I used to dread watching horror movies, for the obvious reasons I definitely share with others who feel likewise. There are horror movies I recall that gave me a hard time sleeping late at night. I can think of movies such as “The Ring”, “The Exorcism”, and “Paranormal Activity”. Over the years, however, I’ve grown immune to horror movies. One of the reasons may be that I’ve grown older. Yet, this obvious reason is not so convincing when you think through it. There could be many reasons why someone, like me, would grow less dreadful watching horror movies. The reason I’ve come to realize is a psychologically unexplored one, and that is the consequence of dealing with enough horrors of our own reality. Growing up itself is a dreadful reality–you start living with less certainty which is quite as scary as horror movies, maybe even more. Unlike horror movies which doesn’t last so long in your mental capacities, many other dreadful things about reality can last for a while. We don’t need to watch horror movies all the time to live in fear. Unfortunately, some of us live in fear – fear of losing someone, a job, and wealth. Not only you deal with the horrors of uncertainty, but you also deal with what others can do to you and others. The scarier thing about reality than horror movies is that there could actually be someone who plots evil against you. The horror is not directed to the “satisfaction” of the crowd but to you and only you. Such horror can begin with the people you talk and deal with on a daily basis.

The bottomline is that people don’t need to look scary to do scary things. They could be nice people in disguise who have ill-intentions to others. Dare to look for examples? Just read and watch the news. You’ll find a lot about scary people, people who shoot children at an elementary school, who shoot devout people during a bible study, beheading innocent people and having the guts to show it to the world. You’ll even find out about a daughter who killed her parents simply because she wants to inherit their money. Forensic Files show us a lot about those kinds of people. You know what the scarier thing is? We are not so different from those people who have committed horrific crimes, insofar as we are equally capable of doing the same thing. We may not feel as evil as them, but that doesn’t get rid of our capacity to do the same thing. Those horrific people are just a thought different from us, and we can never know when that same thought could arrive in us. The greatest horror films are those not seen in the movies but in our life realities set right before our eyes. When we were kids, we were scared of monsters underneath our bed. I found out that those monsters are not underneath our bed, but actually in us. Only by grace can we keep those monsters in check. When we surrender ourselves to the Lord, we become more like Him and less as our own monsters. It is only through this surrendering that makes us not afraid of our own demons, the dreadful reality we are living in, and – most of all – horror movies.