Horror has always been suspect.

What kinds of people watch, write, or put on film and in our minds such awful images? What kinds of people like that sort of thing?

Since it first emerged as its own genre, Horror has been blamed for being the cause or the effect of mental derangement, of moral impropriety and religious slander. Hidden behind the guise of the immaturity of adolescent boys, everyone has intentionally overlooked the real origins and depth of the genre, trading it for gratuitous sex and violence and wielding it like a magic wand to explain the irrational behaviors we have come to embrace as “evil.”

Most recently we had the Slender Man girls. And now we have the Scary Movie-Watching Florida middle school girls who planned to murder smaller classmates in the girl’s restroom…

As a Horror writer, I feel we must brace ourselves for the interrogation of…