2020 has been wild. Every day, I see news reports of the Black Lives Matter protests for justice for victims like Breonna Taylor in Louisville that have been going on for over 100 days now. Reports of wildfires of wildfires burning half of the United States. And, of course, Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic that has left over 200,000 dead. It’s awful, but you know what the kicker is?

I don’t live in the US. I live in England.

Despite this, all I ever see on British news channels is about the US. As I write this, the second most watched thing on the BBC news website is about Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. It overshadows the fact that Boris Johnson isn’t doing much better. We’ve got 40,000 dead here.

As a horror fan who enjoys digging into horror theory, I’ve noticed an interesting parallel. A common theme in horror theory is the idea of that horror films explore the fears of society at the time, like how after 9/11 there was a surge of films that had the horror elements occur in seemingly innocuous locations (think the latter Final Destination films or home invasion movies like The Strangers). The idea that nowhere was safe became a common fear that horror films played off of and examined.

Horror fans became sort of obsessed with seeing these gruesome and ghastly scenes. To me, at least, it felt cathartic because it wasn’t real and no one was actually getting hurt. I could see these atrocities but I could disconnect from them. Considering the success of these sorts of films, I wasn’t alone in this.

The thing that brought me back to horror, after being terrified of it as a kid growing up in the early 2000s, was watching Dead Meat on YouTube. In particular, I would watch the Kill Counts, where the host James A. Janisse tallies up the kills in all our favourite horror movies. He would break them down into statistics…which sadly brings me back to the news in the UK. The US’s 200,000 dead dwarfs the 40,000 here in the UK and makes Boris seem like a less extreme Trump. That he could be worse.

uk protest coverage vs us protest coverage.png

But it’s not the only thing that overshadows the UK. You’ve got the police. I didn’t see a single report on the protests that took place in the UK. I didn’t see a single report on police here being racist, even though they cover it when it happens in the US and racism is still as big an issue here as much as it is in the US.

We still have people like Osime Brown, a 21-year-old black man, the same age as me, with Autism like me, who is being deported over some minor thing that happened to him as a child despite witnesses saying he didn’t do it. I didn’t see anything about him on the news. Instead we just see stuff about the US.

We make jokes about how stupid Trump is. We disconnect and pretend that these issues aren’t happening here. Hell, I had to bring myself back from the disconnect in this very discussion. It might make it easier to face the issues if I look at a hyper-exaggerated version of them happening in the US and I could compare it to that meme with the kids in a pool, but I don’t want to detract from the issue.

Let’s face it Britain, we’re no Sharon Stone.