Just enough to make you wonder what you’re tasting.

It’s earthy, tart, sweet, creamy, and slightly mysterious. A composed first course that looks far more complicated than it actually is.

And those micro-greens languishing in my refrigerator? They’ve finally found their purpose.

Nothing wasted. Not even in the House of Usher.

A Few Words About Bloody Beets

A word of caution before we begin: don’t wear white.

Red beets stain absolutely everything—your fingers, your cutting board, your kitchen towels. One afternoon of peeling and slicing them, and your kitchen could resemble a crime scene.

Wear food-safe gloves, peel the cooled beets with a damp paper towel, and use a nonporous cutting board to keep the evidence to a minimum.

Of course, you shouldn’t be wearing white after Labor Day anyway.

Some horrors are simply unforgivable.

The pomegranate gastrique should lean tart rather than overly sweet. The roasted beets already bring plenty of natural sweetness, and that sharp acidity is what makes the creamy cashew chèvre and toasted pistachios sing.

When it comes time to plate, think restraint rather than decoration. Overlap the beet slices organically, almost suggesting the shape of a heart. Add the gastrique sparingly, place the whipped quenelle cashew chèvre slightly off-center, and finish with pistachios, micro-greens, and just a whisper of rosemary.

Beautiful, a little unsettling, and absolutely delicious.

The perfect first course for a rainy October evening.

And unlike Poe’s unfortunate narrator, we have absolutely nothing to hide.

Well, except perhaps our fingers.

The heart may be silent, but the evidence is everywhere.

— Kitchen Oracle

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