Every birth is filled with pain.

Because every birth is a scene of horror, distended flesh, spilled fluids, and searing blood red pain. But it is also an act of hope. That twitching gore-covered creature that splits the air with a scream from violated lungs is a promise of something as yet undecided. Oh, and we thrive on uncertainty. That’s the stuff our dreams are made of. The total lack of foretelling within the crazy narrative logic of the sleeping mind: will this be good? Will this be a nightmare?

We live in a frightening world. Because we, ourselves are frightening. We know we carry inside of us the potential for glory as well as the potential for the utmost devastation – not always mutually exclusive. We are dangerous creatures living in a protected environment and that means trouble unless we find a valve to vent all the pent up destructive potential of our psyche. Cue the horror movie. We love to be frightened by the boogieman, to shiver before the silver screen mirror that mirrors only our soul.

With the silvery shiny disk spinning away inside the DVD player, spinning off candy-coloured dramas or luminous black and white elegies on the liquid crystal canvas before our eyes, we sit back to partake in a arcane ritual… with the world shushed all around us, we daydream in darkness, listening only to the murmur of our tortured souls being dissected for the joy of the angels.

We don’t fear the things that go bump in the night. In this rational and technological world of ours, it’s the lack of those things that makes us shudder. We crave the frisson of the unknown – for it is one of the two things that really, really frighten us: the other one is the unavoidable. We do not believe in werewolves, living scarecrows, animated monsters or flesh-eating zombies. But we fear the things they stand for: death and decay, body decadence, the ruin of the mind. The sudden jolt when the magic machine stops and the monster on the screen becomes our dear relative whose brain is being devoured by Alzheimer. The silent enemies we may or not be carrying inside of us like so many other parasites that Mr. Cronenberg can think up.

We know the ride is short and more exhilarating because of it. Ultimately we know death and decay are unavoidable, and we want to laugh at their gruelling faces. And we do. We do. They’re inside us. All evil comes from within. And it dies with us.

So, if you care to join me in exploring the collective fears we stuff in our horror fantasies, just sit yourself comfortably in a dark quiet room, and listen to the screams, to the bumps in the night, to the shuffling of feet and the revving up of chainsaws… they’re here to get you… because they’re you’re friends…