Opinion: This election could end in a real horror movie

This column is part of HuffPost’s “She the People” series: stories from Black women addressing the historic candidacy of Kamala Harris. To find out more, visit our hub.

My late mother’s eyes were almost always hidden behind dark glasses.

When she was just 20 years old and a student at Florida A&M University, a police officer threw a canister of tear gas into her mother’s face during a peaceful march. And it shaped her for life.

It was 1960, and the officer recognized my mother as a student sit-in leader at the Florida A&M chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. She helped organize sit-ins that resulted in the arrest of black students and allies who sat down for church services at the lunch counter at Walgreens and McCrory.

A thousand students marched to downtown Tallahassee in a nonviolent protest against the arrests. “I want You!” said the officer and threw a live tear gas canister into Mama’s face. Mom was barely 1.70 meters tall. Like most protesters (and HBCU students) in the 1960s, she wore elegant clothing: dresses for women, jackets and ties for men. Their femininity, stature and clothing did not protect them from racism and state violence. Mom choked on the thick gas. She couldn’t see anything and stumbled through the crowd when she heard screams and shouts.

No wonder mom always loved horror movies. They helped mom calm down their emotional wounds and creates imaginary monsters and heroes who might validate and alleviate their fears in real life.

What she was truly afraid of was rooted in reality and the idea that “the clock would be turned back.” And with the rise of MAGA and the castigation of Donald Trump, I’ve seen my mother’s worst fears come true.

I recently published a horror novel: “The Reformatory“inspired by Mom’s real-life uncle Robert Stephens, who died at the infamous Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. In my novel, the reformatory is haunted—but the most frightening scenes were those that reveal Florida’s violent racial history. (It was even harder to write than the civil rights memoir we co-wrote: “Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights.”)

Even in fictional form, the sight of the spirit of Jim Crow was terrifying every day.

And mom was right. The clock has turned back. The MAGA slogan “Make America Great Again” reminds me of the treacherous world of “The Reformatory” and the reign of racist lawlessness under Jim Crow.

Inspired by my parents, I’m calling on the horror community to participate in a historic online event called ” Scare the vote Begins October 15th at 8:00 p.m. ET.

I work with a small committee consisting of: New York Times Bestselling author Christopher Golden, Bram Stoker Award winners Linda D. Addison and Cynthia Pelayo, award-nominated poet Maxwell Ian Gold and horror podcaster Robb Olson bring this event to life.

Authors Stephen King, Joe Hill, Stephen Graham Jones, Victor LaValle, Rachel Harrison, Erin E. Adams and many others have signed on – as have Hollywood horror icons Kevin Williamson (“Scream”), Mike Flanagan (“Doctor Sleep“The Haunting of Hill House”), Don Mancini (creator of “Chucky”) and Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”).

We want to remind Americans that nothing we imagined as horror creators compares to our fears about what will happen in the United States if Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don’t win the White House. Or what will happen in a world already descending into chaos as dictators and war criminals (leaders Trump most publicly admires) salivate at the prospect of a Trump victory.

A lot of this fear is rooted in being a black woman, especially when I remember how much my mother’s civil rights activism cost her. I firmly believe that her ongoing trauma – only partially marked by her dark glasses – shortened her life by years. She died of cancer in 2012 at the age of 72.

My family and I recently celebrated our father, “Freedom Lawyer” John Dorsey Due Jr.’s 90th birthday, and Mom’s dark glasses appeared in one family photo after another. She even wore these glasses indoors because they were sensitive to light.

As a student at Northwestern University, when I left an anti-apartheid demonstration before the police arrived to arrest me, I called my mother and felt ashamed. I told her I wished I had stayed and gone to prison too.

“Tananarive,” Mom said. “I went to prison so you wouldn’t have to.”

We both wanted to believe that. But if Kamala Harris cannot stop this country’s descent into fascism, many more of us will be portrayed as criminals as we dedicate ourselves to the urgent task of protecting ourselves from the hateful agenda of Donald Trump, Project 2025 and other oligarchs , who believe that this nation is only here to plunder.

Recently, Trump said in a speech that police should have one “Day of Violence” Maintaining order in this country is an idea comparable to a nightmare from a horror film, “The Purge.”

Of course he does. He says he wants to cleanse the country of immigrants, promising mass deportations. He and the Republicans have not apologized for racial and political discrimination reckless statements about Haitian immigrants in Ohio, who sparked bomb threats with their staged lies about Haitians eating pets.

Trump’s history of corruption, crime and insurgency makes him a tremendous threat to our democracy. And we don’t just have to imagine how terrible a Trump presidency would be; We’ve seen it before.

Only this time, his rogue government will have the power of his Supreme Court supporters behind him. The same Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade. The same Supreme Court that could be tasked with deciding this election after MAGA’s relentless attack on the truth and the right to vote.

The lies about rising crime rates and “voting irregularities” always clearly point to black and brown communities because, after all, MAGA doesn’t consider us “real” Americans.

And under MAGA, women are deprived of reproductive decisions that impact their own bodies and their futures. Women like Candi Miller and Amber Nicole Thurman in Georgia have already died because they were unable to access legal abortions due to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban.

Kamala Harris represents a new direction forward. Instead of trying to restrict and privatize Medicare Benefits under Trump’s Project 2025, This week, Vice President Harris announced her intention Expand Medicare benefits to include home health care for older people – a policy that would relieve countless voters of the crushing financial impact of caring for our aging parents.

Parents like my 90-year-old father. Parents and grandparents like yours.

Horror fans know that in typical horror films there are two types of protagonists: those who freeze, stumble and fall, and those who fight back. In a way, that’s what a horror story is all about to me – the moment when a group of campers or a family on vacation finally realizes they’re dealing with something dangerous and comes up with a plan of action.

That’s why the horror community is campaigning with Scare Up the Vote. We’ll talk about why we love horror – and why we’re supporting Kamala Harris in this election. We won’t be returning.