Vicky Ewan: A lifetime aversion to horror

I am, quite unequivocally, not a fan of the horror film genre. I made my first foray into its macabre depths when I was a middling teen, as yet quite innocent of the dark underbelly of society and, quite frankly, regretful now that happy naivety no longer applies. 

As is fairly common, I imagine, my exposure to horror films was something of a rite of passage. I was initiated into its dubious embrace during a sleepover at a friend's house when another friend, who had long delved into those murky waters and who seemed surprisingly—and rather cheerfully—inured to their baseless charms, supplied a video tape for our night time entertainment. 

Perhaps not wishing to be considered spineless—but probably more because I was sufficiently intrigued to throw caution to the wind—I raised no objection to watching the proffered film. 

We waited for the house parents to pootle off to bed, no doubt engaged in the meantime in the usual teen-girl shenanigans, and then installed ourselves in the lounge with the VHS video player and snacks a-plenty, ready for the fun. 

Well, I won't impose a scene-by-scene description of the film upon you—let me save you from that; suffice it to say that I witnessed a shocking, brutal, terrifying ninety minutes of gore, fear, and suffering, set in the overlapping worlds of nightmares and reality. 

Despite my abject terror, I was unable to tear my eyes away from the screen—I think I was more worried about imagining what was going on than actually seeing it—but I sincerely wish I had. When the ordeal was over and it suddenly struck me that I had to cultivate sufficient composure to sleep, I was consumed by dread. 

By contrast, the other two in the slumber party appeared to have emerged from the horrendous experience relatively unscathed and were soon settling down for repose, their minds apparently unfettered by the dark chains that were pinning me captive inside the worst of the scenes I had just viewed. 

We bade each other goodnight, and they both drifted off, leaving me wide awake, trembling ceaselessly, rigid with tension and fright, utterly unable to imagine a time or place where I would ever feel safe enough to close my eyes again. 

Time dragged laboriously by, and, finally, I caught a grateful glimpse of the first greying of the dawn skies and resolved there and then never to watch that particular film again. 

More than 30 years later, I have kept good on my word. I was forever changed by the experience, dramatic though that declaration might seem; suddenly, I had been made freshly, painfully aware of genuine nastiness (albeit cinematically based) in a way that had been hidden from me before. 

That occasion certainly didn't qualify as my only excursion into the horror genre—I was a teenager, after all, with more impulse than sense—but it remains the most impactful and harrowing and set the tone for my future visits. 

These days, despite being a grown woman, I'm still at the mercy of that primary and wholly visceral response to scary movies: as soon as the opening credits roll or unsettling music insinuates its way across the screen, my heart rate accelerates, my brain judders, and I find myself physically and emotionally teetering on the edge of my seat, mute with fear. 

My children gently tease me, fully aware of my inability to control this reflexive reaction. They themselves—the older ones, at least—seem rather to enjoy scaring themselves witless with the latest shock flicks, somehow able to withstand, from details they have divulged in my unwilling yet strangely compelled hearing, extremes of chills and thrills that would doubtless haunt my thoughts for eons afterwards—rather them than me. 

I can, nowadays, steal myself to watch the occasional horror film (usually as long as I have ascertained either that it's not truly unpalatable or that it features some element of humour at its shady core), often because one of my offspring has asked me to watch it. 

My husband can rarely be persuaded to join us—and not because he is frightened. He simply doesn't buy into the genre, his grasp of reality solid enough to have centred within him a failure to suspend his disbelief sufficiently to allow him to accommodate the (admittedly often ludicrously far-fetched) premises playing out on the screen. 

Picture the scene: me, palpitating with wide-eyed fear, creeping closer and closer to his reassuringly warm body, willing to crawl inside his skin for comfort and protection, he shrugs his shoulders and raises incredulous eyebrows, impervious to the devastating effects of the barbaric images flickering before his eyes. O, would that I could be so unaffected! Perhaps I should just curl up with a good book instead. Stephen King, anyone?