In the weeks and months after my kids were born, I couldn’t tolerate watching violence on television. I sought out the softest, lamest shows around. I watched multi-season family dramas in which people yelled at one other, broke down, stormed off, then came back, reconciled and broke down again.

I did two seasons of Midsomer Murders, the winsome drama that began in the late 1990s, and dug up prestige BBC shows from a decade earlier – the kind in which characters in large drawing rooms exchange brittle remarks, and all the relationships between the men had a gay subtext. I thoroughly enjoyed Downton Abbey.

The pandemic has seen off our usual methods of escape, and for those of us lucky enough to be home and safe, the question of where to go in our heads can be tricky. It’s unhealthy to fall down a news wormhole, but avoiding the news seems bad too. Novels require more peace of mind than I have. And while the days are fraught with commitment – schoolwork, housework, regular work, lesson prep, the ceaseless whir of the printer and the sink full of dishes, again – they also seem aimless and without end. No one goes to bed in my house any more. If there’s a minute off, it is hard to know where to go.

It started with The Outsider, the HBO adaptation of a Stephen King book in which a shapeshifter – I talk about “shapeshifters” now – causes boils to break out on his victims’ necks, then comes back in the form of their abusive dead mothers to taunt them. I kept waiting to lose interest, as I tend to do with horror. Instead, I was beside myself with enjoyment. I binged the series in three nights straight, thinking it was the best thing I’d ever watched.

From there, I moved on to The Terror, the Hulu show based on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic. It has Ciarán Hinds blustering about in period costume, and it illuminates an interesting period of naval history; but that wasn’t it. In the second episode (spoiler alert), a demonic polar bear appears on the scene, ripping a bunch of sailors in half and putting Hinds head-first down an ice hole. Bingo.

Since it came out, in 2018, I’d been avoiding A Quiet Place, the John Krasinski alien flick in which a woman (Emily Blunt) has to give birth in perfect silence, lest she alert to her presence a bunch of flappy-legged creatures who “see” through their ears and eat humans. Artwork for the movie showed Blunt, wide-eyed with terror, with a hand over her mouth. God, I thought. Why do people watch this stuff?

It’s all I watch, now. Through a combination of anxiety and boredom, lethargy and fear, the only thing I’m interested in is the apocalypse. In the early days of the lockdown in New York, it was easy to watch regular TV and feel a pang of sadness and alarm at scenes in busy restaurants. Now, I couldn’t care less those about those people clinking glasses or pushing their way through Times Square. They are innocent to the point of delusion.

I don’t want thoughtful internal journeys, or wistfulness or subtlety. I tried Normal People and was impatient to the point of fury; this is all very well, I thought, but when is someone going to lose an arm? How could it possibly compete with something like Train to Busan, the brilliant South Korean zombie flick in which fast-moving zombies take over a train, causing a fund manager to reboot his humanity? (“At a time like this,” he tells his daughter, “only look after yourself.” Well, he certainly learns his lesson).

I watched Cargo, a great Australian zombie movie starring Martin Freeman, in which, after the zombie apocalypse, only the indigenous people survive. I rewatched War of the Worlds, the Tom Cruise version, in which he spends the entire movie just shouting his kids’ names. It was as terrible as I remembered, but there was no denying the fact that, at the sight of the aliens gathering in a weather event behind what looks like the Long Island Expressway, I was infinitely soothed.

I went back to Contagion, of course, Steven Soderbergh’s virus movie from 2011. But, strangely, it didn’t hit the spot. I don’t want documentary. I don’t want a show about a virus, unless it is extraterrestrial. Consolation only comes in watching something worse than reality, that externalises the sense of the world gone insane. I want monsters, and aliens, and armies of the undead. I want to see people being stalked by an unnamed terror. I want some reflection of savagery that won’t be smoothed over, an emergency that can’t be absorbed.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist