The world feels heavier these days.  You don't need to be a political analyst to sense it. Rights once thought untouchable are suddenly up for debate. People sit around wondering what will be stripped away tomorrow. It's the kind of dread that doesn't end when the news cycle shifts. It lingers. It hangs in the body.

And yet, in the middle of all this unease, I find myself turning again and again to horror. Always horror. Not because it erases fear, and not because it's some kind of cure. But because it gives fear a shape. Horror takes that creeping dread outside the window and puts it on a screen, a page, or a stage where I can face it. The monster has a mask. The haunted house has doors and hallways. The curse has rules. For ninety minutes, I know the terrain.

Stephen King once said we make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones. I think about that line a lot. On the surface, it's simple. Watch The Exorcist, and you're not really confronting Satan. You're confronting the fear of losing someone you love, the terror of watching them slip away into something you can't understand or reach. Sit through Night of the Living Dead, and it's not just zombies pounding on the farmhouse. It's the collapse of the social contract, neighbors turning on each other when the pressure builds, institutions failing when we need them most.

Horror turns vague dread into something physical, something you can name. There's comfort in that. Comfort in knowing when the scare is coming, even if you jump every time. Horror has rhythm. Silence, build, crash. It may shake you, it may even scar you, but it ends. The lights come up. The screen goes dark. You walk out of the theater, or shut off the TV, or close the book. The real world doesn't give us that kind of mercy. The real world leaves you suspended in uncertainty, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And maybe that's why horror works so well in darker times. It's not an escape, it's practice. Practice for chaos. Practice for loss. Practice for the sound of the floor giving way beneath everything you thought was solid.

I've lost track of how many nights I've turned to horror when sleep wouldn't come. When the news was too much, or the silence itself felt dangerous. I'd throw on a scratched DVD of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the colors washed out, the sound just a little warped. Or I'd dig into something grimy and forgotten, a bargain-bin slasher with blood that looks like ketchup and dialogue that shouldn't work but somehow does. Sometimes I'd go all in on the surreal, Lynch's Mulholland Drive, where reality becomes as unreliable as a funhouse mirror.

Even the cheapest, roughest films had power. They borrowed the fear that lived in me and gave it a stage to play on. The characters screamed in my place. The monsters carried the weight for me. And when the credits rolled, my chest felt lighter. Not empty, fear doesn't vanish, but lighter. Like I had let some of it out through the screen, bled off the pressure that had been building all day.

I remember election night in November 2020, when the election results were still being counted and everything felt like it was balanced on a knife's edge. I couldn't concentrate on anything, couldn't even scroll through my phone without feeling sick. So I put on They Live, Carpenter's brilliant paranoid masterpiece. For ninety-four minutes, I watched Roddy Piper discover that the ruling class were literally monsters in disguise, that the signs and billboards were pumping out messages of "OBEY" and "CONSUME." It was the perfect film for that moment, a story about waking up to see the world as it really is, about fighting back against systems designed to keep us blind and compliant. The fictional conspiracy gave shape to my shapeless dread, and when it was over, the real world felt manageable again. Not good, not safe, but survivable.

Horror doesn't heal, but it bleeds pressure. It takes the formless anxiety that lives in your chest and gives it teeth, claws, a face you can look at directly.

But here's where I wrestle, and it's a wrestling that's gotten more intense as the political landscape has darkened. Sometimes I wonder if horror makes me too comfortable with fear. If it teaches me to sit with dread when I should be standing up and fighting back. Watching a masked killer cut through a group of teenagers might help me process my terror about rising authoritarianism, but does it also make me complacent? If I can drain my fear into a movie, do I risk leaving the real monsters outside untouched?

This isn't an academic question. I think about the women in The Handmaid's Tale, how they were gradually stripped of their rights while many people watched it happen, paralyzed by the sheer scope of the horror. I think about how easy it is to treat real atrocities like entertainment, to consume them as content rather than calls to action. There's a fine line between processing trauma and becoming numb to it.

I've noticed this in myself. After spending an evening watching The Strangers or Green Room, films that deal with senseless violence and the fragility of safety. The fictional violence has somehow inoculated me against the fear I should be feeling about actual dangers. It's like horror creates a pressure release valve that sometimes releases too much pressure.

But then I think about the alternative. What happens when you don't have that outlet? When fear has nowhere to go except to fester and grow in the dark corners of your mind? I've been there too, and it's worse. Without horror to give my fears a shape and a stage, they become shapeless and infinite. They take over everything and I just want to hide.

Maybe the truth is in the tension, between comfort and complacency, between ritual and paralysis. Horror is rehearsal, but rehearsal isn't the performance. At some point, the lights stay on and the monsters aren't actors anymore. The key is knowing the difference, and using the strength that horror gives you in service of something larger than just your own peace of mind.

I've started thinking of it this way: horror teaches me how fear works, how it moves through the body and the mind. That knowledge doesn't make me complacent—it makes me a better fighter. When I can recognize the rhythm of my own terror, I can work with it instead of being paralyzed by it.

There's something inherently subversive about horror that becomes more apparent in times of political repression. Horror has always been the genre that says the unspeakable, that gives voice to the things polite society wants to keep buried. It's no accident that horror flourished during the Cold War, during the AIDS crisis, during every period when official culture tried to paper over real fears with false optimism.

Think about how Night of the Living Dead wasn't just about zombies, it was about Vietnam, about racial violence, about the failure of authority figures to protect ordinary people. Or how The Texas Chain Saw Massacre captured the specific madness of post-Watergate America, the sense that the institutions we trusted were fundamentally broken and possibly evil. These films didn't just reflect social anxieties; they gave people permission to feel them, to name them, to confront them.

In our current moment, horror continues to do this essential work. Films like Get Out don't just scare us, they show us the horror that's already here, built into systems we're told to accept as normal. They make the invisible visible, force us to look directly at things that power would prefer we ignore.

But horror's resistance goes beyond individual films. The act of gathering to be scared together, of choosing to feel vulnerable in community, becomes a form of political action in itself. In a culture that demands we be constantly productive, constantly optimized, constantly "positive", and under an administration that demands we accept cruelty as necessary, horror creates spaces where we're allowed to fall apart. Where we can acknowledge that things are not okay, that the world contains real darkness, that our fears are not signs of weakness but responses to actual threats.

Horror has never just been about watching alone, though the solitary midnight viewing has its place. It's about the circles that form around it, the communities that gather in the shadows to share stories and compare scars.

I think about midnight screenings where strangers sit shoulder to shoulder, jumping at the same moment, laughing nervously after. There's something beautiful about that shared vulnerability, the way terror strips away social pretenses and reduces everyone to the same basic human responses. In those moments, differences of class, race, politics, they don't disappear entirely, but they recede. Fear is a great equalizer.

The internet has transformed horror community but hasn't diminished it. Old message boards with their broken image links and heated arguments about sequels have given way to Discord servers and Twitter threads, but the essential impulse remains the same: the need to process fear together, to find others who understand why we seek out the very thing most people run from.

I remember discovering the original Last House on the Left through a forum recommendation, someone describing it as "the most disturbing film ever made" with a warning that it would "ruin your day." That warning was also an invitation, and finding the film led me into a community of people who took horror seriously, who understood that the genre's power came not from cheap thrills but from its willingness to go places other art forms wouldn't.

These communities have become more important as mainstream culture has become increasingly sanitized. Horror fandom creates space for darkness, for complexity, for the full range of human experience. In a time when authoritarian voices try to strip people of their agency and their voice, horror communities feel like stubborn little campfires that refuse to go out. We gather, we talk, we scream, we laugh, we argue about whether the remake is better than the original. It's not a revolution, but it's resistance in its own way. A reminder that no matter how isolated we're told to feel, fear can be shared, and sharing it makes us stronger.

The community aspect extends beyond fandom into creation. Horror has always been a relatively democratic genre, one where low budgets and DIY aesthetics can be features rather than bugs. In our current moment, I see young filmmakers using horror to process everything from climate anxiety to political violence, creating works that mainstream media won't touch. They're not waiting for permission or for proper funding. They're grabbing cameras and making the films they need to see.

I can't write about horror without acknowledging the criticism that haunts the genre: that it's exploitative, that it traffics in the very violence and dehumanization we should be fighting against in the real world. This criticism isn't unfair or uninformed. Horror does contain violence, often extreme violence. It does sometimes treat women, people of color, and other marginalized groups as disposable. It can be cruel and nihilistic and genuinely harmful.

I've wrestled with this more as I've gotten older and more aware of how representation matters, how images shape reality. I've stopped watching certain films that I once defended, stopped making excuses for directors whose work I now see as genuinely toxic. The genre's history is full of films that cause real harm, that perpetuate dangerous myths about mental illness or domestic violence or sexual assault.

But I've also come to understand that this isn't an inherent flaw in horror. It's a flaw in how horror has been made and consumed within broader systems of oppression. The same genre that gave us I Spit on Your Grave also gave us The Babadook. The same medium that produced countless slashers where women exist only to be killed also produced A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and Raw and Saint Maud.

The key is intentionality. Horror can be a tool of oppression, but it can also be a tool of liberation. It can reinforce harmful stereotypes, but it can also break them down. The difference lies in who's behind the camera, what stories they're trying to tell, and how conscious they are of the power they're wielding.

I think about Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, which uses the language of horror to explore maternal depression and domestic violence without exploiting or sensationalizing either. Or Nia DaCosta's Candyman, which takes a story originally told from a white perspective and recenters it around Black trauma and resistance. These films prove that horror can be both terrifying and ethical, that it can confront darkness without wallowing in it.

The country feels colder now. Families worry about rights that once felt permanent. Book bans spread like wildfire. Trans kids lose access to healthcare while their parents face criminal charges. Ice raids are growing more violent. Some days it seems like the lights are dimming, room by room, and those of us who remember what brightness looked like are left squinting in the growing shadows.

But horror is still here. It won't save us, art alone never does. It won't fix the headlines or change the laws or stop the erosion of democracy. What it does is remind us that fear can be faced, that chaos can be given form, that we can scream and then stand up and keep fighting.

I think about the final girls, those women who survive until the credits roll not because they're pure or perfect but because they refuse to give up. They're bloody and traumatized and probably changed forever, but they're alive. They looked the monster in the eye and lived to tell the story. That's not nothing. In times like these, that's everything.

Horror doesn't promise that everything is going to be fine. It drags the monster into the room and forces you to look at it. And that act, staring back, is powerful. Even if the monster wins in the movie, you've practiced the act of facing it. You've rehearsed courage, even if you didn't recognize it at the time.

The real world doesn't offer the clean resolution of a horror film. The monsters don't always die in the third act. Sometimes they win elections. Sometimes they pass laws. Sometimes they come for your neighbors, and then they come for you. But horror teaches us that even in the worst scenarios, even when the house is surrounded and the phone lines are cut and the car won't start, there are still choices to be made. You can hide or you can fight. You can give up or you can keep moving. You can despair or you can grab whatever weapon you can find, a camera, a ballot, a voice, a pen, and swing back at the darkness.

To be clear: when I talk about fighting back, I mean through democratic means, through organizing, through art, through bearing witness. Violence is never the answer, and I reject it completely. The horror genre may be filled with blood and brutality, but its real power lies in showing us how to survive, how to endure, how to maintain our humanity even when faced with inhumanity. The strength horror gives us isn't physical, it's moral, emotional, spiritual. It's the strength to keep going, to keep caring, to keep fighting for justice through the tools of democracy and community.

That's why I keep coming back to it, especially now. Because when the screen goes dark and the credits roll, I'm reminded of something I forget too easily: fear is survivable. Horror doesn't erase the darkness, but it shows me how to walk through it. It teaches me that terror and courage can coexist, that feeling afraid doesn't mean you're weak, that sometimes the bravest thing you can do is keep watching even when you want to look away.

And right now, in times like these, that reminder is everything. The threats are real, and they're closer than we'd like to admit. But we've been practicing for this our whole lives, every time we bought a ticket or pressed play or turned the page. We know what evil looks like. We've seen how stories end, and how they begin again. We've learned that the only way out is through, and that sometimes the scariest thing in the movie is also the most human.

Horror is rehearsal, and the show has already started. But those of us who've been preparing in the dark, we're ready. We've always been ready.