Humans tell stories constantly: to ourselves, about ourselves, and about the world. Collectively, the stories we tell and are told make up culture. It is thus worth noting which stories we choose to tell and, vitally, how closely those stories map the real, material world.
This checking of our narratives with verifiable reality is a vitally important exercise that has become increasingly rare, and the effects have been especially pernicious in American politics. From the disastrous and counterproductive “War on Drugs” (driven more by Scarface and Miami Vice than by data and research) to the anti-scientific information illiteracy preached by programs like Ancient Aliens and The 700 Club, some fantastical political fables have bled into American culture in ways that make us, to be blunt, dumber, meaner, and crazier.
Stories of devils, monsters, and witches are much older than America, of course, but we seem unusually given to believe that such fantasies are factually true. In our history we’ve conjured up fearsome (and fictitious) adversaries ranging from Salem all the way to Joseph McCarthy. However, just as both “pop culture” and “horror movies” can be understood as products of modernity, the political weaponization of horror has been the subject of modern innovation; more specifically, innovation by the American Christian Right. This process began in the 1960s and by the Trump era it culminated in its logical terminus; the apocalyptic death cult called QAnon.
When one digs just below the surface of American conspiracy
culture, it’s remarkable how much of it is unapologetically cribbed from Hollywood.
Alex Jones contends that the science fiction movie Oblivion literally
contains “the globalist playbook for their endgame.” Similarly, much
of QAnon’s mythology is based on an outlandish blood libel, itself based on a fictional
drug invented
by Hunter S. Thompson for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Milton “Bill” Cooper,
an OG UFO weirdo and the man whose original radio gimmicks were stolen wholesale
by Alex Jones thought that the “Luciferian New World Order” could be understood
through Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Most conspiracists, when
confronted with the reasonable query “you know that’s fiction, right?”
respond with the remarkable assertion that, due to some cosmic/theological
loophole or another, the Enemy must hide their plans in plain sight. All the
better to beguile and pacify the populace that way, too (I guess?).
No genre of fiction – not even sci-fi – has had a deeper impact on conspiracist thinking than horror. While in the past anti-scientific, anti-Masonic, and anti-European themes had been explored by horror, it was horror’s modern embrace of diabolism (beginning with Rosemary’s Baby) that proved to have the most lasting (and pernicious) effect. Rosemary’s Baby is a tale whose outlines should be familiar to anyone acquainted with the long, horrible history of blood libel, lies, and calumny that surround ideas of Satanic conspiracy. Rosemary, a young mother-to-be used as an incubator by a network of Satanists that includes her husband and their neighbors. This secret cabal conspires to corrupt Rosemary and bring about the birth of the Antichrist, ringing in a new Satanic era. One could argue that Rosemary’s Baby was the first modern proto-QAnon story. It’s essentially all there save for the harvesting of adrenochrome and Donald J. Trump busting in at the last moment like the Kool-Aid Man to save Rosemary from peril.
I remember a time when even political junkies didn’t know
what QAnon was. Those days are, regrettably, behind us. Now, even most Time
or Newsweek readers know the basics, if not the more grotesque details.
The QAnon cult – complete with its stories of mole children, blood-drinking Satanists*, and
“frazzledrip”** – has grown beyond my most pessimistic predictions. A movement
that is essentially a horror LARP (live-action role playing game) or ARG
(alternate-reality game) for unbalanced people and shut-ins would be fucking
hilarious if it hadn’t already racked up a body count and led to kidnappings and shootings. QAnon is on the FBI’s list of domestic extremist threats. In its apocalypticism, its
growing number of adherents, its cultic freneticism, and its encroachment into
the realm of legitimate political power, QAnon is deeply reminiscent of another
cult: Aum Shinrikyo (now rebranded as Aleph, and still a presence in Russia). Shoko Asahara, the madman at the helm
of Aum, was hanged to death in 2018 for the mass murder of commuters in a 1995
subway gas attack, but before his arrest, Aum/Aleph tried to make inroads
into legitimate political power in Japan, despite the
horror movie beliefs of its members and the overt doomsday fixation of its ideology. Aum also had
a weird relationship with mass media, promoting their beliefs through the
popular Japanese media of anime and manga.
Obviously, I love horror. More than that, I love political horror; stories which examine the social issues that face us in real life, but do so through an exaggerated and Gothic lens. I’ve written on the subject at Madness Heart Press, and have written political horror myself (if you’d like to read an example, my short story “stuffed” is a good place to start, and is available in the anthology American Cult). That said, it is vitally important to remember a few things when approaching the genre: When horror stories infect politics in real life, when myths, hysteria, and outright fearmongering are fomented for ideological purposes, the results are inevitably catastrophic. Worth noting, too, is the short and brutal history of fascism’s relationship to such narratives. What we are seeing now is an unholy (or, rather, an all too holy) union between the religious-political cultic milieu and the horror milieu. Right-wing and conservative politics have become a fantasy world in which horror movie monsters are literally real and fear lurks in every shadow and beneath every bed. It would, like so much during the Trump/QAnon era, be fucking hilarious if we didn’t have to actually live through it ourselves.
At its most basic level, government is not about convoluted
theory or flowery speeches. It’s a matter of resource (re)distribution, public health,
infrastructure, and other mundane, wonky concerns. The injection of religion
into this arena has been heinous enough to this point. The threat that
modern conspiracy culture represents is even worse; a degradation of theocracy
into an overtly fascistic death cult with actual, literal
witch-hunts as its goal. We’ve been here before, and “Michelle”
isn’t the only one who remembers.
*: I am a Satanist. I have been to – get this – many
Satanic rituals. I have yet to see someone consume human blood.
**: This is a warning before you Google that word. No,
really. QAnon goes to some places darker than you could possibly imagine. You were warned.
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