Loving cinema is a lonely affair, a one-sided relationship. As a film fan (or a cinephile, if you’re fancy), you are kidnapped by the images a group of mad people have crafted to seduce you. You’re absorbed by the faces on the screen, you want to see them loom over you, larger than anyone you’ve ever known, like titans manifesting before you. To behold them is to be possessed. You become consumed with the need to know everything behind them – the actors, the directors, the production history – thinking this knowledge might bring you closer to them. You live in Kansas and in Oz simultaneously. Images of a film and your memory of it live side by side in your brain and in your heart, seemingly giving nothing back, just taking up brain space and emotional real estate.

Loving horror films, meanwhile, is akin to nursing the memory of a secret lover, someone’s touch that never leaves the most hidden grooves of your muscle memory, one that makes you feel things you cannot yet name, think thoughts so forbidden they send an exciting chill down your spine. Horror films don’t consume you; they infect you. An image, or a sound, or a performance, might worm itself into the deepest crevices of your memory and stay there. Horror is a full-body experience, a full-on possession that we invite. We volunteer our dreams and nightmares for takeover. No wonder horror fans are looked upon as oddballs: we choose, and chase, that possession. We want to relive our anxieties, our fears, our hungers over and over again. And we’re never sated.

I don’t remember the first time I went to the cinema, a space I’d dedicate my career and untold hours of my professional and personal life to, but I recall in vivid, grainy detail the precise moment I first watched a horror film.

Cut to: Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, 1996 or 1997. A tiny apartment with a rough, burgundy-patterned rug on the floor and a very similar one nailed to the wall, right behind the hard, two-seater sofa. Everything in this Soviet-era block is square and hard to the touch. A small television on a shiny black TV stand filled with bootleg VHS tapes: some are American films with alternative Russian covers; others faceless videos with a sticker on them and a handwritten title. My cousin, then a teenager, had to look after me for the day. His assortment of videotapes, most of them bought at the local bazaar, was a treasure trove of action, horror and comedy films starring former WWE wrestlers. The film he wanted to watch that day was A Nightmare on Elm Street. The title was written on the tape in Cyrillic: Кошмар на улице Вязов. No cover, just a cardboard case with the title written in ballpoint pen on the side. The only word I recognised was ‘nightmare’: a bad dream. The tape had both the first film, from 1984, and the sequel. I didn’t know what a sequel was, or that the tape held two separate films, so I thought it was the same film, experienced it as one extended nightmare. We watched them back to back in my aunt’s one-bedroom flat, which had a small balcony that overlooked a small children’s playground with metal monkey bars, not unlike those in Elm Street’s Springwood.

That night I had nightmares, vivid images which did not feel like dreams, of Freddy reaching out from under the bed; Freddy over the end of the bed; Freddy looming over my grandma’s sleeping body; Freddy’s breathing near my ear. Freddy knew I would eventually have to get out from under the protective force of my blanket. When I thought he was gone, I peeked under the bed, cautiously edging near the floor like I was about to defuse a bomb. Not breathing, trying not to make a single noise, tucking my waist-length hair into my sleeping gown so Freddy couldn’t grab it. My grandmother’s bed frame was made out of cherry-tinted wood and the mattress was springy, nearly folding on itself whenever you lay on it. Every one of my movements had to come in small increments, with the millimetric precision that only a terrified child is capable of. I willed my heart to stop for a few beats while I spied under the bed to see if Freddy’s clawed glove was lurking in the dark. It was, and it tried to grab me, sometimes. Other times, I just heard his laugh coming from somewhere deep under the bed, or hidden behind the curtains, or from inside the TV itself. I could see him peering at me from the darkened screen, waiting for the right time to leap out of it. I developed the habit of leaving the TV on while I went to sleep, comforted by the noise of static. The recounting of Freddy’s visitations became annoying for my grandma, so I stopped, but remained vigilant at night. I was the bed’s protector. This went on for a month, maybe more (what is time to a nine-year-old?). When they  ceased, I found myself missing Freddy. I asked my cousin for more movies, more nightmares.

I often think of my cousin – this boy who wouldn’t live past twenty-seven – when I think of horror films. I begged him to show me more things from his magical cupboard of coverless tapes, and I was indiscriminate in my voraciousness when he obliged. Action, horror, sci-fi: they all melded together. Some images from these films became so ingrained that for years I thought I must have imagined them. Kung-fu teenagers became fused with robot aliens. Enhanced soldiers blended with maskwearing killers. Leprechauns who tricked women into sex in their caves. Zombified lovers and red-headed warrior women. A high-tech prison that would implant a chip in the necks of its prisoners that could detonate at any time. An animated Halloween tree that signalled an upcoming death. These might be real films, or they might be old nightmares.

I didn’t meet Freddy again until a decade later, and was surprised to discover he no longer scared me. The Freddy I encountered on the screen now was funny, with a sick, slimy sense of humour. He was the ghost of a pervert, a child killer and a vengeful spirit. This Freddy was also just an actor, Robert Englund, who years later I would see having breakfast in a hotel in Sitges. I refrained from talking to him because I couldn’t bear the idea of losing my memory of that earlier Freddy I once knew, the one who lived under my bed for a month, the one who opened the door to so many new nightmares. My Freddy would not be having poached eggs.

A Nightmare on Elm Street is the horror origin story I keep retelling. This is just my story, but what’s most thrilling is that everyone has one of these. During our shared appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week programme, celebrated author George Saunders told me his, asking: ‘Have you ever seen Mr Sardonicus?’ He recounted, joyfully, the 1961 William Castle B-movie, which sees a man dig up his father’s grave to retrieve a winning lottery ticket. The producer of the show emailed me that very day about a black-and-white film she watched as a child and couldn’t remember the name of, but was still haunted by – in particular the image of a woman bricked up in a room, alive. In her seminal book House of Psychotic Women, author Kier-La Janisse remembers being haunted by the image of a possessed priest from the 1972 sci-fi horror Horror Express, transformed through her ‘hyperactive imagination into The Man With Green Eyes’, and which would become a ‘primary fixture’ of her sleeping life for years to come.1 Later on, she realised that she actually watched the film on a black-and-white television, so the green eyes were entirely her invention. Everyone has a foundational horror. It’s the image that seeps under our psyche and won’t let go, transforming the film and the image of horror itself into an avatar for our biggest fear. Take a moment and remember yours.

‘Culture gives us our collective dreams – on stage, on screen, online –’ writes House of Leaves author Mark Z. Danielewski, ‘but daydreams grant us each the collective possibility of oneself.’2 Danielewski’s idea is concerned with the process of becoming something other, of allowing strange and unexpected changes to be discovered. Horror cinema, following this thought, gives us our collective nightmares. It challenges us to see what fears, hungers and anxieties we are holding on to. Horror is part of our culture. Despite decades of dismissal and snobbery, of hiding under more qualité labels like ‘thriller’ or ‘elevated horror’, it has always been a significant form of cultural expression. The new terminology, which has been reinvented every other decade in order to separate the frowned-upon thrills of horror from ‘proper’ storytelling, carries in itself an implied sense of shame thrown at horror fans. We’ll take your money, but you should be ashamed of yourself, it seems to smirk. Every October, I’ll do a panel or a slew of interviews where I’m asked, variously, ‘Why do we like horror?’, ‘Is the genre misogynistic?’, ‘Why are people still watching horror?’ The unspoken implication, of course, is that there is something wrong with the people...