And this isn’t an aesthetic thing, or a taste thing. I just don’t find them scary. I don’t buy them. I don’t think there’s going to be someone chasing me with an axe, or some supernatural, superpowered something infecting my brain. I’m not afraid of ghosts or ghouls or psycho killers or Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th. Horror movies just aren’t plausible to me.

And that’s when my friend resorted to the ad hominem insistence that I don’t have an imagination.

Which is a wicked lie, and I told her so. “I have a very vivid imagination.” I sniffed. “A very vivid, often terrifying, imagination.”

“For instance,” I elaborated, “I have never driven over a bridge without being absolutely certain that it’s about to collapse. And I have never been behind one of those car-carrying trucks without noticing that the cars seem to be bouncing around a little too freely, a little too loosely, as if the person tasked with securing them spends his lunch hour taking full advantage of America’s basically nonexistent marijuana laws, and is just a little too relaxed to make sure that all of those cars don’t come sliding down and onto my head.”

I went on: “I imagine, in other words, what it must be like to free-fall off of the Delaware Memorial Bridge. Falling, falling, screaming, falling, and then … lights out. Just like I imagine the sensation of being bombarded with brand-new Kia Sorentos at 70 miles per hour, suddenly losing control of the wheel, flipping over and over, fire and crunching metal, and not dying instantly. Experiencing every terrifying moment of that. I imagine the whole thing every time I pass one of those trucks.”

“OK, OK,” she said. “I get it.”

“No, no,” I said. “Here are some more nuggets from my no-imagination imagination: When I’m at the doctor, getting blood work done, I imagine a tiny air bubble racing its way to my heart. I imagine plane crashes, deadly amoebas, slipping off the subway platform, elevator cables snapping, and forgetting to blow out a fancy candle, falling asleep, and incinerating myself to death.”

“All of those things are imaginable,” I wound up, “because all of those things are possible. A guy in a hockey mask, a supernatural being who infects your brain? Give me a break. But that tiny bubble of air? Those exist.”

And here’s the other thing horror movies get wrong, the thing that gives the whole game away: They announce themselves. There’s the music. There’s the slow build, the creaking door, the hot girl who shouldn’t go into the basement but goes into the basement. Horror movies are obvious that way. They give you a full orchestra’s worth of warning that something bad is about to happen.

But nobody composes a score for your actual life. The genuinely frightening stuff arrives without a soundtrack — in a sudden snap of bridge cables, on the freeway behind a logging truck, in a phone call at the wrong hour, in a sentence that begins, “The doctor wants to run a few more tests.” No mask, no machete, no fog rolling across a summer camp. Just a Tuesday.

So, yes, I have an imagination, but it has standards. It’s a snob. It will not work for free, and it will not work on a premise it doesn’t believe.

AN OLD FRIEND’S SUPRISE AT A NEW VOCATION

“So, everything is a horror movie to you?” my friend asked.

“Everything except horror movies,” I said. 

Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.