Even as a young child, I preferred horror above every other movie genre. This is the nice way of saying that I liked to watch people die violently, or try not to. The flat-screen television in my family’s home offered more than eight hundred channels. Many Sunday mornings, I would collapse on the sofa and surf for something bloody enough to sate my craving. If “The Exorcist” or “Psycho” wasn’t playing, I could worship a selection of lesser-known slasher films, splatter flicks, psychological thrillers, zombie comedies, paranormal mysteries, crime bio-pics, natural-disaster documentaries, or, in desperate moods, Lifetime melodramas, in which death or scandal threatened earnest suburbanites.

In a 1965 article titled “Monsters Are Good for My Children,” the author Terri Pinckard argued that it’s healthy for parents to show their kids films that echo anxieties of the times. Pinckard, a mother of four, was writing at a pivotal moment in the horror genre’s history: three years after her piece ran, the Motion Picture Association of America outlawed formal censorship, allowing major studios to introduce audiences to films of unprecedented gore. It was a pivotal moment in the country’s history as well. Race riots were stirring the South; a gunman had assassinated the President. “As a child learns of the outside world,” Pinckard wrote, “he learns of real-life things to be afraid of.” When her eight-year-old daughter inquired about the atrocities of the Holocaust, Pinckard obliged with a detailed explanation, bringing the girl to tears, and then sat the family down to watch an episode of “The Twilight Zone”: “For how much better to have her dream of a Frankenstein than of Buchenwald. Yet, in reality, which was the Monster?”

For almost as long as I can remember, I, too, have found that fictitious fears can help to soothe the real ones. When I was three years old and my sister was twelve, our parents took us on a summer vacation to their native city of Ankara, Turkey, where they still owned the apartment my family had lived in before immigrating to the United States. My father and mother were celebrating their twentieth anniversary that August, so they went one evening to dine by candlelight at a restaurant downtown, leaving me and my sister at our grandparents’ house. It was one of the hottest nights of the year. After their date, we all returned to the apartment, and my father opened every window to the dark.

Late that night, once we’d gone to bed, a burglar entered our flat through an open pane above the balcony. We later learned that he was seeking shelter after robbing another house. My father heard a sound in the corridor and emerged carrying a coatrack. The robber shot him five times point-blank, killing him, before holding my mother at gunpoint. During this time, I hid with my sister in a closet. As police sirens neared our building, the killer escaped the way he came.

The sick logic of many horror films holds that victims of violent crimes solicit their own suffering. The babysitter ought to have called the police when the kids went missing. The lost spelunker could have chosen a safer cave. The deaf writer who decamped to the woods should have brought a gun. Such reasoning transforms scary movies into morality tales. John Carpenter’s “Halloween,” the pioneering slasher film, punished sexually forward women at the hands of a knife-wielding stalker, leaving only the virgin alive. Screenwriters in the eighties transformed a rising divorce rate into fodder for films like “The Lost Boys,” in which mom’s new suitor is a vampire. In the aughts, “The Ring” and “One Missed Call” mocked technology fanatics, characters too latched to electronics to avoid the curses they contain.

My father’s sin, I suppose, was his own sense of security. Had he thought to lock our windows, he might still be alive. As an adult, I have returned to visit the apartment in Ankara where he died. Another family lives there now, their balcony barred. To reach our flat, I discovered, my father’s killer would have had to jump; I clear six feet and even on tiptoes could not touch the balcony’s lip. Standing underneath it, I replay the night from the burglar’s perspective. He shins up the building and crawls inside. Encountering my father, he shoots once and then four more times. I see him shake a smoking gun before my mother’s eyes—an image informed not by memory, I know, but by the movies.

Most of my own recollection comes from what my mother has told me. Some details she has forgotten entirely; others remain imprinted—the sound of the shots and the rush out to the street, where reporters had arrived before the paramedics. I, too, heard my father’s murder as it happened, but a toddler’s oblivion spared me from understanding. In the following days, my mother received calls from everyone she knew—high-school friends around Turkey, old colleagues from Canada, new coworkers in the States. I am told that I outpaced relatives to the phone, picking up each time and answering, “Daddy?”

Adults have the worst work, explaining horror to a child. The psychologists my mother consulted told her to guard me from the details but not to lie.

“Where is he?” I asked for days afterward, holding her leg.

“He went back,” she told me.

“Does he know where Massachusetts is?”

“Yes.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s good.”

Turks hasten to bury their dead, so we did not need to postpone our flight home; we had the tickets already, one too many. In Ankara, undertakers wrapped my father’s body in muslin and dropped him into the ground. One week later, a plane carried us overseas to a different life.

Back home in Massachusetts, my mother, too, watched many movies, mostly comedies and romantic dramas. Perhaps because she, like my father, was a chemist, she considered the process osmotic, as though sitting before that bright screen in our unlit living room might induce an exchange, excreting grief and replenishing the house with laughter. Why I wished, instead, to steep myself in fear was a mystery to her on those days and nights—when more than once she took my sister and me to huddle in a bedroom with a barrier of furniture stacked against the door. She hated the “Final Destination” marathons, the Hitchcock box sets, the home-invasion thrillers I played and replayed on our screen.

A defining feature of horror movies is that they are targets of critical scorn. Many acclaimed films, though terrifying, are considered too thoughtful to remain in the genre’s lowly confines. When “The Silence of the Lambs” won five Academy Awards, in 1992, including the one for Best Picture, no horror film had received similar honors since “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” earned its star, Fredric March, a Best Actor Oscar, six decades before. And yet horror films subject to the harshest critical reception have often enjoyed the greatest commercial success. When “Friday the 13th” premièred, in 1980, Gene Siskel, in his review for the Chicago Tribune, called the film’s director “one of the most despicable creatures ever to infest the movie business” and encouraged viewers to write the chairman of Paramount’s conglomerate—whose address the paper published—and voice their contempt. Meanwhile, the movie, which cost less than six hundred thousand dollars to shoot, grossed almost sixty million. Eleven sequels would follow, critics be damned.

Most adults I grew up with considered a taste for horror base and strange, especially in a child. Parents monitored me at fifth-grade sleepovers, where, asked to cast my vote between “High School Musical” and “Mission Impossible,” I was likelier to suggest “Hannibal” instead. I spent recess enacting hostage scenarios in the playground tube slide, making sounds that summoned grownups to its mouth. Outside of our home, my mother advised my sister and me to keep quiet about the details of our tragedy. What had happened might entitle us to attention, she knew, but it would not guarantee us tenderness. Onlookers would misunderstand the facts—shunning us as vulnerable foreigners, showering us with specious pity, or sensationalizing the crime in the manner of the media. It’s easier to empathize with death, an eventuality, than with murder, a nightmare.