Spilled Milk and Root Rot 💀🌿

People often assume darkness is something to fear.

Something to avoid. Something to grow out of.

For me, it has always felt a little like home.

People often assume horror is about fear. Blood, gore, and things lurking in the dark waiting to jump out and make you spill your popcorn.

And while there is certainly plenty of that, it has never been what drew me to horror.

I’ve been a horror fan for as long as I can remember. Not because I enjoy being scared, but because horror has always felt strangely familiar.

I’m a third-generation horror fan.

Some families pass down recipes. Some pass down sporting teams. Mine passed down monsters.

Growing up, horror wasn’t something forbidden or hidden away. It was just another form of storytelling. Ghosts, creatures, curses, haunted houses, tragic monsters, and strange worlds were as normal to me as fairy tales were to other kids.

The older I got, the more I realised that the horror I loved wasn’t really about fear at all.

It was about empathy.

The best horror stories aren’t about monsters. They’re about people. People dealing with grief. People dealing with loss. People trying to survive things they don’t understand. People carrying burdens that slowly transform them into something unrecognisable.

Underneath the ghosts, creatures, and darkness, horror has always been a genre about being human.

And humans are messy.

We struggle. We fail. We break. We make mistakes. Things don’t always work out the way we planned.

That has always felt more honest to me than pretending everything is fine all the time.

Maybe that’s why the horror aesthetic found its way into SMRR so naturally.

Spilled Milk and Root Rot was never really about horror, not in the traditional sense.

The spilled milk isn’t just milk. The root rot isn’t just a plant problem.

They’re reminders that things go wrong. Plans fall apart. Life gets messy. Despite our best efforts, we don’t always get everything right.

And yet things keep growing anyway.

I’ve always found beauty in things that other people overlook. Overgrown gardens. Weathered books. Forgotten places. The strange. The imperfect. The things that don’t quite fit.

I think a lot of horror fans are like that.

We’re not necessarily drawn to darkness. We’re drawn to honesty. To stories that acknowledge life isn’t always tidy. To characters who aren’t perfect. To monsters that aren’t really monsters at all.

The truth is, horror never taught me to fear monsters.

If anything, it taught me to understand them.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realised that some of the people who love horror the most are often the most compassionate. We’ve spent years rooting for outsiders, feeling sorry for misunderstood creatures, and looking for the humanity hidden beneath the surface.

Horror never taught me that monsters were scary.

It taught me that sometimes the monster is grieving. Sometimes it’s lonely. Sometimes it’s angry. Sometimes it’s simply different.

Maybe that’s why I’ve always felt comfortable in the shadows. Not because they’re dark, but because they’re honest.

Beneath the darkness there’s usually a story about survival. About resilience. About finding beauty in unexpected places. About learning to live with the parts of ourselves we’d rather hide.

That’s something I’ve always related to.

And it’s something that will probably always find its way into the things I create.

💀🌿

Bec