When I was growing up, Hallowe’en was but a half-hearted prelude to the serious business of Bonfire Night. But thanks to our American friends, that apostrophe has gone the way of the dodo, and the brash commercialisation of all things scary and sinister has expanded like insulation foam to fill the entire month of October. Luckily for us the plastic bats and witchy costumes help keep Christmas tree baubles and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing out of the shops until November, but the spooky shenanigans also provide film distributors with a hook on which to hang seasonal fare such as Halloween Ends, final chapter in the career of the luckless Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who has spent the past 44 years running away from the slow-moving bogeyman.

It also gives them an excuse to rerelease, this year, such creepy classics as Poltergeist (scary ghosts), The Thing (scary aliens) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is not scary at all, but we’ll forgive it because of Eiko Ishioka’s fabulous costumes and Wojciech Kilar’s thrilling orchestral score.

Halloween or no Halloween, it’s as though the public can’t get enough horror right now. It’s the only non-superhero or Tom Cruise-free genre that is booming, partly because it’s so cheap – you don’t need highly-paid film stars or costly special effects to make a decent horror movie – and partly because the fans are a loyal bunch who will gladly turn out to see any old garbage so long as there’s a possibility of someone getting decapitated by a telegraph pole, or a parasitic twin erupting out of the back of a woman’s head.

But there are changes afoot. For so long dismissed by cultural gatekeepers as almost as disreputable as porn, horror is no longer the exclusive province of gorehounds or goths. Nudged along by the burgeoning popularity of endless horror-themed TV or streaming shows (Supernatural, Stranger Things, Fear Street et al), it’s well on the way to becoming mainstream or even family entertainment. But is it still scary?

You may already be familiar with the term “elevated horror”, coined by Mr Tony Critic to refer to examples of the genre that – in his view – break out of the ghetto to appeal to those with more discerning tastes. Snobs, in other words, who despise the very idea of horror so much they feel compelled to frame its greatest hits as something else – a superior subgenre, if you will. As they see it, films like Get Out (2017), The Babadook (2014), A Quiet Place (2018), The Witch (2015) or Hereditary (2018) are more edifying than the usual dross because they are obviously “about” something, whereas traditional horror, they maintain, is little more than a vulgar compendium of jump scares and splatter.

But horror has always gone hand-in-hand with auteur or experimental cinema – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Vampyr (1932), and Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) are just three examples that spring to mind – so “arthouse horror” is hardly news, no matter what certain columnists would have you think, and, like it or not, it’s part of the same genre as Friday the 13th (1980).

Horror films have always been “about” something, even if they don’t wear their subtexts on their sleeves, as so many recent releases are perceived to do, often with disappointingly reductive results. Yes, such-and-such a horror movie is “about” bereavement, or racism, or parental fear, but I would contend that horror’s most powerful tools bypass the intellect to dabble in oneiric or surreal imagery that taps into an audience’s subconscious, haunting their dreams like the way the graveyard zombie from Night of the Living Dead (1968) once haunted mine. He was standing over the bed where I was sleeping, just staring at me. Yes, it was probably my night brain presenting me with a metaphor, one I’ve never been able to work out, though that’s probably for the best…

Horror movies have always been a way of addressing fears and desires that can seem too enormous, upsetting or embarrassing to face directly. Sometimes these fears are disguised as vampires or zombies – all-purpose symbols of consumerism, class differences, addiction, fascism, sexuality, viruses, or what have you.

But just as the miller’s daughter breaks Rumpelstiltskin’s hold over her by learning his name, slapping a label on hitherto unmentionable feelings can loosen their grip on us. And even if so-called elevated horror doesn’t always twist the knife at a primal level, perhaps it still performs a useful function. There is so much awfulness in the world today that fictional horror can be oddly comforting, even when the stories end in tears, or uncertainty, or lashings of blood and screaming.

In the real world, our collective anxieties have been unleashed by unprecedented threats, not just to our health and prosperity, but to our very existence, so that retreating into a sphere that encourages us to be anxious within the limits of a cinema or TV screen, with a finite running-time, simultaneously offers a safety valve and reassurance. Horror has already been there, seen that, and plumbed the depths, so now it’s offering to hold your hand and guide you gently through the darkness.