Why Horror Can be Oddly Comforting and Some Recommendations by Black Authors

With the pandemic, wildfires, a worldwide racial reckoning, and an impending constitutional crisis, many readers have understandably been turning to comforting, escapist stories to help cope. I remember when the lockdowns first hit (it feels like years ago) and celebrities like Dolly Parton and Michelle Obama were reading children’s books on livestream and pretty much everyone was publishing lists of comfort books. While I’m not here to knock anyone’s coping mechanisms, I have a feeling that I’m not alone in needing something radically different to me through this third wave, and weirdly enough, I find myself turning to horror of all genres for comfort.

This week, I did a little research and found that psychologists have a number of theories as to why some people find horror to be comforting. Controlled risk-taking activities like going on a rollercoaster or playing a contact sport help people practice emotional regulation making it easier to access risk and regulate fear in other contexts. Horror books, I’d argue, are the most controlled type of controlled risk-taking. With nothing but words, the story’s fear factor is entirely dependent on the limits of the reader’s imagination. Every time you open the book and flip the page you are choosing to breathe life into that monster, and every time you come out unharmed. In this way, horror can be incredibly empowering giving readers temporary mastery over things that are normally out of their control.

Of course, it is much easier to feel empowered by horror when you see yourself and your experiences reflected in the protagonist rather than parodied by the monster. Horror has a bad, and mostly deserved, reputation for racism, misogyny, homophobia, and ableism that I’m not going to get into here. While horror with antiracist themes has existed from the genre’s inception, there has been a recent explosion of horror stories that explicitly debate genre’s bigoted history. Here are some of my recommendations:

Toni Morrison, Beloved