I love horror films. My friends, who have access to my video library, often comment that I must be a deeply disturbed individual.
Well, I am. But not because of my taste in horror films.
I am not particularly fond of monster horror movies. You know the type, where the antagonist is a grotesque physical entity and the plot consists mainly of screaming, running, hiding and systematically thinning the cast one at a time.
I prefer psychological, ethereal ghost stories. These are the ones where the antagonists obey no known physical laws. They appear without warning. They move objects without touching them. They haunt you in your dreams. And, more often than not, they are obsessively committed to avenging something that happened a very long time ago.
What I enjoy is not the ghost itself, but the complete collapse of cause and effect.
We grow up learning that if you do A, then B happens. This principle underpins education, engineering, relationships and Ikea instruction manuals. Horror stories, however, treat this rule as a loose suggestion.
In these films, physics works differently. Lock the doors and no one gets in. Except perhaps a terrifying, long-haired, white-robed, vengeful and hungry ghost whose unfinished business involves avenging her untimely demise after she flung herself out of a multistorey apartment to retrieve a Big Mac that had been thrown out the window by a taunting bully.
The terror is not the ghost. The terror is the blatant disrespect for natural law.
The irrationality of human behaviour, combined with the occasional suspension of physics, chemistry, and biology, creates a wickedly chaotic playground for telling very human stories.
And that is why my daughters and I enjoy watching them together. Our latest conquest is The Haunting of Hill House, which we watch one episode a day, partly for suspense and partly for emotional recovery.
Because nothing bonds a family quite like screaming in unison at something that makes absolutely no scientific sense. And when adrenaline is still high, nothing reinforces the importance of not bullying someone by throwing her hamburger out of a window quite like a good horror film.