Why Horror Feels Like Home: The Blood, Its Mirrors and the Relief of Being Seen.

The first horror movie that ever caught my attention was ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street. I was eight or nine, and my teenage cousin decided to take it upon himself to ruin part of my childhood and attempt to give me visceral nightmares for life.

Freddy Krueger no longer gives me nightmares, but he did introduce me to something that would shape my understanding of fear forever. If you put a child face-to-face with a nightmare born of abuse, you either break her, or you show her something unexpected: terror can be a form of recognition.

Freddy mirrored my childhood in a way that no monster should. I felt seen by it — not even fully realizing at the time why. What was important was that I now had the means to defeat the monsters that haunted me. Nancy was my new hero, and my brooding child’s heart revelled in that. My childhood was riddled with trauma, so much so that it’s become a black hole of distant memories. I knew too much about the world at too little an age, and never asked to be viciously aware of the real-life monsters that lurked inthe darkness.

My cousin tried to show me an engulfed evil man with fantastical nightmares, but instead of scaring me, all Nightmare on Elm Street did was provide me with a new lens to experience the chaos of my life, and introduce me to the catharsis of experiencing emotions as a child that I once did not understand.

Oddly enough, The Nightmare on Elm Street never became a comfort horror for me, but I have also never been able to get the image of his elongated arms reaching out towards the walls as he motioned down the back alley of Elm Street with undeniable nefarious swagger. I spent years chasing that high, wandering through the aisles of Blockbuster, reading the back of every horror DVD, begging my dad as a pre-teen to rent me a horror movie, any horror movie. I just wanted to be scared, safely. I was denied at every request; my dad thought he was protecting me. An impressionable young girl should not be watching such awful things, so, as any child would, I asked my other parent. Soon, I was being snuck into my mom's room while she and my dad watched their shows, and many nights unfolded, being snuggled into her beautiful white duvet, watching ‘Goosebumps’ and ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark.’ I had found my home, absorbing all that went bump in the night. I should have been terrified, but I had never felt so safe.

Horror is our mirror; it’s a reflection of our trauma, and there’s something morbidly beautiful about the way a poignantly unsettling, grotesque film can make you feel like you just crawled into the arms of someone who deeply loves you.

Is it the true reflection of life? Or is life merely a dream, masked by a nightmare, and horror allows us to sit in that nightmare and not be desperate to wake up from it?

The sheer extent of what we, as human beings, and what we are expected to go through, and process is abysmal. Grief, trauma, and crisis of the soul are concepts so large we can’t even begin to wrap our heads around them, let alone the means of how we seek to comfort these emotions. Our lives are drenched in chaos, even in the quiet, the noise never stops. Our heads are screaming, sirens going off all around us. Our hearts have been torn out, our egos and our bodies bruised. We have been beaten down, traumatized and told to suck it up; there’s no room for feeling sad in the real world.

So we did, and we learned to tell our pain through stories, and these stories resonated with others because they felt the same pain, and now, instead of saying, “I’m hurting, please help me.” We watch these films that tackle the issues head-on, and we mend through violence. We heal through jump scares, through creepy monsters and liminal images that hang over our heads.

We are nothing more than the embodiment of precious beings made up of each event in our lives. All the whispers in our ears, the laughter and joy, but also the heartbreak, the losses, the trauma. The distress. The misery. Our lives blend into one another, some giving great purpose, others only left in hopelessness, and in that, we allow horror to resonate with us, to allow it to stop by and say hello. It makes us feel safe when we let it in, and security is a precious gift we can give ourselves.

Film is art; art imitates life, and life is viciously painful. We suffer, often too quietly, too afraid to be seen by the world for the things that we are told to be our ailments. The conditions of our mind hold us back because we must adhere to a certain standard of living to meet criteria and expectations in behaviours. When we do let our masks slip and let some semblance of true feelings out, we are met with dismissive advice and quips that only cause us to bury our emotions deeper.

“Just think positive.”“Time heals all wounds.”

“Let it go.”“It could be worse!”

“Turn that frown upside down!”

Smile.

Smile, or more accurately, Smile 2, is a movie that profoundly changed my life when it came to being seen, but before that, we must first discuss its spiritual predecessor.

When ‘Smile’ first came out, my initial reaction was that it was a copy of David Robert Mitchell's film. ‘It Follows’ is a beautifully shot, dark movie about the ever-growing fear of death and the dread that lingers in the consequences of adult decisions. I was terrified of it before I realized what it was truly about, and only because I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, heavy on the obsession, and I had a visceral fear of death—not just me dying, but everyone I’ve ever loved succumbing to blackness, that it was always there, waiting to take them from me. The fear of death is certainly not an unusual one, but to have it be encapsulated in another human—or human-like entity—is horrifying. The dread of this film is palpable, and the ending is ambiguous. We have no idea if Jay escaped the curse and are only left thinking she may have just evaded it for a moment. This is a dangerous reflection of how we perceive things in our lives. Sometimes, evasion feels like it’s all we can do: try to run from the truth, the responsibility of our actions, rather than facing them head-on. Try to pretend death doesn't linger beside us, waiting for its turn to take us. ‘It Follows’ externalizes trauma as an unrelenting force—always behind you, never stopping, never disappearing. The horror lies in knowing it will always be there, creeping just beyond reach. ‘Smile’ evolved this idea; instead of trauma simply following, it embeds itself within you, distorting perception, manipulating thoughts and feeding on your isolation.

If ‘It Follows’ is about the quiet inevitability of past wounds. ‘Smile’ is about their insidious transformation, turning those wounds into something that consumes you from the inside out.

I hated ‘Smile’ because of that. It felt like it took a movie precious to me and turned it into a parody, but over time, I realized that they’re not the same. Both of them are about the inescapability of trauma, and both feature women who run instead of face it, but that’s where the parallels end. In ‘It Follows’, Jay is pursued by a mysterious force that never stops trailing behind her, mirroring the effects of the repercussions of what she had done. The inevitable weight of past choices and fears that always find us, no matter how hard we try to run away from them—we have never escaped them, they’ve always been right there, watching, waiting for a moment of weakness before they seep back into our minds. The fear isn’t in knowing it, whatever it may be, follows her; it’s knowing that it never left, it will always be there.

‘Smile’ takes this concept one step further. It takes the fear of the trauma and transforms it into a relentless, manipulative force that doesn’t just linger but hunts. It infiltrates, possesses and consumes. Jay runs from her fears and her trauma, but Rose and Skye are devoured by them. In the first film, Rose is a psychiatrist, already twisted by the guilt of her mother's death, when she meets a patient desperate to be heard, crying about beings that look like people, but they’re not, they’re not people. She’s broken, this woman. Terrified, she reaches out, but nobody believes her, and the clock runs out; it’s too late, and she completes suicide in Rose's intake room.

“They look like people, but they’re not. They’re not people.”

The perfect analogy for the mask we wear as we embark on each day, coated in our trauma. We plaster smiles on our faces to look like people, to blend in with everyone else, but inside, we feel like a fragmented, distorted version of ourselves because we don’t match what society tells us is the perfect persona of “how to be a proper human.”

‘Smile’ was the foundation, but ‘Smile 2’ shone a light so bright on living with a mental illness that I nearly went blind from it. You’d think I would have been terrified by this film, its sequences alarming, perfectly twisted and absurd, but I watched it all in awe, I was dumbstruck by the end of it, not only because the ending was beyond perfection, but because the first time I saw ‘It Follows’ I was seen again, only this time to the degree that I can only try to explain.

The way the curse worked in Smile 2 resonated deeply with my struggles with having OCD. It was profoundly cathartic to see a visual depiction of unwanted, deeply unsettling, intrusive thoughts that have suffocated me to the point of not being able to get out of bed. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder makes thoughts stick in your head. I once read an analogy of thinking that referred to words on a river, flowing down through the bends until they fall off a waterfall—the obsessive part in OCD is more like they’re in a river, they get snagged on a fallen branch, and the river tries to drown them, but instead, they resurface constantly, making it more difficult for the water to flow around it.

They embody a fear of doom; they’ve made me feel like I’m a dangerous, horrible person, that these thoughts are not just voices that linger in my head; they are me. I’ve been on medication since I was a teenager, and I’ve had years of therapy, reconditioning, and reframing. I have every tool at my disposal to understand why my brain attacks itself and what to do when an episode begins, but I still have to live every day with the fact that it will never go away, I cannot escape my thoughts, I can only drown them a little bit at a time and learn to let the water flow by in whatever means it can. In speaking with someone very close to me with ADHD, a diagram of similarities was created, but now the thoughts are in a paradox of both being stuck and moving too quickly, that paranoia grows when Skye cannot get anyone to believe she is suffering, and that the entity manipulates this, mirrors her, causes her emotions to intensify which only makes her feel more alienated. She’s being forced to live a normal life when she’s unravelling; she’s screaming, and nobody will listen to her. I know this pain, to say, please listen to me, it won’t stop, and to be completely ignored, so all I can do is pretend to put a smile on my face.

How do you act ‘normal’ when your brain doesn’t let you?

Is there a way to break the cycle?

How do you fight something your mind cannot escape?

The trauma the monstrosity causes in Smile and Smile 2 isn’t just a memory, it’s a stain, a replication of what happens when you don’t face your trauma, it eats you alive, it creates a focal point in all that you are and all that you will be and your life becomes a trigger warning because you cannot handle anything outside the bubble of protection you’ve created for yourself. This is a dangerous precedent to have; one cannot simply live their life properly if they don’t get help for what has afflicted them in the past—and this is exactly what these movies do. There’s an overlooked detail in these movies, though, something that those of us with mental illnesses and trauma don’t want to face entirely: if we do not deal with our trauma, then we can become our trauma, and when we become our trauma, we pass it on.

That’s simply what happens in Smile. The trauma is passed on; it eats at those who are not able to cope, causing them to relive it instead of learning to live with it. From person to person, everyone the curses touch becomes trapped in the cycle, and gets the reminder of the smile as an echo for the worst moments of their lives. In Smile, the entity attacks Rose by making her relive the trauma and guilt of her mother's death, in Smile 2, it attacks Skye by making her relive the trauma and guilt of her boyfriend's death, by feeding into her subsequent addiction, by mimicking her broken friendships and relationships, it dug into her trauma and it reflected it back onto her, and when she begged for help she was met with the same quips we hear time and time again.

“It’s in your head, get over it.” This is what Skye’s mother says about her not wanting to wear a certain stage outfit because it showed her scar. “Don’t you think you’re overreacting a bit?”She speaks out, and she’s dismissed. Yes, it’s in our head, no, what happened isn’t happening to us daily, but that doesn't make it feel any less real. We are sent away so often in our thoughts that everything becomes feigned in our trauma, even the connections we make are scary because we fear they may not be real, that they will be taken from us too.

Mental health and horror can play a tricky game together; too often, we are given depictions of horrid representations of mental health in horror films. It’s a genre that too often characterizes mental illness as something dangerous, something we should fear, and further stigmatizes people's acceptance of it. Even recent films, like M. Night Shyamalan’s “Split,” reduced Dissociative Identity Disorder as a trope, failing to show its trauma basis, suggesting those who have it are violent, manipulative, and unhinged. Halloween and its sequels show Michael Myers as a psychopath and that mental health institutions are prisons for monsters. He’s treated like a lost cause, reduced to evil. Jason Vorhees's trauma turned him into a malicious killer—an unfortunate notion of something that has happened in our reality, but in the way of a definitive route from trauma, there are so many of us who are inherently good and strive to be better despite the life that has been inflicted upon us.

These notions conflate mental illness with violence, suggesting that our minds can only be evil. We rarely get to be seen, rarely get to be put in a place where we are allowed to heal. Simple narrative twists rather than exploring with depth and nuance, and thankfully, this seems to be something that is exiting the horror world rather than continuing to use our minds as vessels of destruction, to take our reality and make us not feel at home in it.

Those who have experienced domestic violence or abuse of any nature find solace in powerful sequences of women taking back their lives. ‘The Invisible Man’ showcases a predator, a nightmare man who uses his intellect to continuously stalk, torture and assault Cecelia. She takes his means of torment and turns it back onto him, and we relish in that story of revenge. Maddie in ‘Hush’ doesn’t let her abuser use her deafness as a weakness; she turns it into her biggest strength, relying on her intelligence, senses and resources to outsmart him. It’s an asset. She manipulates his perception as he desperately tries to manipulate her; she creates a trap for him to walk into, and because he greatly underestimates her, he does.

I’m a survivor of violence, but ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ says that’s okay. I’ve been controlled by my partner, but ‘Ready or Not’ says fight back. I’m a woman with big dreams, and ‘MaxXxine’ says go get it, baby girl.

Midsommar transforms heartbreak into rebirth. Dani sheds the weight of her emotionally and mentally unavailable boyfriend, and she doesn't grow from brutal violence, but a slow unravelling of her former self. She isn’t a hostage; she’s been chosen, and for the first time, she chooses her own life. Christian just had to burn in a bear carcass first.  We survived it, we survived these. We have been seen.

I’m not the only one, and even though it’s not real, it’s there: these beautiful, powerful women also experienced the pain, but they didn’t lie down in it. They fought back. Horror sometimes feels like it’s the only place where I can breathe. Visuals of our deepest fears and gnawing anxieties guide us through our own emotions. The world is a mockery of our safety, it feels sterilized of hope, and horror says, “We’re fucked, but at least we’re not alone.”

When we talk to the people:

I posed a question to the world: What’s your favourite comfort horror movie? I received thousands of answers back, but what was fascinating was the consistency of theme, parallels, and even the same movie listed over and over. Those who faced domestic violence loved films where the woman came out on top. Parents and children who experienced generational trauma and grief found solace in Hereditary. Connections of memories between films and their past. Zombies for those mad at the world. Slashers, for those who want all their pain to end, but maliciously. Religion-based. John Fucking Carpenter. Cabin in The Woods.

Cabin in the Woods was easily the most popular amongst the commenters, but it was also the film that nobody gave any explanation for—just that they loved it, point blank.

Why do so many people love a horror comedy from 2011? It’s a brilliant film, but it didn’t exactly change the trajectory of horror; it just sat in it. This film is confidently self-aware. We’ve seen it before we even watched it. We know the monsters, we know there are always worse people pulling strings, and zombies are our favourite! The undead? Sign us up. We’ve experienced the horrifying cabin nestled in isolated woods, and the creepy gas tender gives a vague, spooky warning. Everything Cabin in the Woods is a reflection of the films that existed before it, and there’s great comfort in nostalgia. This film both takes away our fear and puts us in it entirely. We become immersed in every detail of it, every trinket in the basement, every monster in the elevator system, all keys that unlocked our experience with horror films and media, and to be honest, it was damn genius. Watching the story unfold for characters that are the embodiment of every horror trope is nearly poetic. They were precisely chosen, both in the film and outside of it, in a parody of how niche those tropes became. Dana, the beautiful, intelligent virgin, and Curt, the brute jock with no emotional intelligence. Jules, the vapid whore whose only value lies in what she can offer sexually, Holden, the scholar, but not the wisest one—no, that goes to the fool, Marty, and everyone knows the comedic relief is the one getting out alive.

This has been the quintessential horror lineup for years. In this era, throw in your queer person who will undoubtedly die, and you have yourself a new comfort film.

Horror has conditioned us to know exactly when we will be scared. Music tones change, camera angles narrow, and we clench our jaws and brace our bodies for impact. Cabin in the Woods plays with that; it shows us what’s happening behind the scenes, and when the Hillbilly Zombie Family comes into play, we even start experiencing the film through their perspective.

We know the rules and the pattern, and we get to play the game. We’re not with the college kids; we’re at the headquarters, laughing alongside Sitterson and Hadley, placing bets against the merman (Trust me, you don’t want it. Cleanup is a nightmare). We laugh with the horror while embracing it entirely, even before its purpose is fully revealed. This film is calculated, it’s smart, it’s a love letter to horror fans, right down to (cue, the love of our life) Sigourney Weaver coming in as The Director. We learn from her that who we thought was in charge wasn’t even close; there’s a bigger, much more monumental thing happening beneath it all, something completely beyond control. Dana and Marty know they’re fated, but they don’t have a decision to make; they didn’t even need to discuss it, and if we’re honest, it’s the same decision damn near anyone would make. So they sit down, and they light one up together. Two best friends at the end of time, not only accepting their reality but revelling in it. We even take this as a happy ending—there’s nothing humanity hates more than humanity. Give us the old gods and let them destroy us and reclaim Earth, please. Just let me pass a spliff to my best friend first.

We’re at peace with the end of our world as long as it’s the end of the world for everyone else, too, and the comfort film that is Cabin in the Woods and its glorious ending couldn’t have existed without legendary horror directors like John Carpenter. Halloween (1978) is the cornerstone of all slasher films. Friday the 13th, Prom Night, and then Scream—the meta deconstruction of them. Scream is a bloodstained embrace of terror and humour. Horror for anyone who loves horror, it’s self-aware, playful, and a little sexy. It doesn't just reference the classics; it revives them. It dissects the horror of the 90s, 80s, and 70s with simplicity. Never say, “I’ll be right back.”

No sex, no drinking, no drugs.

The killer always comes back for one last scare.

These rules are embedded in us; we’ve followed them for years, so when they are said out loud, we’re forced to resonate with them.

It includes us in the conversation. Everything about Scream is drenched in films that predate it, even the opening scene is a brutal homage to ‘When A Stranger Calls.’ Billy’s last name is Loomis, a clear nod to Dr. Loomis from Halloween. Small town setting, masked killer, a traumatized final girl. Ghostface takes all the famous killers and turns them on their heads. He’s not a tribute to just one; he’s the reincarnation of all. We have the shape in Michael Myers, the nightmare in Freddy Krueger, the silent brute in Jason Vorhees; then we have Ghostface, a mask pulled straight from the Scream painting. He stalks, he taunts, and he lunges.

So what’s the difference? If Ghostface is just a multi-faceted trope that alludes to the three biggest killers in horror cinema history, then why does he bring us a special kind of comfort that isn’t aligned with them?

He’s human.

He stalks, he taunts, and he lunges. He trips. He fumbles. He misses. He falls.

He’s not an unstoppable force, a nightmare of torture, a demonic child of abuse or the raised dead of a drowned boy. First, he’s an unhinged teenager playing a killer like it’s a game, then he becomes his trope—someone who isn’t happy about their sad life, so they kill to make it better.

“My mom and dad are going to be so mad at me.”

Take Scream for the nostalgic factor alone, and you have a comfort film. Add in the final girl, and you’ll be so cozy you’ll have no ambition to move. Sydney Prescott. She’s a survivor. She’s a fighter; she’s what you’ll find out when you fuck around. Not only does she win, but she also keeps winning. Throw a Ghostface her way and watch a woman stand up to a maniac and reclaim her power.

Scream and Cabin in the Woods are linked together through the power of how horror makes us feel; they allow us to relive how it felt to be back in a John Carpenter movie. John puts us back in our childhood homes. We’ve walked these halls many times, we know how to move our bodies around the corners, and we can navigate the layout with our eyes closed. His methodical means of directing give us this sense of comfort—we know where his films are going, they’re going to be terrifyingly picturesque visions of impending doom blended with hypnotic and haunting music that gives us the same sense of relief that The Exorcist’s Tubular Bells does. Each time we hear the synth, our heart leaps, not in anticipation, but in contentment and ease. Something is about to go down, and we are going to revel in it. We walk through a haunted house where we already know the ghosts. Familiarity.

Everything about the Carpenters' most famous films is about isolation and finding madness within it. We feel it; it’s an echo of how alone we feel in our own lives. The Antarctic Outpost in The Thing, Antonio Bay, is smothered in fog; even the streets of Haddonfield are empty, liminal. Despite groups of people, they exist in solitude—surrounded but unreachable. Immersing ourselves in this movie is like watching a dreadful storm from a window. They’re me as a child, cozied up in my mom's blankets, watching Goosebumps.

Nostalgia is a cure for loneliness. There’s bliss in revisiting what we’ve already experienced. The horror movies we grew up watching make us feel safe, and it’s hard to blur the lines between the preservation of adolescent years and the travesties of the world we exist in today. Our former selves were ignorant of the corruption, finding the horror that raised us allows us to step backwards and feel safe.

Horror films have a genuine catharsis to them. There’s something sombre and exhilarating in seeing a vision of your experiences unfold horrifically, but we can’t forget about the satisfaction we feel when we absorb ourselves in stunning visuals, even if those stunning visuals are a depiction of hell.

What happens when we reach the edge of the universe? A relentless descent into madness, cosmic dread and peace of mind, that’s what. Welcome to the Event Horizon. A personal comfort film of my own, and not just because I’m a deeply depraved soul who enjoys the torture of the human soul, but because of the acceptance of the abyss. This film is an embracement of the unknown, the inevitability of death, a construct that there is something greater than human understanding, and even finding the beauty in it. A chaotic nightmare delivered right on schedule, each character spirals into psychological torment while we, the viewers, remain intact, anchored to our tether of reality. It’s oppressive, saturated in themes of grief as we watch them step into the void. Deliverance is dripping in blood, fanning its fires.

In the realm of 2025, we’re allowed to step into brutal horror, but for the 90s, this sci-fi horror came from a time where space was allowed to be messy, studios took risks, and they were able to navigate industrial hellscapes, eerie transmissions and let you feel that there’s something worse than death. You are not alone in the dark, but…

“In space, no one can hear you scream.” Why do we feel such intense comfort about the isolation of space? The crew of the Nostromo is cut off from Earth; they have no access to civilization, it’s just them: forced into a world that’s as cold, sterile and uncaring as what they’re about to face. Alien has always resonated with me as a film that deeply took on societal views of women as vessels. We lack bodily autonomy, and Ridley Scott, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett were not afraid to have men be utterly aware of how easily that control can be taken from us. That’s the power, but not the core. How do you confront challenges without any external help? We’re shown a world of physical isolation and industrial isolation—the crew is expendable from the world, a horrifying notion only because of how relatable it is, but we are given Ripley, and she introduces us to a new type of final girl.

Ripley refuses to be another cog in the machine; she asserts her autonomy in a world where all it wants to do is to strip her of it, a fierce portrayal of the determination to not only survive but to thrive, to win, for no reason other than she can. Ripley is not a woman written in one dimension; she’s layered. She has intellect, emotional depth and resilience; she acknowledges her fears and moves with them, not against them. It’s not her capability of brute force that makes her so relatable, but her ability to be vulnerable with it. She’s unapologetically human.

Ripley stands apart as the embodiment of strength and agency. Her journey from being the pragmatic, somewhat cautious officer to the lone survivor who actively fights back against the Xenomorph represents a reclamation of power. In horror, where women are so often portrayed as needing to be saved, we’re given one who saves herself. The conventions of femininity are now challenged; the stereotype of passive women in peril, Ripley has taken control of the narrative and given us our power back. She will not be a victim of circumstance, no matter what that circumstance may be.

She will never be controlled—not by her crew, not by the system, and certainly not by the Xenomorph. The final battle isn’t just physical; it’s dominating. She’s prepared to not only destroy the alien but to do so on her terms, navigating the claustrophobic, confined spaces of the Nostromo up against a seemingly invincible alien, everything about the narrative here suggests chaos and a complete lack of control, but she’s quiet, she’s deliberate, she’s defiant, she accesses the situation, plans her actions and executes them with precision. No panic, all wits. The sheer human will to survive is what comforts us, to know that we can face pure, carnal monstrosities and live. Alien tells us that self-empowerment, survival and resurgence of personal control are possible, even in the most extreme circumstances.

Horror is the kind of comfort you find in the middle of the night when the world is silent, and you can let your fears breathe. It gives you the space to allow them in, to sit with you without the weight of the consequences. We find solace in remembering moments in our past, reflecting on times when we felt safe and in control because we had someone else taking care of us. The blood spatter, demons, stalking killers and ghosts that haunt us are just reflections of the chaos inside of us—they serve us as a reminder that we’ve all been through hell, and somehow made it out alive. Your pain is real, and horror says it's okay to feel it. It’s okay that bad things happened to you, because bad things happen to all of us, and we’re all sitting here together watching them play out on screen, silently talking about the core of it while we marvel at soundtracks and cinematography, set designs and costumes. It’s holding the hand of someone you love, and they're whispering “I see you” even when your world feels like you’re falling apart.

Perhaps there’s no definite answer to why horror movies feel like they’re squeezing us in trying times. They provide us with a safety net, but there’s no promise in it. Maybe we don’t need an explanation to justify why we feel secure while watching it. We can just let it pull us toward the darkness without a reason or purpose. It doesn’t need to be solved, just as grief doesn't need to be neatly processed, just as fear does not need to be eradicated.

Each level of comfort is coated in personal reasons; they are movies that connect us to the losses in our lives, trials, mistakes, and heartbreaks. ‘Hostel’ could allow someone to rage after losing a parent,  the perfect family in ‘Poltergeist’ could be a wish for someone who grew up in a broken home. ‘The Shining’ could simply remind us of a better time. Maybe it’s all surface-level, or maybe we just need beautiful, surreal images and incredible scores to comfort our souls.

Pretty little movies with gorgeous sets that allow us to escape. Wishes for love that crosses oceans of time. Wandering manors in Victorian gowns.

We are shaped by the ghosts we carry, and what haunts one person to the bone might bring a strange sense of peace to another. Horror feels like home because it doesn't demand resolution. It’s messy, it lingers. It’s a little girl wrapped up in her mom's cozy bed, no longer fearing the monster but facing it. Then it’s done, the credits roll, and you can walk away, your heart palpitating, but knowing you will be okay.

• Eris