People have asked: "Do you feel your life is over?"
No. It's been far more enriched than it has diminished.
"Are you less selfish?"

Er, no. If I make sure the baby's fed before feeding myself, maybe that's because I don't want my dinner to be spoiled by the mewling of a hungry infant. I'm not about to claim to be a better person than I was this time last year.

There's definitely been a double whammy of the profound and the banal. For every moment of transcendental beauty, there's a dreary scramble around the house looking for a clean bib.

But now and then I'm surprised to discover my reactions to things have changed.

Most music by new indie bands now sounds shallow and trite. I'm drawn towards gravel-voiced singer-songwriters who've been around the block a few times.

And I'm seeing things in films I didn't see before, especially horror films.

As a teenager I was fascinated by the sub-genre 'body horror'. A classic of this type is David Cronenberg's film The Fly.

After a botched experiment with a teleportation machine, Jeff Goldblum's scientist experiences a surge of strength and sexual prowess. But this has a price – he's turning into a giant insect.

Nowadays, I might see the funny side more, and appreciate Cronenberg's allusions to Stevenson and Kafka.

But at 13 years old, I was afraid, I was very afraid. Tormented by the upheavals of puberty, I was well placed to empathise with a character who feared he was becoming a monster.

If adolescence made body horror more powerful, parenthood does the same for horror films that deal with children.

The makers of scary films are shrewd sadists who delve beneath our rational defences and plumb the dark, primal swamp beneath. And they have made much use of our anxieties about kids.

The Exorcist is ostensibly about a child who becomes possessed by the Devil. But what parent of daughters cannot respond to the film's subtext – the disturbing suggestion that your cute little poppet will one day morph into a highly-sexed, potty-mouthed tyrant?

Some horror films play with the disturbing idea that children have special knowledge. The boy in The Shining is innocently aware of the carnage his father is about to unleash long before anyone else.

And the telekinetic mayhem wrought by Sissy Spacek in Carrie is a horrific reminder of what an angry child would do, given supernatural powers.

Children's innocence not only make us afraid for them; it can be creepy in itself. I'm not the first man to have basked in the gaze of a child – only to find something disturbing in its pre-moral blankness: "Children," as the poet Philip Larkin put it, "with their shallow, violent eyes..."

The wicked child is a terrifying prospect, as it suggests that innocence is an illusion, evil inherent, and the human project therefore doomed.

So I like to think anyway. With years of Harry Potter and Disney cartoons ahead of me, I've got to take my existential shivers where I can find them.

awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk