By Matthew Fontaine
My yard is decorated with terrible things. There are skulls and skeletons. There is a menacing jack o’lantern. There is a zombie poking his head and one arm above the ground. An illuminated, flashing heart dangles from his hand. There is even a severed head jammed on a bamboo pole.
Halloween has always been my favorite holiday. Partly, it’s because I love candy. Mostly, it’s because I love monsters, human and otherwise. I’ve seen all the most notorious horror movies—and their sequels—many of them several times, some several dozen times. I’ve even made my own horrifying entertainment, writing and directing plays and musicals featuring cannibals, mad killers, and monsters from beyond the fabric of space and time.
I’ve thought a lot about why I have chosen to spend so much of my life immersed in scary stuff. Some are obvious—being scared is fun. Fear happens in your guts. It’s an experience of the body, not the mind or soul. That is one of the reasons that many people—such as Mr. Amadio, the sixth grade teacher who was furious at my possession and display of Fangoria magazine on school grounds—see horror as a form of pornography. Both stimulate the basest, most irrational parts of us. They recall the uncomfortable truth that the person we think of as “I” may not be in control. To experience fear in a controlled fashion is thrilling.
On a deeper level, controlled fear reassures us that real fear—and the chaos that drives it— is controllable.
Few reading this will be unable to recall horror stories from the Bible: God’s monstrous floods and pestilences, Jael nailing Sisera’s head to the ground, Job’s ashy wounds, Christ’s mortification and death. In one sense, the horrors of Scripture are just news—they’re things that actually happened in one sense or another. In another, they are part of good storytelling, helping to stick a story fast in the reader’s memory. In a deeper sense, they share with the most pedestrian horror film a paradoxical desire to experience the sublime and control over the sublime. The Flood is a horror stamped into myths from before we could speak. After our horror at its mindless magnitude, we posit wickedness as its cause. We attribute to ourselves a lineage free from that particular strain of wickedness. We wonder at the flood’s horror and construct a myth to protect ourselves from it.
For many decades, few mainstream horror films failed to follow the old-testament formula. They enumerated reasons why victims deserved to die—promiscuity, drunkenness, whatever—showed us their deaths, and provided us with a hero free of sin who conquered the evil and lived on. (Not coincidentally, the villains typically have the ability to bend reality and are more or less immortal.)
Today, most horror films revel in an even more cynical view of existence. They posit a lack of any form of justice, even the severe and capriciously applied justice of YHWH. They’re like the story of Job, only the director’s cut—without the ending obviously tacked on to make it more palatable to a mass audience. Full-blown horror creeps into the most unlikely places. Contrast the psychopathic violence of The Dark Knight—a massive, global hit—with Adam West’s candy-colored batcave.
In a culture where we enjoy outrageous material abundance, distant from day-to-day death, sheltered as effectively as possible from grinding poverty and suffering, we revel in a carnival of horrors. Is it a symptom of decadence or a talisman against the Flood? Are we Job’s interrogators, attempting to understand a pain we cannot possibly fathom? Maybe that’s why we need bowls of candy, tasting sweetness before winter darkness falls and the brooding questions of existence tap at our doors.
Maybe we’d best not lift the mask.
Happy Halloween!
Matt Fontaine is a freelance copywriter living in Seattle. He is currently trying to write 100 songs about horror movies. Listen at (100 Songs About Horror Movies)