“There’s a real dichotomy right now,” says Matt
Hayden, co-owner of Terror Town, an Old West-
themed horror village in Williamsburg, Ohio. “If
you’ve been directly impacted by serious illness
or loss, we’ve heard from people that this isn’t
something that appeals to them this year.”
That’s not the majority. Hayden reports record
attendance this year, people who want to
swap that dull, pounding fear for something
immersive and cinematic — to lose themselves
in a storyline for a moment.
“They can come to places like this,” he says, “and
separate themselves from this year and what
it’s been.”
The coronavirus might be 2020’s newest
bogeyman, but other, older ones are just as
menacing. Even beyond COVID, there’s enough
fear and death in American life to go around
this year.
Among the scares: What will happen on
Election Day? What will happen to the republic
AFTER Election Day? Both sides of a polarized
citizenry have their own brands of unease at
those questions.
Then there’s the racial reckoning fueled by
centuries of fear and death visited unto Black
people in America — and renewed by 2020’s
convulsive events. As The Root wrote in October
2016, “Every day is Halloween for Black people.”
The HBO show “Lovecraft Country,” which ended
its first season this month, played on that notion
with a blend of fantastical horror and the ugly
real-life terror of racism in 1950s America.
Though it was filmed before the pandemic
descended and George Floyd’s killing by police