Actual Horror is not like the Movies

It turns out that actual horror is more insidious than horror in the movies. It doesn’t have chainsaws or zombies. It doesn’t have a madman stalking you outside your window. Instead the perpetrators of actual horror are the politicians. People with great power acting out their homicidal fantasies.

Actual horror is watching senseless mass murder happen on your phone. The ghouls are leaders pulling on the mechanisms of war. Playing a military game of hubris. A game they gladly play because, it’s part of their rulebook, toying with people’s lives as if they were throwing dice to test their luck.

Actual horror is seeing trembling children in makeshift hospitals getting sewn together without anesthesia. It’s reading of families demolished and watching towns be flattened.

Actual horror is hearing rationalization. In real horror movies there is no rationale. We all know that evil is just evil. We know there’s no reason or at best a back story or a creation story. But still we know without a doubt that evil must be conquered.

Not in actual horror. In actual horror there is explanation and righteous indignation. There is misinformation and redirection. We are bombarded with reasons while watching the actual horror play out.

That’s what’s good about movies. We hope that evil will be conquered. If not squashed now, for sure in the next episode. We have to have hope or else we wouldn’t want to keep watching.

In this actual horror I am fighting to find the hope. I am dumbfounded by the horrors that people are capable of. Perhaps I see too much. Maybe it would be better not to see. Maybe the game of war is best without the image or the sound. Maybe if I saw less I could trust the mainstream news.

But the actual horror is I have to watch. I have to watch because it’s better to know the truth of war than to believe it’s like the movies.