Salon.com > Halloween 2012: What's scary?

Halloween 2012: What’s scary?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:11:00 +0000

Halloween is the strangest of holidays, the day we actually invite the creepy, the spooky, the downright scary into our lives — as if we aren't surrounded by enough horror, with many of us just now emerging from the very real, unwanted terror of Hurricane Sandy. But there is something strangely alluring about having control over your own fear, to make it into a fantasy, whether it involves walking through a haunted house, or dressing up for a costume party, or watching horror films, knowing that you can hide under your coat, run out of the theater, or hit STOP.

We've asked six of our favorite writers to open up and tell us what freaked them out when they were younger — and what scares them now.

The essays include (click on the title to read each piece):

"Real-Life Body-Snatchers," by Peter Trachtenberg

The author of "The Book of Calamities" sees body-snatchers. All the time.

"The Horrors of Aging," by Kate Christensen

The PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novelist used to love Halloween. But now every dangling skeleton and rotting pumpkin in the neighborhood is reminding her of her own mortality.

Fearing fear itself

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I slept in the attic. I was put up there when I was 5 and my sister was born and she took over my room. The attic is a haven in a lot of ways — I am atop my family and can hear them moving below; I have a window seat and I can look down on the world, see the kids playing kick the can, riding their banana-seated bikes down the hill, ringing their bells, and I can watch the old people leaning into each other, walking hand in hand after dinner.

I soon realize, though, that the world doesn’t look back up. No one can see me. I have just seen “Beauty and the Beast” at Wolf Trap, the performing arts center in Washington, D.C., where I have also seen “The Music Man,” “Hello Dolly” and “The Phantom Tollbooth.” I loved these productions so much that I have signed up for a drama workshop here. But when it’s my turn to improvise onstage, I giggle with so much self-consciousness, I am told by the drama instructor to get off the stage. “You need to get into your character,” she says. “Who are you going to be?” Alas, I have always, only, been myself.

My lifelong pursuit of ghosts

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I really want to see a ghost. It wasn’t always that way. Growing up in a very large, over 200-year-old house in Katonah, N.Y., I spent my childhood running through dark rooms praying I wouldn’t see — or hear — a ghost. For the 20 years my family lived there, things were fairly quiet. We had radiators in our room and in those very rare occasions when the heat came on, the sound of it was not unlike a poltergeist or an exorcism. And it was a very messy house so there was no telling if things had been moved or were missing, stuff got lost all the time, but it hardly felt any different than losing the one sock in the dryer. Katonah Woods, near our home, was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of Native American Chief Katonah and his wife, Mustato, who had been killed along with their child in a very bad storm. I knew this because when I was in kindergarten, I was sleeping over at my friend Patricia’s house (she lived on the still-dirt Katonah’s Wood Road). She told me in a very haunting voice that Mustato and the baby were in the teepee and the high winds of a thunderstorm blew them down a hill and Chief Katonah, in despair, threw himself after them … but on the full moon, they would walk … among the trees of Katonah Woods. I got up from her room, told her mother to call my mother to come get me. I was going home. And I would never walk to her house again, not even when I was in high school. (She tried backpedaling and saying the ghosts wouldn’t let people see them. Too. Late.)

The horrors of aging

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

‘Tis the season of horror and fear, along with sweets and disguises. On Halloween, kids get to assume for one night the outward forms of their innermost dread, and they’re also allowed to take candy from strangers, the scariest thing of all. Grownups, likewise, get to unleash their Ids – women dress as sluts and tarts without fearing judgment, strutting around in push-up bustiers and hanky miniskirts and stilettos, while men, gay and straight alike, can go in drag or let their inner Village People macho man out in a mustache, cowboy hat and tight pleather vest. It’s a communal bacchanal of campy, ritualized spookiness before the onset of winter, when we all retreat to our couches in elastic-waist PJs to hibernate and wait for Mardi Gras.

I haven’t worn a Halloween costume since way back in my 30s, when we hipster chicks all marched in the Greenwich Village Halloween parade dressed in our sluttiest, fishnettiest attire, a cabal of blood-red-lipped medieval serving wenches, Mad Maxine dystopian sci-fi wet dreams, and Morticia-vampiras in satiny black slip dresses with glow-in-the-dark fangs (I plead extra-guilty to the latter). Back then, my chief fear was that I would fail to achieve and do and be all the things I wanted; I frequently lay awake in bed in a wee-hour welter of panic, imagining obscurity, failure, and thwarted ambition.

Real-life body-snatchers

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

At first glance, everything looked the same. In the 1956 original, the possessed don’t act much different from their former selves. They don’t stare hollowly; they don’t shuffle. They’re just a little unemotional. And, really, what’s so wrong about that? In the 1950s, people cultivated blandness of affect. You went along to get along. The alternative got you labeled hysterical, with its connotations of effeminacy and madness. Hysterical, of course, is how Kevin McCarthy looks when he bursts out of the examining room in the opening scene and babbles warnings at a dubious shrink. Somebody give the guy a Klonopin. "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers" has been read as an allegory of communism and an allegory of McCarthyism, though Joe McCarthy always seemed hysterical himself, with his jittering gaze and vigilante’s snarl. In both readings, the film locates evil in the collectivity, the passive, homogenous mass that stirs to action only when it scents the presence of one of the unpossessed. Can’t you see? They’re here already. You’re next!

Pretending fear doesn’t exist

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

I don't seem to be very close to my fear. I experience it peevishly, vicariously, or sideways — as a kid, I nursed a grudge against Halloween, felt superior to horror movies (on no basis, since I never saw them), and, though I claimed to embrace "darkness," this for me was always, actually, bleakness, i.e., sanctified modernist-tinged art in morbid philosophical or existential modes, à la Kafka or Beckett or Magritte or Talking Heads' "Fear of Music." For me to relate, my object was usually divested of anything visceral, revolting or goofy — which disqualified nearly everything traditionally spooky or supernatural. I liked vernacular popular art, but I didn't like John Carpenter movies until I was in my 30s. Now, of course, I'm inclined to regard this as a sort of cognitive quarantine around everything I couldn't even handle, and I can see in retrospect that my childhood consisted of vast submerged edifices of fear — fear of urban crime, and of my mother's illnesses — I had to pretend didn't exist. Yet I still get at it by inference, by working my way inside these feelings, often on behalf of a fictional character. Or through my kids. I can't remember what I felt at Darth Vader's mask coming off when I saw it myself, but I'll never forget going through it with my 5-year-old.

The 4:30 p.m. matinee

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 21:00:00 +0000

The 4:30 movie often terrified me as a child; it seemed that every other day they showed "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte," or "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?" A friend and I would sit in my den or her den, eating Yodels and feeling a sick, spreading terror as we watched, even though the production values of these movies were poor, and the TV screen was always exceedingly small. (I am amazed, looking back, that we had time to fit in an entire movie after school; today's kids are so riddled with work and busywork that the idea of so much movie-watching seems pretty surreal. On my college applications, in the space for "extra-curricular activities," I could've written: "Bette Davis.") I was relatedly scared by the feeling of being trapped that these movies engendered in me. Trapped in a relationship, trapped in a mansion, trapped in obsessive love — these felt like very adult problems, and it didn't seem all that far-fetched that one day I too might become demented with love or hatred, and would eventually go from being a Yodel-eating suburban girl to an old woman who dressed like a baby. I guess I thought that not only were these movies lurid; maybe adulthood was lurid too.