So there’s this game, Eternal Darkness–one of those titles that broke everyone’s heart by being really good, then not getting a sequel or a port to modern hardware because the developers were apparently about as functional as a bag of weasels on meth. It was one of the first games to do Lovecraftian horror well, and so, of course, it had a Sanity stat to match Health and Magic. In case you have access to a GameCube or Nintendo decides to port the title, I won’t tell you all the things that happen when your SAN gets low–some of them are amazing, I totally recommend it–but they included having your character’s head fall off, being surrounded by phantom enemies, or being unable to control your movement.

A minute or so after each effect went off, the game would snap back to normal, and your character would exclaim “This…can’t be…HAPPENING!”. It’s a phrase you get very used to hearing as you go through the levels of floating skinless horrors and zombie priests.

It’s also a phrase that kept running through my head on Election Night 2016, and then again in 2024. 

People have turned to a lot of pop culture to get through the Trump Years, then and now, from Lord of the Rings quotes to dystopian novel comparisons. I’ve been right there with them. I still am–but the more I talk about it, the more I realize that the horror genre gave me most of the tools I use to frame my feelings, not just about Trump or MAGA but really about the last ten or fifteen years.

(Ugh, I know. It makes me feel a little nauseous to write those numbers down.)

For a lot of us nerds, it started with GamerGate. Butthurt manbabies were far from new at the start of the 2010s, even in geek culture–we talked about Cat Piss Men and the Geek Social Fallacies that let them lurk around our friend groups, we knew that there were guys to avoid at LARPs and cons, we’d seen the arguments about how it was “just realistic” that female characters have Strength penalties–but I think a lot of us had assumed that these were loud minorities, that they didn’t matter, that people we knew and liked wouldn’t think that way.

Then it turned out that a lot of them did. Adam Baldwin became one of the biggest GamerGate supporters. Gabe from Penny Arcade wrote a bunch of transphobic shit and whined about how haaaard it was to get girls. A bunch of sci-fi authors formed the Sad Puppies because the Hugo Awards were Just Too Woke, Guys, and a bunch of others either supported them or did a bunch of handwavy centrist bullshit about how well we have to listen to their concerns, maaan, marketplace of ideas. 

I remember staying up until 1 AM on a worknight arguing with a guy who’d been my friend and was now dying on the hill of how it was okay to say that women were shallow bitches who just wanted rich guys or bad boys because…IDK, rejection hurt. I’d hung out with this guy and his wife. I’d ridden to LARPs with them, sung along to music, gotten wasted and played board games. I had no idea.

I remember when another guy I’d considered a friend spent half a year spreading rumors that I was sleeping with a married man, rumors that coincidentally started after I made it clear I wasn’t into the “friend” in question. I remember that half my other “friends” stopped speaking to me and didn’t tell me why, that a fair number of the rest pulled me aside to interrogate me or drunkenly told me at a third party’s wedding that they “had a low opinion” of me but couldn’t discuss it right then. I remember that none of those people ever said a word to the guy I was theoretically banging–the one who’d, y’know, made the commitment to another person–or otherwise acted like he was anything but their best buddy. 

This is all leading up to a point, I promise.

Rumormonger Guy, who I will call Albert because that’s his name and he can and should go to hell, later managed to drive me up to a game, alone–an hour and a half–and tell me that everyone hated me and I shouldn’t tell anyone, but if I trusted him, he could fix things. I was lucky: I called a real friend, who reassured me, figured out what was going on, and then brought the wrath of God down on Albert via several of my other actual friends, who are awesome.

Albert apologized to me a year later. Then he did the same thing to two other people, and more people believed him, and more people decided what he was saying was their business.

I remember someone objecting to flirty NPC characters at LARPs because “PC women should be reserved for PC men.” I heard that secondhand, which is why all of the people I used to hang out with still have their full compliment of teeth. I remember rumors about how female players at games “got plot,” and that the sources of those rumors were guys whose weddings and bachelor parties I’d gone to, guys I’d confided in after breakups and during existential crises. 

In the middle of all of that, I remember a friend of mine saying, basically, that the year in question had been like putting on the sunglasses from They Live. You look around you and suddenly half the people you know are pinball-eyed aliens, and…is this new? Have they always been this way? Did you just not notice? How many other people only look like people on the surface?

That stuck with me. 

(Also, apparently some racist assholes online will argue that They Live is meant to be about the International Jewish blah blah blah and: no, dipshits, it’s about Republicans, Carpenter said it’s about Republicans, the creepy alien politician guy actually refers to morning in America, shut up and fuck off.) 

People have written a lot about how horror trends express a culture’s current anxieties without–often–coming out and saying that: vampires as seductive foreigners, aliens as Commies, vampires as the AIDS crisis, zombies as capitalism, mutants as nuclear anxiety, and so forth. I agree–but I also think that past horror (and past fiction, more generally) provides us with a context or framework or reference point to handle anxieties that come up.

It makes sense, in part because none of the last decade or so is really new. We’re not the first country to elect a psychopath multiple times, and people who aren’t white or cis or het have spent a lot longer grappling with the fact that people you know, trust, or even idolize often turn out to be horrible. And I’ve been extremely fortunate even as a cis woman, insofar as the above situation with Albert and one or two minorly shitty boyfriends constitute the worst experiences I’ve had with men. In 2010, I was reasonably familiar, even second- or third-hand, with the shitty things people and countries do.

I think a lot of us were surprised to find out how far and how deep the rot went, though. I know I was. It’s one thing to know that assholes are out there and maybe even encounter one or two in your life, but when there are enough to start a whole online movement, or to swing a major award and then a goddamn election…

Yeah. The world isn’t the world we thought we knew and it doesn’t play by the rules we thought existed, like voters won’t elect someone who publicly mocks disabled people and veterans or nobody cares about strangers’ consensual sex lives unless they’re in the Westboro Baptist Church. We don’t know if the people around us even see many of us as people.

(Tangenting away from horror for a bit: I also don’t think it’s any coincidence that Stardew Valley became massively popular in 2016 and Animal Crossing: New Horizons took off in 2018. COVID helped the latter, but I think a big part of both is the fantasy that, while some of your neighbors may be annoying or surly or whatever Pierre’s deal is, ultimately they basically have good intentions and aren’t going to vote to strip you of your rights and cut your health care. “The people around me are worth getting to know” is now up there with void chickens and beans that grow in three days as idealistic fantasy.)

How does the shit they’re pulling work? How do half our fellow citizens not know better, or not remember, or not care, or actively want what Trump and the manosphere are selling? Sociologists and political scientists can try and explain, but all the explanations I’ve heard come down to everything and everyone is so much worse than you thought. Horror is the only reasonable context.

The last year or two, and especially last summer, we slipped into the most American horror context of them all: the slasher movie sequel. Not the marginally decent second one, where okay, Jason is the killer now or Michael got away, no, the movie five films and six directors later, the one that involves inexplicable resurrection with lightning and dog piss. (Appropriate.) We dealt with this, dammit! We took a machete to the appropriate necks, we had the jump scare, we woke up. It should be fine. 

But it’s not, because Hollywood loves a goddamn franchise.

If there’s a moral here, I guess it’s that we need to start setting the bodies on fire. Take that for whatever metaphor you want.