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In Greek myth, the head of Medusa cut off by Perseus became the representation of pure fear. Freud turned it into a condensed figure of the female sex, castration and death. The author proposes an elaboration of castration anxiety, an analogon of death anxiety, and questions the possibilities of overcoming the fear at the origin of the trauma, through its expression in the destructiveness of the contemporary world, particularly in terrorist acts that stage and act out the myth of Medusa, through what is seen and heard, such as the 7 October pogrom in Israel or the years of terror in Algeria. Kamel Daoud’s novel Houris will illustrate the question of how to escape from the petrification and silence imposed by the generalised fear programmed by the killers.