In an age in which it is impossible to keep up with the endless cycles of denunciation and rehabilitation on Twitter, internalized political guilt is the other side of the moral outrage coin. And come Halloween horror-movie season, we’re forced to confront (or repress) our feelings about the blood-splattered images on their screen.

To all of the people with a conscience out there who have ever been gripped by an irrepressible giddiness while evaluating whether a kill sequence was any good or not, only to later snap to your senses and find your shirt covered in the sticky red muck of shame, you are seen. I, like so many others, suffer from this affliction and feel the inner turmoil that comes from delighting in mounting body counts and secretly rooting for every mass murderer in a mask in every schlocky 1980s slasher.

We all know that this carnivalistic revelry in guts and gore borders on the objectionable. And yet we can’t look away.