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Just a few more days until the veil between the spiritual and the physical worlds thins. This Halloween, the moon will be just a sliver of light in the night sky, a waning crescent as it rounds the bend in its journey to becoming full again.
We have purchased our bags of chocolates and candied sweets to keep the childish demons and spirits that manifest this time each year at bay.
And along the way, my family and I will watch equal mixes of horror movies to scare us silly and cartoon fare to bring us back down to earth and comfort us in the darkness.
There are some people that hate horror. Their amygdalas are super-tuned, and they feel enough fear and anxiety in everyday life, thank you very much. But not me. I have always been a fan of horror ever since I read my first Stephen King book back in middle school (Carrie). I loved the pale ghostly rage of Sissy Spacek’s portrayal of Carrie in the 1976 movie, and as I got older, I ventured out into inscrutable labyrinth of indie and foreign horror movies.
As I’ve moved solidly into middle age, and closer to my own inevitable death, I have less desire to see straight splatter fests and gore for gore’s sake movies. I’m somewhat shocked, though not really, given how numb we’ve all become to the daily horrors and outrages occurring in the world around us, that the indie extreme slasher flick Terrifier 3 topped the box office during its opening weekend, beating out big-budget studio flops, like Joker: Folie à Deux (I mean, what the heck kind of name is that?) and Saturday Night Live. Terrifier 3 was a movie that spent almost nothing on its marketing, banking instead on the viral appeal to its core audience of showing reaction videos of people leaving the screenings in shock or vomiting at the extreme scenes they were seeing.
I have never been a fan of those types of movies. Internal horror and the paranormal manage to get under my skin way more than anything else. My family and I watched the first Smile last night, and the idea that there exists a mental horror that only you can see and that you can’t escape because it is in your own mind is utterly terrifying to me. In fact, the more that you call out for help, the less likely you are to get help because the internal demon that you’re battling is invisible to everyone else. No one wants to catch the horror that you’re experiencing.
These movies, along with their spiritual brethren, like It Follows, as well as paranormal fare, like The Conjuring and 1408, deeply unsettle me. They illuminate, though never fully, the dark shadows that always haunt our lives. These shadows, that can be born of the traumas we experience, settle in the corners and backrooms of our lives, and they never quite leave us no matter how much therapy we go through or lightness we try to bring into our lives.
Oooh, I’m getting the shivers even as I type these thoughts down. And then I’ll sit back in my chair and smile (but without creepy Kubrick stare that makes the Smile smiles so insidious) because after the adrenaline of the scare has washed away, a gentle euphoria at still being alive floods through my body.
And that is why people love scary movies and to be scared. It’s that constant adrenaline/euphoria seesaw that these movies provide us with. And the fact that they remind us that we are all still alive, as we feel all of our nerves and neurons firing, and that things could always, always be so very much worse.
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