What the hell is horror?

Its fans are often treated as pariahs but there’s more to a love of the genre than merely an enjoyment of sordid scenes of blood and gore. Horror fulfils a genuine psychological function, says Alex Greenwood.

My mind should resemble a cavern of suppurating gore.

Not only that, but I should suffer electrical spasms of murderous nihilism that only vinegary adrenaline can extinguish by driving me to slash, slash, slash while murky shapes whisper deviant thoughts that twist reality.

Why? Because I am a horror junkie. I search out gruesome films, and, according to tabloid lore, that must mean there is a piece missing from my psychological jigsaw, or, indeed, that I am a dinky version of that infamous character, impressing his Sadean logic onto humble bodies.

Unfortunately for various newspapers, the nearest I get to distasteful ooze in real life is when I clean the food recycling box outside my house – and, I admit, once there were maggots. And it smelt really bad. And I had to use boiling water. And I realised I was actually boiling the maggots. And I felt terrible about it.

This begs the question of why someone who feels a profound guilt over poached larvae constantly watches films that depict, say, someone filleting another person’s leg.

The answer is simple: people get horror wrong.

Many horror films are more than just gore fests; they are educational gore fests. I may never wake up one morning to find my village full of brain-dead zombies but if I did, I would know exactly what to do. The same goes for escaping psychopaths in rural locations, inventing ingenious home-made weapons, working out codeword systems to defeat alien clones, protecting my house from demonic invasions, and surviving suburban rippers that wear masks and tennis shoes.

Now, on the whole, I am unlikely to ever find myself in any of these situations. But being literal misses the point. Horror films also refresh that tiny place in the back of your mind where you subconsciously file all your emergency programs.

Horror films can teach you how to recognise when something is odd, or when a situation is escalating. They can give you ideas on how to deal with dangerous predicaments; how to protect yourself and others by showing you instances when fictional characters did something wrong and when they did something right.

They do this through an age-old process: telling a story. And here’s the thing: horror films tell stories about circumstances we can almost never experience for ourselves – until we suddenly find ourselves in an equivalent situation. You don’t get dress rehearsals for riots or home invasions.

In this way, horror films function as manuals for when the shit hits the fan. Your car gets stuck on a rural road and you have no phone signal? The forest around you might not hide Ed Gein waiting to use your skull as a soup bowl, but the history of horror gives you an idea of the possible consequences of the actions open to you.

You know that any sequence of events that leaves one person alone is a bad idea; that keeping the heating or radio on will kill the car battery; that waiting until morning has benefits. You also know to be careful about going to the nearest house with lights, and accepting a tow from a truck driver that appears on cue.

You may say that anyone with a brain would know those things, but would they?

After watching Bertino’s The Strangers, my other half and I spent hours discussing the mistakes of the couple, and what they should have done differently – a conversation that turned into how we would approach the problem of masked psychopaths outside our home. The film made me realise the best escape route out of our house was through the built-in cupboard in our attic. We would squeeze into the far corner, punch through the roof tiles, crawl along the terraced roofs and shimmy down the drainpipe further up the road.

Would I have thought this if the film had not provoked me? I am not so sure. Will I ever need to use the idea? Interestingly, my next-door neighbour had a ground floor fire a week ago. As we live in a terraced over-dwelling – a very weird Yorkshire housing convention – we possibly would have been trapped in our home if that fire had spread. The only way out would be through that attic cupboard onto the roof.

Likewise, 30 Days of Night made me seriously consider what I would do if trapped in my home during a riot. 28 Days Later made friends think about how they would actually get out of London in an emergency. Wolf Creek made me wonder whether my ignorance of car mechanics was actually more dangerous than dumb.

It seems strange to argue that horror films provide a service that cannot be found elsewhere, as though they are like laminated flight emergency sheets for the dread times of your life. Yet it makes total sense when you realise that most horror films aren’t really about gore, murder and mayhem. What they are about, fundamentally, is survival. And not just any old survival, but survival in the most bizarre and strangest circumstances: who makes it, who doesn’t and why.

When you view horror this way, most horror junkies cannot be dismissed as twisted monkeys who slather over scenes of desecration. Rather, they are vigilant Scouts for those circumstances of dark despair where “be prepared” means inserting another DVD into the player.

So if you ever find yourself in a cavern of suppurating gore, your best bet for survival is a friend with a John Carpenter obsession. It won’t be their mind that got you there, but it may well be their mind that gets you out.

Although if said cavern is actually a huge food recycling bin, all bets are off. No amount of George Romero can prepare you for broiled maggots. Some things are just too dreadful for words.