(NYTIMES) These days, there's a lot to be anxious about. There's a lot to fear. There's the environmental wreckage that's increasingly evident around the world, the fragile state of our political systems, the mutating virus making the very air we breathe dangerous. It's perhaps no surprise that a horror renaissance has happened in film over the past decade.

If many other aspects of one's day are a running list of terrors or involve creeping dread and consuming paranoia, then the eyes and mind, already accustomed to that, will expect it from whatever page or screen they land on.