horror shows

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