How Do People Write Horror in a World That Feels Horrifying?

I have a horror script open on my laptop and, three tabs over, the news. That is becoming a problem. I am supposed to be figuring out how to scare somebody. I am supposed to be thinking about monsters, blood, the thing hiding in the hallway, the horrible discovery at the end of Act Two.

Instead I click over.

ICE.

Another raid. Another arrest. Another family trying to figure out where somebody was taken.

Running, screaming, filming, trying to help, trying to warn each other. Another story about somebody who went to work and did not come home. Another group of people standing outside a detention center waiting for information. Another Latino neighborhood learning a new set of survival rules. And then I am supposed to click back over to Final Draft and invent something scary.

Some days I genuinely do not know how.

I write horror for a living, or at least I am trying very hard to.

I spend an embarrassing amount of my life thinking about how fear works. Lately, I keep getting stuck on the absurdity of trying to manufacture dread while actual dread is pouring into my phone all day.

The current immigration crackdown has become particularly difficult for me to compartmentalize. There have been deadly encounters during immigration operations, deaths connected to detention, protests, lawsuits, and entire communities changing the way they move through daily life because of enforcement activity.

I see the videos. I read the stories. Then I look at my screenplay. These are my people.

I mean that very literally. Latinos. Mexicans. Immigrants. People working jobs that look like jobs members of my family have worked. People speaking Spanish while somebody with a mask and a vest stands over them. People whose children are suddenly learning things about fear that children should not have to learn.

It gets into my head.

Of course it does.

Part of the reason this hits me as hard as it does is that I have my own border story. When I was seven years old, I was separated from my family at the border because of a clerical error. I was a kid.

I did not understand immigration policy. I did not understand bureaucracy. I did not understand jurisdiction or paperwork or why adults with official authority were suddenly deciding where I could and could not go.

I understood that my family was gone.

Years later, when images of children separated from their families at the border started filling the news, I recognized the feeling before I had language for what was happening inside me. I knew that fear. I knew the strange helplessness of being a child inside a system so much larger than you that nobody feels obligated to explain what is happening.

That experience eventually became part of Migrant Spirits. Because apparently this is what I do. I get angry and eventually a ghost shows up.

Migrant Spirits came out of those images and that memory.

The story grew around a detention center, missing children, ghosts, and a young person trying to find someone they love inside a place designed to make people feel powerless. That is the part horror gave me that reality did not. Agency.

In real life, being seven years old at the border meant I had no power. Somebody else had the paperwork. Somebody else had the authority. Somebody else knew the rules. All I could do was experience what they decided.

In a horror movie, I get to change the rules. I can make the detention center haunted. I can make the people who were disappeared impossible to erase. I can make the children matter to the universe of the movie even when the system surrounding them has decided otherwise. I can make somebody fight back.

That is wish fulfillment horror.

And I do not think wish fulfillment has to mean everything turns out okay. Sometimes the wish is much smaller. Sometimes the wish is simply: What if you could do something?

When I look back at my work, I realize I keep finding ways to do this.

With Your Life is about a woman trying to escape an abusive husband with her baby. The story takes something intimate and brutally real and eventually turns it into slasher language. The danger becomes a masked killer. The escape becomes a chase. Fear becomes physical.

Once it becomes a slasher, she can run from it. She can punch it. She can survive it. That matters to me.

There are experiences in life where the threat is diffuse. It lives in a relationship or a system or a history. There is no monster standing in front of you conveniently waiting to be stabbed.

Horror is generous enough to give you one. That is one of the reasons I love it. It takes something enormous and shapeless and says, fine, here it is.

Now fight.

Lechuza is about the broken family.

That is probably not surprising to anybody who has read more than three things I have written. There is grief in that story. Mothers and daughters. Sisters. Old wounds. Things that have been passed through a family because nobody figured out how to put them down.

Then an enormous supernatural owl witch enters the equation.

Great.

Now the grief has talons. Now the thing tearing the family apart can actually stand in front of them. That sounds funny when I write it like that, but I think it explains a lot about why monsters have always been useful.

Real pain is frustratingly difficult to confront. A monster gives it a body.

I think this is where I have been getting stuck lately. Some part of me keeps thinking horror is supposed to offer escape from the news. Then I open the news, feel horrible, and suddenly writing a monster movie feels frivolous.

But that is not actually how horror has worked for me.

The horror I love has never pretended the world was fine.

George Romero did not look at America and decide zombies would be a pleasant distraction. Tobe Hooper did not make The Texas Chain Saw Massacre feel like a clean vacation from the country around him.

Horror takes what is already in the air and gives it another shape. Sometimes that shape is ridiculous. Sometimes it has fangs. Sometimes it eats flesh. Sometimes it wears a mask.

I can sit in a theater and look directly at something I have been avoiding because now it has movie lighting. That has helped me more times than I can count.

I do not want to spend the next few years writing scared.

I am scared. I am angry. I am watching things happen to Latino communities that make me furious, and I would rather admit that than pretend I can turn off the part of my brain that notices because I have a deadline.

So maybe the work gets angrier too. Good. Maybe ICE becomes a shadow somewhere in the next thing I write. The next monster could be born from a system that believes nobody can touch it. Or somebody who looks like the people I keep seeing in these videos gets to survive.

My horror gets louder about who I care about.

There are worse things that can happen to an artist than becoming specific.

This part matters too. I do not want everything I make to feel like homework because the world is bad. That would destroy me. I love horror because horror can carry all of this and still be a fucking movie.

There can be a great kill. A monster reveal. A can be a chase through the woods. There can be practical blood spraying somewhere it absolutely should not. There can be a packed theater laughing and screaming together. The politics do not disappear because the movie is entertaining.

Sometimes entertainment is how you get close enough to something painful to actually look at it. That is what horror did for me.

I want to return the favor.