On The Real Life Horrors In Orlando

I am writing this in the early afternoon of June 12th, 2016.

I’ve spent the morning reading and watching the news of the tragic events in Orlando, Florida over the last few days, and what seems to be a horror averted in Los Angeles, and I would just like to take a moment of your time to say a couple of things.

Horror4Me and its sister-site SciFi4Me were created with the “Me” part of those names actually meaning all of you.

You are the Me.

Fans writing and filming and recording for each other, celebrating the genres we all love, together. A community of fans. A family of fans.

Horror, as a genre, is almost always about violence and death. The monsters of horror, however, are not real. There are no zombies or demons; no Jasons, Michaels or Freddies; no Monsters in the Closet or Under the Bed. Stephen King and Clive Barker are not famous for their non-fiction. John Carpenter and Eli Roth are not documentary filmmakers.

We know that. We enjoy being frightened by things we know are not real, because the world often – too often, so terribly, terribly, too often – has horrors that make any vampire or demon or whatever look like a bad joke.

Real horrors like the events after a concert or in a nightclub in Orlando, in a Charleston church, a Colorado movie theater, the Middle-East, Europe or anywhere that real people harm other real people? Real horrors that cut down the lives of the innocent for “reasons” based on fear, zealotry, bigotry or intolerance?

Those horrors diminish us all, those horrors wound us all… that Me that is all of Us.

On behalf of the family that is this site, I extend our thoughts and prayers for the victims of those senseless, horrific acts in Orlando; for their families and friends; and for all those who face, and have faced, horrors far worse than any fictional creation can cause.

Our hearts are with you.

• Timothy Harvey