From literary boogeymen like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster to modern reinventions like Freddy Krueger and Pennywise the clown, our culture has long been fascinated by the macabre. In recent years, however, a new brand of horror has begun to haunt audiences — the terror of reality.
Whereas the monsters of Universal creature features and H.P. Lovecraft novels terrify our primal brains trained to fear the unknown, the horror of reality digs deep into the rational mind.
The modern status quo, in which our world leaders, fueled by narcissism and prejudice, wield immense control over a powerless society, terrifies me and my contemporaries more than Stephen King ever could.
Though previously any commentary on the terrors of reality would be coded through metaphors, the horror genre has grown blunter in recent years. Gone is the age of using monsters as metaphors for the prejudices of society. In 2020, the monsters we see are real, or at least reflections of our reality.
A particularly pertinent piece featuring this kind of horror, Amazon Prime’s “The Boys” — based on the Garth Ennis comic book — crafts a world not unlike our own, in place of politicians and moguls, super-powered egomaniacs maim and manipulate their way into society’s upper echelon.  
“I realized what a perfect metaphor this was for the exact second we’re living in,” the show’s creator, Eric Kripke, told the New York Times, “for this world where authoritarianism and celebrity are combined and fascism is packaged through social media.”
“The Boys” reflects the terrors of corporate America, where those in power act as “heroes” but in private are deviants, rapists, power hungry creatures of prejudice and even literal Nazis. Sound familiar?
Along the same trend as “The Boys” is HBO’s “Watchmen,” itself a sequel to the 1986 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic books of the same name. Opening with a gut-wrenchingly real depiction of the Tulsa Race Massacre, an event which has been largely ignored in the American education system, “Watchmen” places an emphasis on America’s history of racial exploitation and its terrifying existence well into the 21st century.
While based on a superhero comic in which an apathetic nude blue god atomizes people, “Watchmen” is less concerned with the implications of this larger-than life-terror, but rather the real horror wrought by white supremacy’s real threat to society.
What makes both “The Boys” and “Watchmen,” along with countless other shows, books and movies so terrifying is not the implications of god-like beings that could destroy our way of life with their supernatural powers but the real issues our own society faces today.
White supremacy, prejudice, narcissistic leaders and ego-driven elites don’t just go away once you turn off the television like Michael Myers or Godzilla do. They are here to stay unless we act on them.
Through this new age of art, we don’t escape into fantastical horror; rather, we’re interrogated about what scares us as a society.
Amid a terrifying year in its own right, it would seem the horror genre has finally caught up to how haunting real life is. Horror is no longer the monsters under our bed or the ones in our closets, but the monsters outside our windows that propagate systems of oppression and exercise control over others.
Domenic Purdy is a 19-year old journalism sophomore from Prairieville.