Horror is so so important. Stories are how we explain our world, how we make sense of it, how we prepare ourselves for it. If ever there is a place for horror, it's in stories. It is the most important part of many stories, because you WILL be afraid in life. And your fears will not be so cut and dry as a zombie hoard you can hack at. Nobody wears a white or black hat- you don't know. Life is messy as hell. So I think it's really important that we learn to feel fear and confusion and to face horror in a controlled environment like a movie or a book, where everything is make believe and reversible, where things are a bit easier to make sense of. It's training, really, for a world that is so much more horrifying than any monster under your bed. The monsters in horror films do exist, they just exist in different ways. They hide behind faces. They hide in the mirror. And you need the practice of recognizing and facing them in their purest form before you graduate to living surrounded and inhabited by them. Children need horror. People need horror. I really believe in that. That's why I LOVE horror films. Because I always wish my life was so simple. I wish I knew what was chasing me, and that it would only break my body and not my soul, and who was "good" and who was "evil". I watch horror and I think it'd be a relief to have something to hit, something to hold and swing against my demons, something to struggle against that had a face and a clear malice, and no complicated soul beneath. Something that could never convince me that maybe I was the one in the black hat, and just didn't know it yet. Life is brutal. Show your children how to face it, instead of protecting them from it until the opportunity is past and letting them face alone the disconcerting, bewildering, frightening betrayal that no, nothing makes sense, and no, the good guys don't always win, and no, you aren't always on the good side, and no, the cruelest people almost never get what's coming to them. Prepare your kids to be horrified, because monsters under the bed and zombies and ghosts and vampires- they're nothing compared to lovers, to bosses and best friends and sudden deaths and trying to live through the pale, ugly moments of mediocrity that pile up around you as you age. Get them ready to be hurt, because you have to know that you can't keep that from them. You can't stop the world from doing what it does. The world creates and then destroys. It wounds. You can't stop that. You can only be honest about it. Just like we teach our children rhymes and myths to explain confusing things like seasons and divorces, we need to show our kids the symbols that represent the horrors they will ALL have to face in their lives. I will always see horror as an escape from the fear I have in my life, because it's simple. It's one side versus the other and nobody switches and if you lose, you die- you don't have to keep going. That's the secret. For all of you who wonder- why would anyone like a horror film? We like them because we can feel our fear and our revulsion and leave it behind once it's done, tidy and finished, a release of the screams that build up in our throats from things we refuse to let inside enough to react to. It's a deferral. A stand-in. A safety net. It's a way to handle everything we can't handle in a symbolic form and move past it. Horror is incredibly important in this world.