Spooky Season
I love October. In the Midwest, we finally get a break from the summer’s heat and humidity. The air becomes cooler, crisper. Some mornings we wake up to the fragile remnants of overnight frost. The leaves begin to change colors.
But, also, there is Halloween. And Halloween means scary stuff.
Whether it is through a short story, novel, TV show, or movie, I love a good horror story. The different TV networks begin running their month-long playlists of horror movies—some good, some not so good. I always look for the traditional ones: John Carpenter’s Halloween and The Thing, The Exorcist (my #1 horror film), Scream, The Ruins, The Omen, Psycho, 28 Days Later, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Blair Witch Project, Quarantine, The Strangers…the list goes on.
Sometimes, when I am first downstairs in the morning, I will search through the channels, hoping a good horror movie is on, and watch it while I eat my oatmeal. More times than not, my wife will make her way down and see what I am watching and say something like, “Well, that’s a real uplifting movie to start your day on.” Let’s just say the algorithm that determines her Netflix feed is much different than my own. I usually stop the movie so she won’t be subjected to it and turn on the news…which proceeds to announce the world’s real horrors in living color between commercial breaks.
So much for uplifting.
I cannot tell you where this fascination with the darker side of humanity came from. I was optimistic as a child and brought that same optimism and hope to my job as a teacher. When I worked at a retail bookstore during college, I wondered about the people who came in week after week to see if any grisly true crime books had made it onto the shelves. I never read one of them. I don’t like going to haunted house attractions. We don’t decorate our house to look spooky on Halloween. I think I have been to two costume parties in my life. So, why do I seek out the macabre? It remains a mystery.
The stories do not get old. The repulsion I feel at specific scenes in the movies I listed above revisits me each year. It does not fade. Goosebumps creep onto my arms every time Regan speaks in that devilish voice in The Exorcist—I can even recite the lines. Perhaps the thrill is in the creepiness of it, or the weight of the story, or the implications of “what if?” What if there are ghosts? What if there is a leather-faced person stalking us with a chainsaw (BTW, I cannot watch that movie because it is too blunt, too realistic)?
This past summer, my wife and I spent an afternoon doing a self-guided tour of the Indiana State Sanitorium. At the time, I sort of knew it was a paranormal hotspot. But we visited it during the day, and I looked at it from a historical angle. Now that I have seen some YouTube videos of paranormal researchers spending the night at the sanitorium, I would go back—yes, the guy who doesn’t want to go to commercial haunted houses would go back to a supposedly truly haunted, crumbling institution. What am I thinking?
My wife says to go ahead without her. I have her blessings.
