I’m not exactly sure when I first fell in love with horror. I’ve always been drawn to dark things. Maybe it started when I discovered Edgar Allan Poe in grade school. His rhythm, his morbidity, the way he made dread feel beautiful.

For a while, I actually thought I didn’t like horror movies. The ones I saw were cliché and boring. But then I found the genre’s other face: the psychological, the gothic, the raw social and personal commentary hidden just beneath the surface. And of course, I also just love a good splatter comedy.

Right now, my top three favorite horror films are Army of Darkness, The Thing, and Rosemary’s Baby. Each one tells a story, evokes a feeling, and fully commits to its world. That’s what I love about horror: how it lets you explore subtle emotions through extreme, often grotesque imagery. It’s the genre of transformation, of metaphor made flesh.

A lot of my writing has roots in horror. Shrouded, my feature-length screenplay, is a psychological horror and family drama about an estranged daughter reconnecting with her schizophrenic father, a man haunted by dark figures that begin to bleed into reality. My short film, Deadline, taps into paranoia and uncertainty through the presence of an ominous neighbor. And Autopsy Report, my poetry collection, dissects the body and the psyche with the clinical eye of someone who once studied nursing and anatomy. A form of body horror turned inward.

Horror, to me, isn’t just about fear. It’s about exposure. It’s about showing what we normally try to keep buried. Finding something human inside of it. An obscured truth.