The Darkness Belongs to Us All: Reflections from Screamdiego’s Diversity in Horror Panel

Horror is the perfect space for truth because it thrives on what we bury, what we fear, and what we try to ignore. On October 4, 2025, Screamdiego‘s Diversity in Horror panel tapped into that spirit to remind us that horror is a mirror that doesn’t just reveal our fears and darkest impulses, but the imbalance of power and representation.

Pedro Iniguez set the tone when he discussed what it was like to grow up reading horror and science fiction without seeing himself reflected in the pages. “When I started writing 16 years ago, a lot of the anthologies and magazines I found myself in, I’d be the only person of color. Not only just Latino, only person of color. They were all white, basically.” He remembered how that shaped his understanding of what was possible. “People were submitting, they just weren’t getting published. So the negativity of that ended up shaping my worldview into thinking our people were less than.”

For Iniguez, diversity isn’t a trend or a quota. “Diversity can mean a lot of things. It can mean diversity in terms of the story that’s being told and diversity in terms of the authors that are getting published.” His poetry collection Mexicans on the Moon became both a statement and a challenge to the limits of representation. “The very act of naming it Mexicans on the Moon was my act of rebellion,” he said. “People scoffed at it, but others told me they cried when they saw themselves in that book. That means more to me than any award.”

Deborah Daughetee brought decades of experience from writing for television and publishing to the conversation. She discussed how her company, Kymera Press was born out of a desire to tell more stories that matter and provide a platform for women where they no longer waited for permission.  “It’s all female writers, all female artists. And we believe in strong female protagonists with realistic bodies and that sort of thing. In horror, the whole thing about women couldn’t write horror. That’s the reason I did Mary Shelley Presents,” she said. The series, she explained, was created “to remind people that women were writing horror way back then, and at the behest of Charles Dickens.” She laughed softly before adding, “The comics aren’t using refrigerator women anymore, you know, where they’re just there as the girlfriend of the hero to propel him into his greatness when they die.”

Her words landed with warmth and defiance. Women have always been in horror; they’ve just had to fight to stay visible.

When Shane Hawk spoke, the room quieted. His voice carried the weight of history. “I think broadly, diversity in horror goes to the identity of the person writing it. I think horror, you know, the flip side of horror would be comedy. I think those two things are tools to really talk about social happenings in your country, in your place of residence. But it’s like challenging power with fiction.”

For Hawk, that challenge is personal. “For a long time, Native stories weren’t written by Natives, usually written by white folks or portrayed by Italians on TV, crying a tear over this trash. And, you know, it’s kind of nice to be able to take back, I guess, narrative sovereignty.” His stories come from his family. “The stories I write largely are borrowed from my dad’s stories, my grandma’s stories. I just fictionalize them. They’re really pretty close to real, you know, I just crank up the horror.” He paused, then said quietly, “Before I even get into anything, I mean, a lot of people don’t know that Indians are real still.”

That statement hung in the air long after he spoke it. Horror, in that moment, wasn’t a metaphor. It was the lived experience of Natives being ghosts in their own homelands.

Jonathan Maberry spoke with brutal honesty that unsettled the room. He shared that his father was abusive and led a local KKK chapter, and that in his environment, hate and violence were normalized. It was a truth that could have led him down a dark path in which the cycle of hate and violence repeated. But he found his escape in books and comics, discovering worlds and heroes that opened his eyes to a world beyond his own. Reading and listening gave him the ability to believe in something bigger than hate.

He discussed what it means to carry that awareness into his work, emphasizing how writing demands responsibility and an open heart. When he spoke about his experience writing Black Panther and the criticism that followed, he didn’t shy away from it. “Angela Bassett even said, ‘I’m having a prejudiced moment, because I’m assuming that you can’t have written that because you’re white and you don’t have the sensitivity for it.’ And we got into a discussion about that. A lot of it is, if your eyes are open, you see the world as it is. Diversity makes it a better world.” For Maberry, diversity isn’t an idea to debate, but a truth to live by, one that comes from listening, learning, and refusing to close the door on anyone’s story.

His stance is profound but straightforward. The more we open our eyes and listen, the more our stories become powerful and real. Diversity gives us more ways to see, to feel, and to understand.

“There’s not one way of telling a story. There are thousands of ways, and there are thousands of doorways in storytelling,” he said. That openness, that willingness to listen, has guided his work as both a writer and an editor.

By the time the conversation drew to a close, it was clear that diversity in horror isn’t just checking boxes or an abstract moral stance. It’s reclaiming the right to create, to imagine, and to exist within the shadows.

Horror, at its best, doesn’t just help us face what hides in the dark; it gives us the courage to name it. It’s a mirror that reflects the monsters we are, the histories we inherit, and the silences we allow. And when we finally see ourselves in that darkness, we don’t just fear it or survive it. We become something new, something unafraid to keep telling the story.