A Guide to the Modern-Day Scaries of 2025

No matter where you look, horrors abound in the news cycle. There’s a bushel, a peck, a whack of monstrosities, and fear is the order of the day.

In the spirit of spooky season, I’ve collected a bevy of terrifying notions that will haunt your nightmares and stalk your daily life.

Americans

David Bowie wasn’t wrong when he sang “I’m afraid of Americans.” The British superstar was just slightly ahead of his time. Even if one makes a concentrated effort to look away from the not-so-slow-motion car crash that is the current state of the U.S., it’s impossible to do so for long. The dread fascination is too strong.

If the Americans goes to war with each other in a blue-versus-red, neighbour-against-neighbour campaign, can we gentle Canadians expect that they’ll leave us out of it? Somehow, I think not. The idea keeps me awake at night.

Goats

Anyone who has ever had much to do with goats knows they are not to be messed with. Long before Black Phillip took his starring turn in Robert Eggers’ 2015 horror film The Witch, goats were associated with the darker, more dangerous aspects of rural life.

In addition to cavorting with covens and lending their likeness to the horned god Baphomet, goats will mess you up just for kicks. They can survive in the harshest conditions by eating rubber tires and old tin cans. They can scale sheer cliffs and butt you into next week.

Having grown up with goats, I learned to have a healthy respect for their abilities, as well as the vagaries of their moods. The most terrifying aspect of living with goats as a small child was my mother trying to convince us that goat’s milk was the same as store-bought cow’s milk.

In hindsight, maybe I ought to have been more frightened of my mother.

Viruses

The resurgence of viruses like measles, the tiniest of terrors, is genuinely terrifying. Diseases that were once considered eradicated have staged major comebacks, along the lines of Broadway stars of old — Diva Diphtheria, Lady Measles, and the most legendary of them all, Sir Smallpox, soon to be rebranded as Major Pox.

That vaccines deemed safe for decades have been somehow re-branded as villains is one of the most confounding things to ever occur in human history. So maybe it’s not so much viruses, but humans and their commitment to self-destruction that’s truly terrifying.

Water

Too much or too little, water has surged to the top of many lists of environmental fears. When your house is being swept out to sea, disappeared into a swollen river, or carried along in a hurricane or typhoon, the sheer destructive capacity of water rivals just about every element of destruction known to humankind. That’s the thing about truly frightening stuff: it transforms ordinary, everyday elements into instruments of utter annihilation. Freud had a term for it, unheimlich, a German word for “unhomely,” or ordinary, understandable stuff transformed into its opposite.

Men and bears

It’s a good idea to avoid deep dark forests where there might be bears, but men are harder to avoid. They’re everywhere: in stores, working in offices, at the gym, running for public office.

Bears are pretty reasonable creatures: they usually don’t send unsolicited DMs or mansplain everything under the sun. Nor do they stand on street corners and make remarks on women’s attire or insist upon driving enormous trucks down city streets, blasting AC/DC out the window. Bears pretty much mind their own business, unless you really get in their face, invade their turf or pick on their kids.

Men, on the other hand, can’t seem to leave you well enough alone. It’s little wonder that when offered the choice, women often choose bears. Men then explain why this is the incorrect choice.

Ostriches

The scariness of ostriches has been duly noted by comedians but here in British Columbia, it’s not so much the birds themselves as the people they attract. The ongoing saga of the Universal Ostrich Farm in Edgewood isn’t so much the ostriches being jerks, but the violent folks who appear only too happy to beat on their fellow humans in the name of protecting these rather large, flightless birds.

Katy Perry

If you’re like me, pop chanteuse Katy Perry also gives you the screaming heebie-jeebies. Even before she catapulted into space and then took up with former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (is there a connection between those two things?) there was something about Perry that made me deeply uneasy. The too-tight ponytail, the godawful songs, the bright blank stare. If the news suddenly emerged that Perry was indeed a space alien come to live among us, I wouldn’t be hugely surprised.

Everything

What happens if you combine all these things into one massive terror, not unlike the alien invader in John Carpenter’s seminal creature feature The Thing? I’m thinking of the film’s penultimate scene when the monstrosity and the remaining human square off in a final epic confrontation. All of the various animals and people that have been absorbed into the creature, including an entire sled team of huskies, Wilfred Brimley, a bunch of Norwegian scientists and Katy Perry, pop up to say hello. Or “Hei!!” as the Norwegians like to say.

Sometimes the world feels like it’s been transmogrified into a giant planet-sized version of The Thing, everything terrifying converging into this moment. It’s hard to know where to park individual terrors. But maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing.

Fear has long been the most efficient method to cajole or cudgel a population into submission or paralysis. If we can learn to face our collective anxieties and stare down the things that we find most frightening, maybe we can emerge stronger and more resilient, able to face an unknown future.

That’s the scariest thing, after all, the unknown. Well, maybe other than my mother. And goats.