Not quite a trope, not even a motif, tea in horror stories nevertheless has a disquieting role.

“It began,” he said, “on the 15th of October…” Thus begins the tale of Reverend Jennings, one of the main characters in Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s Gothic horror story Green Tea. In it, Jennings recounts to his acquaintance, Dr Martin Hesselius, that he is haunted by a malignant being in the shape of a shadowy monkey with red eyes.

At first the monkey does nothing but follow the reverend sullenly and then, over the course of months, begins to interfere with his daily life, including sitting on his written sermon so he cannot read it to his parishioners. Eventually it begins to talk to him, encouraging dark thoughts.

The doctor latches onto a small detail at the start of Jennings’ tale: when the reverend studied metaphysics long into the night, he drank green tea. Hesselius then diagnoses him with a nerve disorder caused by a disturbance to the spiritual fluid in the brain. “By various abuses, among which the habitual use of such agents as green tea is one, this fluid may be affected as to its quality, but it is more frequently disturbed as to equilibrium.”

It’s a neat and weirdly scientific diagnosis for a tale that derives its horror label from Jennings’ descent into madness (or is the demonic monkey real after all?), but it keeps well within a faint theme I’ve picked up regarding tea’s role in horror narratives: a benign substance that is used as misdirection for darker purposes.

One moment I recall was in the film Crimson Peak, in which an heiress follows her new husband to his remote (and haunted) manor. Her sister-in-law is not happy with the new addition to the household but plays nice and makes her firethorn tea every night as a pseudo peace offering. Pseudo is the operative word here; spoiler alert: the tea is poison. (“It’s not even real tea!” I may have yelled at the screen.)

Another more contemporary example is in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, where a black man is invited to meet the family of his white girlfriend. His girlfriend’s mother is a hypnotherapist and offers to help him quit smoking. Her stirring tea in a teacup is the trigger for him to enter a paralytic state called the Sunken Place, and what ensues says a lot about the family’s lack of hospitality.

I’m not much of a horror fan but I do think the genre’s ability to upend expectations gives it cultural significance. Turning tea’s genteel reputation inside out is just another way to keep us up at night.