The recent news from Iraq and Nick Berg’s death delivers a painful reminder what horror really is.
I won’t belabor it or the politics of it here. But it’s important to note. Horror isn’t just a genre of spook thrillers and slasher flicks. We slap the word on books and movies when we should be calling them dark fantasies. Vampires and black magic don’t happen in the real world. Horror belongs to the real world.
I’m not knocking horror fiction, dark fantasy, or anything like that. I wouldn’t have written Afterhell, let alone produced it, if I could dismiss the genre out of hand. As long as we carve out a place for dreams in our waking hours, our nightmares deserve equal time. We need the emotional release.
But considering how jaded we are about so many things, in a strange way it’s a relief to know we can still be horrified.