I am a coward. I have to watch horror movies through my fingers and half-closed eyes. I need to watch someone else to play the latest Triple-A horror survival game, even though I would like to play it myself, because I’m too jittery to fight the zombies and the ghosts head on. When I read horror novels, a foreboding dread fills my body for days, or weeks, depending on the quality of its prose, although even the weakest of them feel like lead in my bones.

The Saw movies freak me the fuck out. I’m not, like, a gore enthusiast, but I can handle a scary movie, slashers, and the grotesquerie of body horror. But when I’m sitting down to watch Saw, I squirm. I close my eyes; I look away; I might even shut the movie off. It’s hard for me not to zoom out and see that Jigsaw is punishing these random people for some horrible crime from their past, something he alone has deemed punishable by acid vat or eye vacuum. Jigsaw strips away their autonomy, their free will. They’re presented with traps and puzzles that imply they have the choice to get out, but there isn’t any other choice, just more suffering, more of a struggle, more of a show for the person watching through the screen.

The threat of some random man capturing me, keeping me confined, torturing me for however long he wants, for however long it takes me to die, terrifies me.

I think what I’m really afraid of is something I consider to be worse than death, something that fills me with an all-consuming dread. Cops. The State. Prison.

***During the few times in my life when I’ve been forced to talk to the police, I’ve been humiliated or had the blame pinned on me. When I was in a three car pile-up, the truck-driving white supremacist at the front talked to the cops first and pinned me as the cause so that, officially, legally, I’d be the one at fault for the damage caused to everyone on the scene.

I’ve watched, in real life and online, plenty of cops hurt people, arrest people, mark them for life as criminals and ne’er-do-wells. I know trans women who have been put in jail for the crime of walking around while looking too trans — in other words, looking like a sex worker. And for me, the pipeline from cop car to men’s correctional facility feels all too real.

Despite the pervasive narrative that trans people should walk around constantly afraid of being assaulted by strangers, despite being a relatively clocky looking trans woman, I’ve always walked around rather unconcerned with the potential violent horrors that await me. Walking home from a friend’s house could end with me getting assaulted, injured, or fatally wounded in some freak accident — by the hands of a mass shooter, a drunk driver, a sinkhole or, yes, a transphobe. But in any of those situations, I either survive (great) or I die (meh).

What I’m saying, I think, is that there are threats worse than death, and Saw reminds me of them. It feels like the boogey man is real, and he’s showing me visions of my future.

What I’m afraid of is the transphobia of the state, the anti-humanity of the police, and the unimaginable cruelty of being imprisoned for some petty crime. I’m afraid of the punishment-within-the-punishment, of solitary confinement. I’m afraid of the complete stripping of one’s agency, the torture of being confined.

What I’m afraid of is some guy out there with a sadistic streak deciding it’s time for me to pay for my sins.

***My best friend, a woman with both a stronger resilience and taste for horror, convinced me to go with her to a haunted house in the suburbs. For a couple of days during haunted house season, during the middle of the middle week of October, it gives all its actors a break. Instead, the haunted house is made up of little tableaux, strategically placed animatronics, flashing lights, gusts of air, and sound effects. Once we had moved past the first five minutes of the experience and burned through the first few jump scares, the primal fear of walking into a scary maze waned. At least, for my best friend it did. I am a coward.

I was preoccupied with wondering how much longer it would take to get to the end of the maze, how many more unpleasant smells, how many more mysteriously jiggling canvas bags we’d have to walk by, how many more tropey scenes there would be, how many more asylums, prisons, cages, figurines of people bound up tight so that they look like monsters writhing around for escape we’d have to look at. I wondered when we would get out, flinching, my eyes closed when I could anticipate a shadowy figure in the corner about to lurch out and scream.

***I am a coward. The houses on my block — the mansions, really — decorate yards with gravestones marked with their own names on them. There’s a rocking chair with a plastic skeleton sitting in it and the smaller plastic skeleton of a dead plastic child perched where its lap would be. I look around the neighborhood and all of its pretend death, the cutesy remains of a make-believe extinction event. My body is filled with dread.

The neighborhoods I grew up in were full of aliens and witches and werewolves and pumpkins around Halloween. Any plastic skeletons that rose up always felt like friends from across the veil, like our slightly-scary, death-laden buddies got a visa to hang out with us for a while here in the land of the living. The Halloween scenes in the neighborhood of my youth were made of polyester cobwebs stretched from palm tree to palm tree, fog machines and strobing lights for trick-or-treaters. They had moms dressed as witches and dads wearing bloody lab coats.

Saw feels like the plastic graveyards of this rich, white neighborhood I’ve found myself in. It feels cruel, disconnected. It feels like it does not care about death, about suffering, like it doesn’t know what it’s like to be ground under the boot of the world.

When I walk by the plastic skeleton and her plastic skeleton baby in my neighborhood, I hold my breath and look away.

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