July Issue, written by Tamara Kaye Sellman
The Inherent Horror On Writing in Horrifying Times
I saw this question in social media recently: “Should horror writing be political?”
My answer: It already is.
In June 2024, I attended the Chuckanut Writers Conference, which commenced the morning following the US presidential debate. A relevant question emerged in the very first panel I attended: “What do people actually want to read these days?”
Two responses, in complete opposition, emerged—both inspired by current events.
In Team Escapism, folks talked of nostalgia, soft landings, happily-ever-afters, and safe spaces for processing hard ideas and releasing anxiety. Maybe this accounts for the rise in sales and popularity of romance and fantasy (romantasy!) and, yes, erotica.
But Team Realism was vehement. “No, we can no longer afford to look the other way. Readers want truth, they want tools for working through and overcoming anxiety… to be empowered.” The word liberated came up as well.
Both perspectives are legitimate. Still, we live in polarizing times. It’s doubtful a writer seeking relevance in today’s publishing marketplace will achieve a balance between either at this moment in history.
I missed the debate because I was driving to the conference while it took place. Following check-in at the hotel, I caught snippets of its aftermath while unpacking. That was enough for me.
Instead of jumping online to chase videos of what I expected to be political theater, I leaned into a classic dark fantasy novel, Clive Barker’s Weaveworld—in which a man discovers a magical world preserved in an old, fraying carpet—and slept like a baby after uncovering this gem of a line: “Talk of Power and Might would always attract an audience.”
The Chuckanut organizers couldn’t know, at the planning stages of their event, how their schedule would come to fall the day after the debate.
I didn’t notice too much in the way of political chatter in the audience, but I did find it prescient how the conference keynote speaker, Cami Ostman, nailed a kind of vibe I think we’ve come to normalize, citing a quote from Toni Morrison: “There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
No, Toni Morrison isn’t a horror writer, category wise. But she writes about horrifying things. She’s no stranger to ghosts and hauntings.
It got me wondering—as we slouch through this election season, already exhausted—why anyone can think literature, especially in genre categories, isn’t political. If horror is the literature of fear, then how can it not be political?
Regardless the lens through which any of us viewed the debate—and its social media aftermath which continues, as of this writing, to spark and flame—there’s no way to unsee the raw truth of the matter: that we in the United States aren’t voting for a president in 2024, but for a way of life.
(This rings true for England and France, as well, who met up against anxiety-ridden elections of their own in July.)
So many fears, uncertainties, and mysteries unfold for so many of us that the collective zeitgeist seems trapped in a contagion of mass anxiety. Without the capacity to control the outcome of the November election beyond our singular votes, we’re left to imagine worst-case scenarios in our darkest hours.
And so many of us do. In social media it’s called doomscrolling, and it eats up all the waking moments for some people’s days.
But creative people, whose work is essentially storytelling, have more and better options for processing the horrors of election anxiety.
Hear me out: Instead of obsessing over this ‘Big Thing You Can’t Control…’ why not use that same fear to bring a new and frightening edge to your next work?
Story horror of the kind found in film, TV, books, podcasts, even music (BOC’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” comes to mind) is often the avenue people turn to to process feelings of lost control.
Many of us who write and consume horror stories know already how it works:
From the safe space spectatorship affords us—wrapped up in our favorite blanket, in the comfort of our own home, with loved ones at hand—we can witness the worst situations, feel surges of stress hormones, jump or scream to elicit a needed response, and feel the release of calming hormones that follow like a salve.
Horror writers must never forget the opportunities that our narrative toolkit affords us. We can alchemize these shadows using words, sensory detail, metaphor, mythos, pathos, and dialog to create stories both scary and relevant.
Here’s a question: How many horror writers who watched the debate took notes on how they felt as the debacle unfolded?
This is where horror writers truly ought to begin.
In spite of the general population’s mistaken belief that horror equals slasher violence (because it’s so much more than this!), it’s the emotions behind the things we can’t control that offer the perfect grist for unsettling, scary, dystopic narratives.
Horror.
It’s a pretty straightforward process. Start by observing how the election makes you feel in your solar plexus, your heart, your soul. Chronicle all the emotions that boil up—fear, but also pride, anger, despair, lack of control, even hope. Then channel these intangibles into your characters—use these emotions to shape their motivations as they butt up against poor odds for a safe journey, easy life, or happy ending.
If you’re thorough in your process, you can expect tension, relatability, drama, and action to follow organically… even in stories that show no clear link to politics.
It’s a vibe.
But I say, why stop there?
Try extending this alchemical practice to politics in general. It’s not only the election and campaigning from which you can borrow dark momentum, but:
court actions
responses from leaders during bad-news events (like school shootings)
protest reportage (is it accurate? Is it worse, or better, than what we witness?)
vague and unsettling statements from powerful think-tanks
government agency restrictions on what we might have once considered civil or human rights (like the right to sleep, the right to bodily autonomy)
organized acts of propaganda
school board motions that leave us wondering… who’s really watching out for the kids?
All of these things, my friends, are political.
We live with these politically rooted, yet ordinary fears every day. We always have. Why not make them the basis for disturbing fiction? I mean, they’re already the basis for real life for many.
The outspoken bizarro writer Jeff Burk speaks pretty regularly to the importance of keeping horror relevant to current events in his show, Make Your Own Damn Podcast (co-hosted with Lucas Mangum).
Topics that come up time and again include revenge horror, feminist tropes, scary technology, mental illness, gun culture as a horror ingredient, the signature modus operandi of true crime, the horrors of war, climate disaster, and nihilism in general… things that we can literally tap into every minute of every day with a single Google or YouTube search.
It's these avenues into the darker aspects of what it means to be human where stories run dark and unsettling.
Isn’t that the ultimate goal, when writing horror? To capture the dark and unsettling?
One might argue that every horror story these days needs to tap into the well of contemporary evil, whatever that may look like to the writer.
Attention to the value of horror inspired by politics seems to be top of mind these days.
Paul Tremblay wrote about “macro-political horror” in his essay, “The H Word: The Politics of Horror,” (Nightmare Magazine, July 2015). He asserts that much of the politics that go into horror presumably follow a path carved out of a conservative/reactionary structure. Yet, he posits that the writer using a more progressive approach to horror writing may more likely succeed at crafting something fresh and relevant.
Isn’t this what we’re all trying to do?
Some writers hesitate to approach even the hint of social commentary in their work (horror or not), believing that it might come off as moralistic or off-putting. Biological horror fiction author Josh Schlossberg, in his editorial, “Do Politics Belong in Horror Fiction?” (Josh’s Worst Nightmare, October 2022), thinks it’s an unfounded concern.
“I believe it’s almost impossible to write without one’s views inserted in some way (consciously or not),” he writes. “Likewise, intentionally or not, that’s usually how most agents, editors, and publishers choose a lot of their projects.”
Humans gonna human, and that means biases will always shape the way we approach our work, both as writers and as readers. It’s also these shared biases that link authors to their audiences. Fair enough.
But Schlossberg goes on to admit that, “Personally, my favorite horror fiction is when the story is the broth and politics the seasoning.” I’m immediately reminded of Stephen King’s Firestarter; there are plenty of politics in this novel tied to governmental overreach (maybe it’s time for a reread?) but there’s also a pyrokinetic girl on the run with her equally gifted (or cursed?) father.
The emotional landscape in Firestarter isn’t centered on politics, but on familial relationships and the psychological dread of having one’s gifts appropriated by another for nefarious purposes. From that standpoint, one could say she was being groomed, truly.
Which brings me to an interesting story that ran on NPR a while back: “Reading Horror Can Arm Us Against A Horrifying World” (August 2018). Author Ruthanna Emrys (The Lovecraft Reread) writes:
“The banal evils of the world — children shot, neighbors exiled, selves reframed in an instant as inhuman threats—these are horrible, but they aren't horror. Horror promises that the plot arc will fall after it rises. Horror spins everyday evil to show its fantastical face, literalizing its corroded heart into something more dramatic, something easier to imagine facing down. Horror helps us name the original sins out of which horrible things are born.”
In other words, it gives readers (and writers, for that matter) a sense of control over horrible things in a real world that consistently strips us of our presumed power to control anything.
In shorthand, horror promises hope.
It also promises tools for dealing with poor mental health.
The New York Times, in its article, “How Horror Stories Help Us Cope with Real Life” (October, 2022) reported interesting statistics from the online movie database, The Numbers, which showed that, while horror movies made up a 2.69 percent share of the annual box office in 2014, that share jumped to 12.75 percent in 2021.
What happened between 2014 and 2021? Among other things, three polarizing events: The Trump presidency, Brexit, and the pandemic.
And we’re not talking so much about the kind of horror that ordinary folks imagine when talking about horror stories.
A 2021 Boston University article examining trends in film studies suggests that today’s horror films are as political as they’ve ever been.
BU lecturer George Vahamikos echoes Tremblay's sentiments about stories leaning into political ideology when he states that “post-2016 horror films are filled with forms of intergenerational conflict, and those tensions speak to the passing away of an older, more traditional order and the coming of a newer, more progressive and more welcoming one.”
He also draws connections between politics and horror by focusing on the lens of the Trump presidency, stating that horror movie fans throng to films like A Quiet Place, Us, Hereditary, Don’t Breathe and the Purge franchise because they “lament the decay of civil discourse and agonize over the future viability of the great American experiment in democracy.”
It’s not just horror film having a moment, but literature as well. The Guardian earlier this year reported 2023 data that showed the genre breaking records, with book sales increasing by 54 percent, the biggest year ever for horror fiction.
2024 appears to be on the same track, with sales 34 percent higher in the first three months of this year than during the same time in 2023.
Of course, horror fiction easily synthesizes politics in ways that don’t seem, on their surface, to be horrifying. In this way, storytelling can serve to subvert established power structures—the keepers of control.
Sometimes, horror writers choose the subtle path, and sometimes they don’t:
STEPHEN KING
The Institute (2019) shows parallels of real life in its plot: Asylum-seeking children at the border forced by the government to separate from their parents.
King writes in Esquire that “I’ve felt more and more a sense that people who are weak, and people who are disenfranchised and people who aren’t the standard, white American, are being marginalized… And at some point in the course of working on the book, Trump actually started to lock kids up.”
JORDAN PEELE
Candyman takes on the perpetual cycles of police brutality by white law enforcement against black men in a bloody urban legend set in Chicago’s Cabrini Green.
Peele bakes in the moral of the story by way of the resurrection of a cursed soul to speak to unchecked violence in the community, reclaimed and gentrified by the very community that put the ghetto there in the first place: White supremacy.
AMERICAN HORROR STORY
“Cult,” the title of Season 7, clearly pushes a political theme, diving quite directly into the aftermath of the Trump election in 2016 without needing to lean into the paranormal to establish a fear factor. (When real life runs stranger than fiction, you might as well run with it as a writer.)
Terror based on speculations about what could happen—especially with January 6th as a real-world counterpoint and threat hovering over our collective awareness as November 2024 approaches—suggests a hyperpatriotic, frenzied militia aspect to American life that makes many ordinary citizens shudder.
(By the way, Jack Reigns takes on patriotism as a horror trope in his previous column for Horror Inherent.)
MIRA GRANT
The author of the Newsflesh trilogy—in which a post-apocalypse world finds us living among the undead—unabashedly asserts that the themes of her books encompass “blogging, politics, medical science, espionage, betrayal, the ties that bind, the ties that don't, how George Romero accidentally saved the world, and, of course, zombies.”
It appears that people in general, and creative people in particular, no longer fear being seen as “political.”
TRUE DETECTIVE
Director Issa Lopez brought the series back in 2024 with “Night Country.” She’s also rather frank about her political messaging in TD, telling Dread Central:
“I am a really political person … but I’m also a geek and I love a good story. You can do both and be truthful to both as long as you tell a really good story.”
She makes a good point worth pondering by newer horror writers, however. When it comes to writing the political, links to the characters, setting, and plot should be organic.
“I don’t believe in …stuffing a message on something that is not organically part of it.”
Readers don’t believe these messages either.
JOE HILL
In his collection of four short novels, Strange Weather, this popular horror author takes on a similarly forthright approach. Hill understands that at the root of horror are political realities like tribalism, which do more to divide than to conquer.
Of social media, Hill says “it encourages you to pull for the people who think exactly like you do, and it rewards you for hating the people who don’t agree with you.”
(Orwell just gave a thumbs up from the grave.)
How is this not blatantly political? And yet terrifying (the goal for every horror writer, yes)?
Hill doesn’t come upon these stories and themes by accident. He’s always looking at what’s happening around him for material to transform into story, telling The Verge that “What you can do with fiction is say, ‘Okay, let’s put this under a magnifying glass, exaggerate it, and present it to you in a hopefully entertaining form.’”
For fans of horror fiction, the terror amplified larger than an already distorted and toxic life in this world is entertainment.
Is there a simple algorithm for capturing current events and political topics in horror in a way that bypasses the pedantic? Is it possible to show (versus tell) truth about the world in horror in a way that both edifies and entertains?
Consider these six approaches to writing the political in horror stories:
Always start with emotional reckoning. Fear, anger, trauma, despair and other emotions aren’t intellectual, but visceral. They put us inside the hearts and bodies of our characters. Political topics absolutely evoke emotion. Mine that content first.
Own your biases about social commentary and justice. Understand and master the facets of your perspective. Own them. Most political issues truly aren’t black and white, but shades of gray. (I bet yours are, too.) That’s where the uncertainty, the lack of control, comes in. Rather than shy away from it, lean into the gray spaces.
Think about real-world consequences that a character facing a moral dilemma must negotiate. Magnify the stakes, find the eerie “truth is stranger than fiction” moments to turn your protagonist’s fate darker and more dire with each bad choice they make. Points of no return are bloody terrifying in any kind of story.
Step back and give your story a cosmic appraisal. What existential questions arise out of the situation your character faces? Can you personify the answers to these questions, mold them into worst-case scenarios? Make them into monsters. Or not. You don’t need to dress it in tentacles—just play with the loss of control through nihilism, the grotesque, the psychological, even the surreal.
Render the tragic comedic. Horror benefits so often from satire and sarcasm. When stories seem bleak and hellbound, throw in a tiny spark of humor. It doesn’t need to read like hopepunk or get campy… but why not? Readers (and writers) seek relief and release in horror stories; levity timed and positioned intelligently makes a great vehicle for these.
Keep it relevant. Some real-world topics coated in the funk of politics include:
The “thought” police (at every level: government, community, workplace, school, church, family, social circles)
Technology mafia (those with the most tech possess the most power)
True crime, no justice (or only for the privileged)
“Doomocracy” (are we at the end of an era?)
Untreated, undiagnosed, unrecognized mental illness (the literal embodiment of invisible chaos)
“Lifeboat” stories (who gets human/civil rights versus who doesn’t)
Mob or cult “lust” (craving the power of the one percent)
Remember that horror provides occasion to process fear and anxiety (for both the reader and the writer).
By tackling political topics, you aren’t automatically joining a propaganda machine; in fact, you might be working against it!
Clive Barker said of dark fantasy (which some describe as a “posh” term for horror): “Yes, fantastic fiction can be intricately woven into the texture of our daily lives… but it also serves to release us for a time from the definitions that confine our daily selves; to unplug us from a world that wounds and disappoints us...”
Whatever else you do as a horror writer, it’s usually in your best interest to write what scares you along the political spectrum without apology. Readers need to know they’re not alone with these real world anxieties and fears. Just knowing this, through your narratives, encourages them to hold out hope, seek empowerment, even participate in activism.
I leave you with one more quote from Toni Morrison, itself a kind of political revelation: “Make up a story … For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”
Postscript July 30, 2024
After sending this column off to the Seattle chapter of the HWA for production, 20-year-old Thomas Matthews Crooks attempted to assassinate former president Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania. Then, President Biden stepped down from his candidacy for the 2024 election and was replaced by Vice President Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Who wasn’t stunned by this? What kinds of feelings emerged for you after you processed what happened? This egregious act, and the social aftermath it has spawned, is likely still top of mind. Yet, we all inherently know this murderous act isn’t likely the end of the drama we’re facing as we lean into the latter half of 2024.
I can’t help but see Crooks’ assassination attempt as grist for writing horror. Not in a capitalistic and insensitive way… but in a personal way.
The personal is political, the saying goes, itself a phrase from a 1969 essay of the same name written by feminist activist Carol Hanisch.
Right now, we are experiencing a political season that’s equally personal, especially among the marginalized communities who make up a majority (or near-majority) of the US American population. These are horrifying times, indeed, for women, folks from the LGBTQIA+ family, people of color, disabled folks, the working poor, the unhoused, and those living with mental illness. Whole swaths of rights and freedoms are at stake, if one is to read and believe the intentions of Project 2025.
If horror describes your pathway moving forward into election season, take some time to mine these real-world events—and any others that might occur between now and November, tied especially to conventions and the fall SCOTUS rulings—leave you feeling.
Write those wide-ranging emotions down in a journal... all of them. Let them percolate, then think about situations, characters, or tropes you’re writing in a story, scene, essay, poem… whatever it is that you’re working on that needs an element of darkness, anxiety, fear.
Because these moments in our shared history do not happen in a void—with the energy of each feeding or spawning the next—prepare to journal these feelings right into and even beyond election season. Capture the stuff of your nightmares: instances of toxicity, violence, ambivalence, loss of control, ethical abuses, collective tension, and wounding.
Writing them down on the page is like capturing them in a cell, the lines upon which you write the words serving as the bars to confine these horrors.
In this way, you might also benefit from the therapeutic value of managing the flood of emotions that come with this season. Doing so can help prevent distractions and chaotic thinking from derailing your creative life, allowing you to do the important work of writing horror during horrifying times.
About the Author:
Tamara Sellman (she/her) is author of the dark speculative collection, Cul de Sac Stories (2024; Aqueduct Press), and Intention Tremor: A Hybrid Collection (2021; MoonPath Press). She co-hosts the BENEATH THE RAIN SHADOW podcast with horror author Clay Vermulm; their collection of regional dark fiction, Rain Shadows, launches in 2025. Her experimental novelette, Trust Fall, a dark contemporary fairy tale about growing up in a John Bircher household, is slated for publication by MCR Media in 2026. Sellman’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Lowestoft Chronicle, Lurking (from the Dark Decades Anthology Series), Quibble, Cirque, and others. The three-time Pushcart Prize nominee is active with the Seattle chapter of the Horror Writers Association, the Author Event Network, and the Cascade Writers Workshop. Sellman lives in Kitsap county, WA.
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