Cassie McClure

I consumed a lot of horror movies during my teen years. For a couple of my friends, my room became the hub where we watched the standard fare of slashers, munched on overly processed snacks, and critiqued the characters’ decisions as they ran for their lives. We, of course, would make better, smarter decisions. Ah, to know more as a teenager.

As a teenager, horror was distant. The victims were fictional, and the violence was entertainment. But my room was a safe container where my friends and I could consume fear without consequence.

Our appetites finally slowed when the horror genre started leaning toward gratuitous torture violence. Around the same time, the world itself seemed to be growing more chaotic. News increasingly carried the kind of randomness and senselessness that once belonged to movies. The distance between fictional horror and real-life tragedy felt smaller than it had before.

My relationship with the media has changed over the years as well. Content consumption has become a near-constant hum, with a phone always within reach. A forced break came when my daughter wanted to see her first horror movie in a theater, and I realized how unusual that experience has become for me. Sitting in the dark, I found my attention occasionally drifting toward the phone resting face down on the table next to the popcorn in front of me. The real horror could be a pop-up in my notifications or an incessant hum that meant someone was trying to reach me with bad news.

Horror movies used to offer an escape from reality. Now reality follows us into the theater.

We were watching “Backrooms,” a perfectly suitable entry-level horror movie for teenagers, though perhaps a little slow for them. The film centers on endless rooms and hallways that are simultaneously familiar and wrong. Watching it, I realized that what interested me was not the monster lurking in the background but the setting itself. The older I get, the more I think some of the most effective horror comes from taking ordinary spaces and making them incomprehensible.

When my kids were little, I missed many of the popular movies everyone else seemed to be discussing. Most reached me months later through streaming services after discussions had largely ended. Looking back at the release dates, I was likely a mother of a baby and a toddler when I first watched “John Wick.” The premise is straightforward enough: An assassin attempting to leave his violent past behind gets pulled back into it. The audience is meant to focus on the action. Instead, I found myself thinking about the people in the background.

As one henchman after another appeared and was promptly dispatched, I had an unexpected thought: All these men have mothers. Somewhere, someone raised them, worried about them, and hoped for their future.

Maybe that is what struck me as I sat beside my daughter in the theater. As a teenager, I saw horror as about surviving the story. As an adult, I am more interested in everyone left behind when the story ends.