Issa Lopez on Fear and Horror in Fiction and in Real Life

This personal reflection is part of a series called Turning Points, in which writers explore what critical moments from this year might mean for the year ahead. You can read more by visiting the Turning Points series page.

Turning Point: The American horror film genre more than doubled its market share in the past decade.

As a Mexican — specifically a Mexican child who had to face death early in my life — I learned a nifty trick pretty quickly: the way my culture transfigures fear of death into art. Into storytelling. Into music.

Mexican identity is one and the same with death. It is a direct response to the fear of vanishing, yes. But it took some years of living in the United States and in several other countries to understand that this is not just a Mexican thing.

All artistic endeavors throughout history, around the world, come from the same source. We tell stories to remain. To deny the void. To fight the void. We sing and dance and make movies and tell jokes to explain a bit of the unexplainable, to tame the endless darkness, all of the things that lurk beyond what we can see, the shadows beyond our tiny campfire.

Our relationship with fear is fascinating. It is the feeling, other than pain, that we hate the most. We bottle fear to consume in tiny doses in the form of roller coasters, bungee jumping and our all-time favorite: horror movies.

I love horror movies. I just adore them, and I am very much not alone in that. Unlike superheroes or musicals or westerns, the business of horror is perennial; it will never go away. Audiences show up for horror year-round, decade after decade. There are whole streaming services dedicated to horror, and they do well. A single genre, go figure.