Saturday Night Live, fake movie trailers, and political satire go together like the orange, yellow, and white stripes on candy corn: They don’t add up to anything mind-blowing, but they’re a fun and familiar presence. For this year’s Halloween episode, the show conjured up a trailer for the scariest horror concept this side of M3GAN: the democratic primaries for the 2024 presidential election. Spooky! Chloe Fineman is the protagonist who gets jump scared by a news broadcast saying that Joe Biden announced he will run again in 2024. Punkie Johnson does the math on this: If he’s 79 now, and the election is in two years, he will be, according to her calculator app calculations, a number so scary she nearly falls over. “Why are we so worried?” Fineman asks. “He’s done so much!”
“But he fell off his bike once,” says Mikey Day, summing up how destructive the news cycle can be during an election year. Then Bernie’s name is written in blood on the wall like REDRUM, which is less a horror trope and more the interior-decorating sensibility of any given communal living space in Bushwick. By the time the sketch gets to Day demonically chanting “I’m with her” and bashing his head against the wall, you realize the most bone-chilling twist of all: SNL more or less accidentally recreated American Horror Story: Cult. Oh, the horror!
