The horrors of a haunted house usually end once you push open the final set of black, saloon-hinged doors and step back in the fairground. However, the Mexican artist Pedro Reyes hopes his nightmares remain with visitors long after they have left his immersive 2016 Halloween attraction, opening in New York next month.

“Monsters have always been a way to speak about our real fears,” says the 44-year-old. “Zombies are a fear of poor people; Karl Marx talked about capital being like a vampire that stalks the living; and Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein is trying to create life, which is exactly what genetic engineers are trying to do today.”

All these bogeymen and more will populate Doomocracy, “a political haunted house” that Reyes is preparing to stage within the vast Brooklyn Army Terminal from 7 October until 6 November in conjunction with the New York non-profit arts organisation Creative Time.

Doomocracy’s spooky run will coincide with both Halloween and the 2016 presidential election, and is appropriately pitched somewhere between a carnival attraction, an immersive theatre production and any given hour or two within today’s news cycle. Creative Time’s artistic director, Nato Thompson, describes the venture as “Hieronymus Bosch meets Fox News. It’s holding up a funhouse mirror to society.”

Seven tombs of gloom: a screengrab from Doomocracy’s Kickstarter campaign. Photograph: Supplied

Reyes and Nato hope to offer about 400-500 people a night a ghastly, dramatic interactive trip that takes in gun nuts, genetically modified crops, climate change, deadly fast-food chains and, looming over Doomocracy’s entrance, a chimeric effigy that’s part Statue of Liberty, part Trojan Horse, and, in Reyes’ view, entirely the embodiment of American foreign policy. “The USA doesn’t have true representation,” he argues, “and yet they say they’re exporting democracy around the world.”

That may all sound as satirical as it is scary. Nevertheless the artist – who has previously staged a fine-art version of a psychiatric sanatorium at different galleries around the world and overseen a programme to repurpose firearms as musical instruments – is deeply serious in his examination of fear within today’s political landscape.

“These days, politicians are trying to create fear in order to take power,” Reyes says, “so it’s quite an experiment to be dealing with the production of fear and its political uses.”

He is also highly respectful of the funhouse trope, partly because it is so familiar to people who might not necessarily be avid gallery goers.

“Pretty much everyone can picture a horror house,” he says. “It will, if you forgive the paradox, deal with political issues in a very democratic way. Everyone can engage with the form.”

Reyes and Thompson are keen to ensure Doomocracy keeps pace with events and have been writing and rewriting the dramatic scenarios to reflect the changing nature of the electoral race.

“We’ve been workshopping the scripts today,” says Thompson. “It’s a fluid process. The ground is moving fast this election, it’s hard to keep up.”

Reyes, who visited both commercial haunted houses and guerrilla theatre groups in preparation for the show, also says Doomocracy reflects a general hopelessness within contemporary politics, both in the US and elsewhere.

“Why do people vote against their own interests?” Reyes says. “Is it that we have brainwashed people to make the wrong decisions? There’s a feeling in the US that it’s a downer to have to choose between the [presidential] options. But it’s elsewhere too; it can be said of Mexico and many other places around the world. Brexit was almost like a democratic, rightwing coup d’état.”

Despite this gloomy view, Doomocracy is still able to engage with some of the norms of campaign fundraising. Its Kickstarter page looks set to reach its goal of $80,000 by its deadline of 29 September, offering suitably doom-laden swag for its pledgers, including Doomocracy pennants and buttons, and “Yes We Can’t” bumper stickers.

With all this left-leaning pessimism, Reyes’ haunted house looks unlikely to attract many Trump voters. However, Creative Time’s executive director, Katie Hollander, argues that the work doesn’t favour either side. “It’s not a commentary on the candidates, more a commentary on the issues,” she says.

Indeed, Reyes hopes to take in wider political issues unlikely to be addressed by either party this election year. “It will deal with mental health, the excessive criminalisation of drug use, and the increasing role of the medical industry as a kind of white-collar drug dealer,” the artist says. “There’ll be stuff on the food industry too, and equity or the lack of social mobility – those universal issues, that are experienced in every part of the world.”

While this all may sound nihilistic, Reyes hopes Doomocracy could be liberating too. “Usually my art is more about hope, but on this occasion it is a dark project, and offers more of a space for catharsis,” he says. “After all, Halloween is a moment to go crazy. That is the role of carnival.”

Yet, does he genuinely expect Doomocracy to actually change any visitors’ minds about the issues examined? Won’t most already agree with his position on, say, pharmaceuticals and gun crime?

“There will be people who love it, people who hate it, people who feel empowered, and people who feel offended,” says Reyes. “Making art is one way to elaborate and engage with reality.”

And this autumn, at a time when truth seems if not stranger, then at least as spooky as fiction, one route for meaningful political engagement appears to lie through Doomocracy’s funhouse doors.