horror show

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.
   • 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.2023 June 7, Laura Collins-Hughes, “‘Wet Brain’ Review: A Vodka-Spiked Horror Show”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
2. (broadly, idiomatic) A horrifying, appalling, or sickening experience, set of events, or visual spectacle.
   • 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.1991 January 14, Claudia Wallis, “The Rough Road to Recovery”, in Time, retrieved 18 Jun 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.2011 September 10, Lewis Stuart, “Nervous Scotland secure victory”, in The Times, UK, retrieved 18 Jun 2015