Amy Goldsmith: A Love Letter to Horror

Some people get their thrills riding rollercoasters, some enjoy skydiving, but I get mine from being scared. Not the hyper-ventilating-scared-for-my-life type of fear, but that delicious creeping sensation you get when you read a good horror story.

My earliest memory of this thrill was when I was seven and received the Ladybird edition of Dracula from my parents as a birthday present. I don’t know who was on the editorial team back at Ladybird in those days, but I’m pretty sure those illustrations wouldn’t get passed for children these days. The one that haunted me most was on the back cover, where a wraith-like, vampiric Lucy carries a small bundle back to her tomb…

A later obsession was Scholastic’s Point Horror series. Horror pickings had got pretty slim at home; I’d exhausted my dad’s collections of vintage ghost stories, so when I discovered these books, with their eerie covers – a mirror spattered with blood, a creepy doll being pushed into someone’s mailbox, a funhouse with a garish clown – I was immediately obsessed. Better yet, these stories featured young adults like me (rather than the fusty old clergy members I was used to reading about in ghost stories) facing the same day-to-day dilemmas I had with their friendship problems and fickle boyfriends.

When these stopped providing the same level of thrill, my eyes wandered back to my parent’s bookshelves – I grew up solidly working class, and trips to the bookshop were rare. I was particularly drawn to a book called ‘Salem’s Lot by Stephen King. Its cover alone was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen: the faces of a gleefully grinning young boy with pointed canines and a Nosferatu-esque monster with rat-like teeth. Based on that, I was expecting some instant gore. But Stephen King does something much cleverer – drawing us into his small-town America, making us care for the multitude of characters before unleashing something monstrous.

The first movie that grabbed me by the hand and took me somewhere exhilarating was John Carpenter’s The Thing (1979). A tense set-up of a dog being chased by helicopter across an Arctic landscape set expectations high, but that first transformation scene – where said dog is revealed as the ‘Thing’ had my jaw on the floor to the point where I considered switching it off. But I persevered and was rewarded by one of the most original (and tense) locked-room horror movies in existence.

My next obsession was zombie movies after watching Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, which is not only terrifying but also has a clever subtext about mindless consumerism. These movies led to endless late-night discussions with friends about what we’d all do during a zombie apocalypse – who would survive and how.

But as well as providing excitement and shivers, horror can surprisingly offer comfort. There’s a safety in knowing that, unlike in the real world, when things get too much, we can always close the book, pause the television, turn off the game. Horror gives us the opportunity to test our courage– we can confront our fears head on and discover we’re braver than we think.

Our Wicked Histories by Amy Goldsmith was published by Ink Road on 30 July 2024