A couple of years ago, my taste in entertainment started to shift in surprising ways. For years, I’d been all about prestige television dramas, movies with Oscar buzz, and critically acclaimed comedy specials. But in late 2016 and early 2017, my steady diet of mostly highbrow art wasn’t doing it for me. It’s hard to say why, beginning at the end of 2016 in particular, my brain could no longer deal with media flooded with serious, antiheroic Don Draper-esque figures.
In the following years, I got out of my comfort zone and explored two mediums that I’d spent most of my life ignoring: romance novels and horror films.
To make things clear: I am way more of a romance fan than a horror fan. I go through many romance novels a month while I only watch a horror film every now and then.
“I can’t believe I’m actually interested in seeing Midsommar and IT Part Two,” I said during a recent visit with my parents.
“Um, yeah. I can’t believe it either!” my dad replied with an equally joking and honest tone.
My Dad can’t be blamed for his surprise. Throughout childhood, I was a notorious fraidy cat. I didn’t watch the show Rugrats for years, because one episode in which the babies thought grownups getting fired meant actually being thrown in fire upset me too greatly.
Yet, in my 30’s I am somehow eager to see a movie about a shape-shifting evil clown that cyclically terrorizes a Maine town.
As I pondered the question of, “what is it that made me decide to try out horror movies after years of avoiding them?” I realized that my journey to accepting horror was shockingly similar to my path to outright romance novel fangirling.