My good pal Thomas S (who’s also the editor of this newsletter) texted me a fantastic theory a year ago that’s really resonated with me since. He asserted that all of American mass media is derived from pulp; that is to say, all our big cultural exports originate from their “low” disposable genre forms before they eventually become elevated to their more respectable forms. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg made many of their big blockbusters based on the cheap serials they watched as children. Superhero movies all come from comic books, a medium that was considered disposable trash at its peak popularity. And horror, most of all, comes from dimestore paperbacks and low-budget B-movies. Our ability to produce a huge volume of cheap media is what’s allowed Americans to ultimately produce globally dominant culture. When you tell a bunch of stories, even cheaply and oftentimes poorly, eventually some of that is going to bubble up to prestige culture and define the zeitgeist.

Horror is a funny genre, because most adults will tell you with a straight face that they don’t like it. Talk to any person who enjoys movies, however, and they’ll tell you they love The Shining, Silence of the Lambs, or Psycho. Horror gets treated as though it’s exclusively the domain of stinky edgelords, and yet Stephen King is one of the bestselling and most adapted authors of all time. We’re in a year where horror is undeniably having a moment. I don’t think anyone could have predicted that Obsession and Backrooms would be massive runaway hits like they have been. But if you’ve been paying attention to the genre this decade, it’s not that surprising. Horror has kept the post-pandemic box office afloat, and Sinners and Weapons got major Oscars recognition last year. Horror is our pulp we’re drawing from the most at the moment; it’s not by accident.

Navarette’s performance as Nikki is so arresting because it represents the constant increasing tension we feel as fascism accelerates. Part of the dramatic tension in the film lies in the fact that we can never guess when the real Nikki is going to suddenly erupt out of the compliant fake Nikki created by Bear’s wish. In every moment the false Nikki is struggling to perform the love and devotion forced upon her by the wish, while her authentic self still rages just beneath the surface, struggling to burst out. Barker lights her eyes in such a way that it feels as though we can see this struggle raging at all times; when the violent anger boils over in Nikki, we can see the internal process of the contradictory consciousnesses inside her manifested behind her eyes. She is forced to perform absolute devotion, even to the point of inflicting violence on her own body and ignoring her own bodily needs. When that performance is disrupted, her dislocation as a person of such a profoundly split identity causes absolute terror for both her and Bear.

This dual consciousness is the heart of what made Obsession such a lightning rod this summer. We live in an era where Republicans are trying to functionally strip away the right to vote for married women, to make it much harder to divorce, and to even further diminish the right to an abortion. In such conditions, love becomes a huge risk and a trap as much as a place to find joy and comfort. For young women in particular, there’s the added landmine that their male counterparts are increasingly under the influence of incel and manosphere influencers who are telling young men that all their problems boil down to women having too much power in relationships. Many women in this country are no longer able to fully make choices of their own free will; there is always a looming threat of structural patriarchal violence, even in romantic relationships. Even men like Bear who aren’t overtly committed to incel ideology still absorb it ambiently, and can’t bring themselves to admit when they are benefitting from a situation where their partner’s ability to fully consent has been taken from them.

There’s a broader component to why the horror in Nikki’s performance is so resonant. For the last several years, we’ve had to continue showing up to work and performing as though everything is fine while deep down something in us is screaming to get out. We smile politely in the grocery store while images of genocide bounce around our skulls. We go out for drinks with friends and try not to think too hard about what could happen at any moment to the street vendor selling pupusas outside of the bar. We work hard to suppress our panic as gas and food prices continue to soar and wildfire smoke seeps into our homes. All of this dread bursts out of us at inopportune and irrational moments; we yell at our partners, we burst into tears over something minor. The sense of total loss of control, of any sense of agency to have any power to stop what’s all around us, is an increasingly shared feeling. The gendered component is obviously where this horror is felt most acutely, but Nikki’s forced performance of love even when every subconscious instinct is screaming for her to escape is maybe the most pervasive feeling of our moment.

It’s why horror is dominating the culture right now beyond Obsession. Backrooms is similarly about the inability to break free of a recursive and degrading past and imagine a future for ourselves. The Netflix miniseries Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen explored similar fears of giving in to love as Obsession, although much more focused on the terror of the marriage pact than love itself. But to me, the other truly great horror story of our moment is Widow’s Bay, the Apple TV series about a cursed island off the coast of New England trapped in cycles of eldritch terrors that manifest in a number of ways and torture the residents.

What makes Widow’s Bay so effective is how it explores the original sin of American colonization and how that passes down from one generation to the next. The conceit of the show is that the founder of the island, Richard Warren, made a pact with an ancient evil in order to make the island habitable for its colonists, and the island is now cursed so long as anyone from Warren’s bloodline continues to live. Anyone born on the island cannot leave; they are crushed by the ocean if they try to get off of it. Because no one can bring themselves to kill their neighbors and eradicate Warren’s bloodline, the people of Widow’s Bay are forced to live through increasing cycles of calamity, seemingly forever. One descendent of Warren’s bloodline, an elderly woman named Ruth, sums up the attitude of the island inhabitants perfectly:

Life is a house of horrors. You should know that better than anyone, Tom … There’s no bliss waiting at the finish line. Even if there was, it would just be taken away from you because that’s just life. In all its ugly, beautiful, terrible glory. You just … You just have to accept it.

Increasingly, to be an American is to feel as though all we can do is accept life as a house of horrors. The people of Widow’s Bay can only try to eke out a decent life for each other before a horror beyond their comprehension eventually drags them into the void. We can’t imagine a life for ourselves beyond the boundaries of American techno-fascism anymore than the people of Widow’s Bay can imagine life beyond the island. Similarly in Obsession, the only way out of Nikki’s curse is for Bear to commit suicide. There’s a fatalism to the horror stories that resonate with us right now because we feel as though the world we inherited and have no control over can only end in one way.

But at the end of the day, this is what horror empowers us to do. It gives us the space to confront our ugliness, the darkness lurking in our culture, and face it in the mirror. I’ve read good critiques of Obsession for not ultimately providing a feminist vision; it’s not a narrative in which Nikki liberates herself of her own volition. Widow’s Bay can similarly be read as bleak and apathetic rather than emancipatory. But to me this isn’t the point of horror; the point is to show us the monster in the mirror, the rot in our foundations, and the evil in our hearts. The work of exorcising that evil, of reclaiming our agency, is up to us after the credits roll.