horror show

See also: horrorshow and horror-show

English

Alternative forms

• horror-show, horrorshow

Pronunciation

• Audio (AU)

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Noun

horror show (plural horror shows)

1. A horror movie or television show or other performance which depicts gruesome, horrible, or disgusting events, especially in a vividly visual manner.
   • 2023 June 7, Laura Collins-Hughes, “‘Wet Brain’ Review: A Vodka-Spiked Horror Show”, in The New York Times‎^[1], →ISSN:

     This is a horror show, unequivocally. But John J. Caswell Jr.’s “Wet Brain,” at Playwrights Horizons, is also a very funny, pitch-black comedy about addiction and obligation, love and abandonment, and patterns of poisonous behavior lodged so deep they seem encoded.

2. (idiomatic, by extension) A horrifying, appalling, or sickening experience, set of events, or visual spectacle.
   • 1991 January 14, Claudia Wallis, “The Rough Road to Recovery”, in Time, retrieved 18 June 2015:

     Colleen Fallscheer, a cheerful 40-year-old mother of two from Waterford, Mich., is living proof that breast-cancer therapy is not the horror show it used to be.

   • 2011 September 10, Lewis Stuart, “Nervous Scotland secure victory”, in The Times, UK, retrieved 18 June 2015:

     A good start, a strong finish, but it was a Scotland horror show in the middle as the team flirted with Rugby World Cup humiliation.

   • 2014 December 26, Fakhrurradzie Gade, “Countries mark 10 years since Indian Ocean tsunami”, in Boston Globe, retrieved 18 June 2015:

     Survivors waded through a horror show of corpse-filled waters.

See also

• horror story