Horror And Me, Part 1 By Award Winning Editor Eugene Johnson

May is Mental Health month. I’ve been struggling horribly for awhile now with disabilities including PTSD, anxiety with panic attacks, bipolar depression, ADHD, dyslexia, agoraphobia, and more. The last few years these have been impossible to manage, effecting every area of my life from my physical health to my relationships. My whole life one of my primary coping mechanism has been storytelling and the horror genre. So I found myself creating fiction in the horror genre as a form of therapy and escape. Lately I’ve been thinking of my struggles and how storytelling and the horror genre has been such an important part of my survival. I decided to write a series of articles based on my reflection and experience on how a genre that some see as taboo has been a lifeline for me all my life. Below is the first article.








Stephen King once said “we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones in the world.”


Looking back on my life, seeing how horror has helped me cope with my own trauma and mental illness, I believe that his statement may sum up why people are drawn to horror so much. Horror allows us to escape the real life monsters in our life, even if it’s for just a few moments. Horror is an important piece of our culture helping us to cope with the dark side of humanity that is sometimes too hard for a person to face.


When I look back at all the horrible times of my life, I can see I was drawn to the horror genre as a way to deal with the all too real horrors I faced daily in my home at the hands of abusive and neglectful parents. 


My father was very abusive taking the majority of his anger out on me from a very young age. I was his outlet, he and my mother blamed me for everything that went wrong in their life.


He even pushed my mother out of a moving car when she was in the late stages of her pregnancy with me. They thought they were going to lose me for a bit. So from an early age my maternal grandparents would take me as much as they could to stay at their house to spare me of the terror of my parents.


I grew up on horror in the late seventies and eighties. Everything horror and everything of the fantastic. My grandmother introduced to me to the genre at a very young age. I still remember going to the theater with her to see Poltergeist shorty after my fifth birthday. The clown scene scared the crap out of me, along with the scene with the corpses in the water. Yet I loved the movie.


At the time, I wasn’t sure why my grandmother, an old-fashioned church going woman, decided to introduce me to horror at such a young age, but she did and I fell in love with the genre. It was much later in life that I discovered that my grandmother had loved horror before any of her children were born, reading the old paperbacks when she could or catching a creature feature at the drive in. She even introduced all three of her children to the horror genre turning them onto it. I also found that she had a very bad childhood herself, full of pain with possible abuse. That she lost her first child just days after she was born. My grandmother also struggled with depression as well as possible anxiety though she never talked about it. My grandparents were from a generation that did not believe in therapy or talking about feelings. They believed appearance and what people went through was to keep everything inside. So looking back, my guess, is horror might have helped distract her from the real word darkness. She might have even thought it might help me. I don’t know the real reason she introduced me to all the creepy fictions most grandmothers turn their noses up at. But I’m so thankful she did.


Whenever I stayed with my grandparents, I consumed anything I could related to horror and the strange within reason. Which was pretty often seeing I grew up with very abusive parents. For awhile I basically lived there. So I took in a lot of horror. Whether it was sitting on the white old wooden swing in my grandparents backyard reading old horror comics. Or sitting in front of the big box television set on the 70’s style pea green carpet of their living room watching black/white reruns of the Twilight Zone, Creature Of The Black Lagoon, the old Hammer Horror films, and many more. I collected any monster related from my cherished Remco Monsters to the Crestwood Monster book series. I even had one of those large official movie Alien action figures that my grandparents found at a garage sale for me. When not reading or watching horror on TV,
Grandma and my babysitters would take me to the theaters as well to catch the new scary movies (both the Jolly Rogers Drive in and South Gate in door theater) being released. Some of my very few childhood memories are of me going to see movies with her such as Poltergeist, Gremlins, Critters, Day Of The Dead, The Evil Dead, The Hand, and many more. I was raised on everything Science-fiction, Horror, or Fantasy related adventures and I loved it. The escape to the different worlds took my mind off the horrible things that awaited me when my grandparents had no chance but to send me home.


Growing up there was just something special about the scary stories that just grabbed my attention. I remember being scared to death, but not wanting to look away.  I was fascinated with the monsters, yet I was rooting for the heroes at the same time. In those stories, anything was possible. The monsters brought people together of all types no matter what their differences. The heroes always had hope, even when everything around them was telling them they should just give up. While in those worlds, I forgot the abuse I was going through at home and from the real monsters that waited for me there. Instead I had hope and was brave and thought anything was possible. I learn hope, creativity and so much more from my beloved horror stories. From this young age, horror and storytelling would become my main coping mechanism when ever I was going through a hard time.


I have no doubt of this, as I look back at my life, which is filled with trauma and abuse. I lived through 15 years of every type of abuse you can think of from two sick addicts who where suppose to love me, a drive by shooting, the loss of both my grandparents, horrible health issues and disabilities, and so much more. The horror genre and storytelling has always been there to help me face the real world pains that I could barely face on my own. Even now, as I struggle worse then ever with my disabilities, they are my primary coping mechanism, third only to my faith and family. I definitely think Mr. King was on to something as I’m not sure what I would do without such an interesting genre such as horror as an outlet for all the real life nightmares I have battled inside.