i realized
at about the same time i was old enough to appreciate a horror story
why they appeal to us so much. 
what it is that frightens us so much. 
obviously it's complicated--
the psychology of fearing ghosts,
for instance,
is a complicated interaction of our reservations about the time after death, 
the things we once failed to understand about the natural world
and the human fear of the unknown. 
but why is that slowly creaking open door in a house no one is supposed to be in
the notion that that statue might have blinked while you weren't looking
so much more frightening
than the ten foot tall fire breathing lizard monster? 
after all, 
one is a lot likelier than the other to actually kill you. 
what i think 
is that the creaking doorways and blinking statues
cater to our fear of the unknown. 
we fear what we don't understand. 
all our human history we have told stories to make sense of an infinitely random and complicated universe
trying to give ourselves a place in it. 
the ancient polytheists invented gods
in an attempt to understand a world which frequently killed and threatened them. 
they feared the wrath of these beings
but they also told rich, wonderful stories
about their rivalries, 
their grudges, 
their loves, 
and their tragedies. 
many of these are still alive today. 
folk tales fulfill a similar role, 
taking phenomenons we could not understand 
and spinning them into stories we could. 
then someone had the idea
of using these stories
these beautiful, random, coincidental stories
to frighten people. 
to take the idea that spirits linger on earth after their deaths
to attend to unfinished business
and turn it into a girl with stringy hair and an unspecified but incredibly specifically gruesome revenge brigade
on, for some unfathomable reason, 
every good-looking teenager the world across. 
a monster to vanquish. 
to turn the strange things, 
the inexplicable things, 
we could spend our time trying to understand in order to know our world
into a trick, 
an exploitation of our fear of the unknown
to make our hearts race. 
fearing the unknown to a certain degree keeps us from doing stupid things. 
but it also prevents us from moving on. 
do i, 
maybe, 
dislike horror stories in part because they scare me a lot more than i feel they should? 
obviously. 
but i also find them frustrating. 
where are the new ideas of life after death? 
the ones that help us understand them in a way we can accept? 
the sitcom about a medium who gives ghosts talk therapy? 
why are stories about killers and the mentally ill
always so simplistic? 
psychological horror
terrifies me
and i still enjoy it. 
people can be horrifying
and the misunderstood can be beautiful and even mundane
and at the very least, 
fascinating. 
asking us to be afraid of a creaking floorboard
is lazy 
and makes me feel bad for all the misrepresented ghosts
i don't believe in. 
i don't believe in ghosts
or any kind of life after death. 
but i'm fascinated by it. 
and it's too easy to apply the fear of one unknown
to the fear of another. 
so for this reason, 
i do not like horror stories. 

i'm a huge film/television nerd and think way too much about stereotypes in television and am mildly obsessed with death, so this was just a thing that i thought of and decided to go ahead and write. i know there are good horror stories in the world. this may make no sense. i don't know.