"Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I said, Well, it's like two of the scariest movies I can imagine"
About this Quote
Koontz frames electoral choice the way his readers already know how to feel it: as dread you can see coming, dread you can’t quite stop, dread sold as entertainment until it isn’t. Calling the candidates “two of the scariest movies” is a canny piece of genre-swapping. Politics becomes narrative spectacle, not civic deliberation; the voter becomes an audience member stuck between two screenings, neither of which promises catharsis.
The line works because it’s compactly insulting without sounding partisan. He doesn’t have to name names or argue platforms. By invoking “movies,” Koontz taps a shared cultural grammar: jump scares, ominous music, the sense that something monstrous is inevitable. Horror is also a genre about helplessness, and that’s the hidden grievance here: the election isn’t presented as agency but as a forced march through curated fear. “Choice” arrives in scare quotes, practically; what we’re “being given” is prepackaged, as if democracy were a studio release schedule.
There’s a sly comment about media ecosystems too. If politics now plays like cinema, it’s because campaigns and news coverage have learned to monetize attention the way trailers do: escalate stakes, simplify characters, tease disaster. Koontz, a professional manufacturer of suspense, is implicitly calling out a system that has adopted his tricks while dropping his implied contract with the audience: that fear is contained, that the lights come up, that you can walk out.
It’s horror, he suggests, because you can’t.
The line works because it’s compactly insulting without sounding partisan. He doesn’t have to name names or argue platforms. By invoking “movies,” Koontz taps a shared cultural grammar: jump scares, ominous music, the sense that something monstrous is inevitable. Horror is also a genre about helplessness, and that’s the hidden grievance here: the election isn’t presented as agency but as a forced march through curated fear. “Choice” arrives in scare quotes, practically; what we’re “being given” is prepackaged, as if democracy were a studio release schedule.
There’s a sly comment about media ecosystems too. If politics now plays like cinema, it’s because campaigns and news coverage have learned to monetize attention the way trailers do: escalate stakes, simplify characters, tease disaster. Koontz, a professional manufacturer of suspense, is implicitly calling out a system that has adopted his tricks while dropping his implied contract with the audience: that fear is contained, that the lights come up, that you can walk out.
It’s horror, he suggests, because you can’t.
Quote Details
| Topic | Sarcastic |
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