Salon.com > Peter Trachtenberg

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.

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!

Entangled

Mon, 07 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

The barn was very large. It was very old. It smelled of hay and it smelled of manure. It smelled of the perspiration of tired horses and the wonderful sweet breath of patient cows. It often had a sort of peaceful smell, as though nothing bad could ever happen again in the world. It smelled of grain and of harness dressing and of axle grease and of rubber boots and of new rope. And whenever the cat was given a fish-head to eat, the barn would smell of fish. But mostly it smelled of hay, for there was always hay in the great loft up overhead. And there was always hay being pitched down to the cows and the horses and the sheep.
-- E.B. White, "Charlotte's Web"
Not long ago my girlfriend and I began reading to each other late at night from E.B. White's children's classic, "Charlotte's Web." It was a book we remembered fondly from our childhoods, and by reading it aloud we may have hoped to recoup some of the lost comforts of that time: the comfort of having someone you loved sit beside you in the vulnerable half-hour before sleep; the comfort of being lowered into the night on a silken line of
narrative. And because we were reading as well as being read to (we took turns on alternating nights), we were also experiencing a pleasure associated with parenthood, experiencing it in a tidied-up way, since neither of us was likely to interrupt the reading to ask what a
certain word meant, or why someone would want to kill a little pig, or for a drink of water.
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