A man with charred face, and a close look at him, you are left shell-shocked by long chunks of rotten flesh swaying away from his extremities and his eyeballs are delicately dangling from their almost desolate d sockets. He walks in a leisurely way that affords no comfort to the onlookers. He looks utterly exhausted, as if a minute current of air will displace him off his delicate stance. But you know at the back of your mind, what’s being projected is only to make us feel easy and uneasy at the same time- an ugly hunt game is on. The hunger of this demon to feed on someone’s fear of death is almost insatiable.

Your eyes must have swept across such body-shuddering sequences in many typical horror movies, including the cult Friday Night film series. They blast the living daylights out of you, every time you conjure up the courage to watch them, and yet you are ready for more horror punches. Why it is so that we so love to experience the mind-freaking experience dished out by this exclusive genre, which is definitely not for the weak-hearted.

Horror is a far call from the romance-fueled emotional roller coasters, the adventurous movies that hike into uncharted domains and the family dramas projecting the delicate chords of relationships. Horror enjoys its own space and fan following. If I am not wrong, our interest in horror originates from our belief in afterlife and along with that, an immortal soul. Likewise, in afterlife we have reserved a place called burning hell for evil souls, where eternal punishment is meted out to them and heaven for the virtuous souls, where they get bathed in Almighty’s endless love.

Finally, we come to possibility that once in a while evil souls manage to escape from hell to promote human misery. The far-thinking human mind gives vent to this heart-stopping  conception on the silver screen. So, while we are engrossed in tales of gore, we are propagating our innate belief that evil supernatural phenomena does exist. We try to show it in as many ways as possible, in pursuit of a sprawling depiction of the dark side of afterlife.

No wonder, we are always on the lookout for those howls, ghouls and the charred monster faces that eat away the silence of the night, turning it into a fright night. As they say, with cinema the freedom of expression reaches its ultimate height and the representation of the horror-driven tales is quiet indicative of that liberty.