Finding Emotional Grounding in Darkness

Horror stories comfort me. Seeing my fears expressed on screen gives them a shape I can live with.

Photo by Amir hossein Kohanzad on Unsplash

More often than usual, I find myself caught in moments when loneliness quietly takes over. Not with fanfare or a parade, but quietly, during the suspended calm of a Sunday evening. This kind of loneliness becomes unbearable precisely because it hums beneath everything. When those moments arrive, I reach for what comforts me: books and movies.

I’m not saying that I found rescue in literature or cinema. This story is reserved for better storytellers who found salvation through something close to a religious experience. What I discovered instead was something stranger and more intimate: a temporary softening of the edge. For a few hours suspended in time, the loneliness didn’t fade away but became, somehow, less severe.

As I flipped through my playlist of comfort films, I realized that none of them were the ones you’d expect. There were no happy-go-lucky comedies, comforting coming-of-age stories, or exciting adventure films filled with warmth that we turn to when life gets too rough. The films that topped my shelf were The Thing, John Carpenter’s coldest and most haunting horror film, and The Night House, with its architectural grief that questions what love leaves behind for those who stay.

I wanted to express my appreciation for those films that carried me through tough times. They didn’t promise to fix me, but they were willing to sit beside me, offering a bittersweet comfort for the duration they played.

The Comfort of Challenging Stories

Escapism is an essential part of our cultural consumption. We look for stories that carry us somewhere easier — a galaxy far away, a fantasy island, a magical kingdom — where the struggles of our everyday lives can fade away for the time being. Even though I appreciate those stories, I believe this approach overlooks an important reason we turn to stories in the first place.

The reason why I find comfort in dark stories — real darkness, not the decorative kind — is that they do something escapism cannot. They ground you. The core message says: this is a real place, real things happen there, and they are not all good. When I watched The Thing, I felt connected to the characters’ struggle. Not against a Lovecraftian creature threatening their existence, but the cold, bleak isolation in the middle of Antarctica. 

The hopelessness of surviving the freezing conditions made me feel for the characters from a distance. In their growing fear of each other, while facing something they didn’t understand, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to my college days. I, too, remember feeling stuck in environments where people could change suddenly depending on the situation, where trust felt fragile, and every interaction carried a quiet uncertainty. Watching MacReady and his colleagues struggle against a force that tries to blend in with them gave me a strange sense of kinship.

The Night House works in a similar way. Beth’s journey as a widow haunted by what her late husband might have hidden from her shows how grief and isolation distort our perception. Familiar spaces that once felt safe seem like they’re watching you.

The film is unsettling and effective in so many ways. It doesn’t rely on excessive jump scares or cheap thrills. Instead, it conveys the shattering unease of not really knowing someone you loved. The sudden moment everything becomes unstable for Beth is terrifying — what she thought she understood about her life literally flips upside down. Certainty becomes chaos. Calm becomes turmoil.

I can’t help but notice the paradoxical feeling that dwells within me. The more I immerse myself in stories filled with isolation and fear, the less alone I feel. Not because the fear wasn’t real, or no longer belonged to me. Instead, I could see it expressed on screen — a proper form, with intention and agency. Dark stories don’t remove fear. They simply recognize it—and sometimes recognition is enough. 

But the power of these films isn’t only in their darkness; it’s also in their empathy.

The Unexpected Empathy of Darkness

When used properly, horror is a powerful vehicle for expressing emotions. Not just fear, though. This is the surface, the point of entry to a world with many more layers. Beneath it, the most impactful horror expresses longing, grief, and alienation. But the biggest feeling underneath is the terror of being misunderstood by the world around you.

The Thing understands this. The evil in that film is obviously external: an alien creature that takes the form of any living being and mimics them, approaching others unsuspectingly to survive in its new environment. But by setting the story at a remote scientific station in Antarctica, Carpenter forces his protagonists not only to confront the creature but also their own loneliness.

The scene where Dr. Copper loses it and starts lashing out at the research computers and the crew was the moment I felt the most for him. I know the scene is played for tension, but I couldn’t help but feel sympathy for a man who is scared yet refuses to show it. The empathy that arises in those moments isn't the comfortable kind that keeps you at arm's length from what you're seeing. It's the uncomfortable kind that completely collapses the distance.

The Night House raises a similar feeling. The horror comes from love gone wrong, where the aftermath reveals a terrible unknown. The grief is internal, but its external expression is painful, specifically real. As we watch Beth discover how little she really knew her husband, it feels like someone experiencing a kind of existential vertigo. The kind of loneliness many people feel — whether they have lost someone or just feel misunderstood by those around them — will be recognized.

At their core, these stories connect people through shared emotions: being hunted, haunted, or simply feeling out of place in the world. That kind of connection is stronger than many of the more uplifting options.

These stories are not dark because the filmmakers wanted to hurt their audiences. They are dark because they paint an honest portrayal of what it feels like to be human and afraid. That honesty is what I connect to. It reflects my own struggles on a big screen, making them understandable. Named. Placed.

These films didn’t change me. They didn’t solve my loneliness or fix the hard things. But they validated what I was feeling in a way that’s difficult to overstate. When you’re experiencing a silent, grinding kind of darkness, you feel like the world doesn’t want you there.

Instead, encountering these stories is like hearing someone say, "Yes, this is real. People feel this way." The darkness is real, and it’s not your fault. 

Dark stories — or as I like to call them, grounded stories — can reveal emotional truth in ways that bright, whimsical stories sometimes cannot because they refuse to sugarcoat. They acknowledge the audience in its complexity and allow them to project their own anxiety into the story.

Emotional Grounding Through Silence and Ambiguity

But I think what stands out the most in those stories is their dedication to ambiguity and silence. The Thing never fully explains itself. The ending never reveals whether Childs or MacReady has become the alien. They are left alone, in the cold night, as the camp burns around them. Their survival, the alien’s fate, the aftermath — These questions remain unresolved. The Night House concludes on a note of deep uncertainty. Did Beth finally let go of her grief? Is there really "nothing" more to come?

That ambiguity didn’t frustrate me. I appreciate how it allows me to create my own space within the story. A space where I can bring my own experience and fill in the gaps myself. The uncertainty I experienced during those lonely times, especially the not knowing, is one of the most exhausting parts of emotional struggle. You live with the feeling that you can’t fully see the shape of what you’re in.

When a story refuses to give an explicit resolution, it secretly tells us that not everything has to. Ambiguity isn’t a failure of the story; it’s just part of a different experience — one where the audience is allowed to participate in the world of the story way past the end credits. This is why they become a comfort to me: they acknowledge my emotional state without pretending there’s a single solution to all the problems.

Ambiguity — when used wisely — doesn’t shut things down. It encourages you to move freely instead of enforcing a seating plan. And when they’re told with care, dark stories turn fear into recognition.