What I'm Reading (& watching & listening to)—Halloween Edition
The Tradition of Living Beautifully, Issue #23
I don’t remember a time when I didn’t love Halloween or its season. This time of year, with the weather shifting from hot to cool, the leaves transforming from fixed to descending, and the sense that the space between the world we see and the world we don’t has narrowed, resonated with my spirit. There’s something about the slow slide into shorter days, darker mornings, and the crispness that hurries us inside our homes that makes those who have left us seem closer. In that space of darkness descending, the dead, spirits, all the things we can sense, if we pay attention, but can’t touch, feel nearer, as if the cold and the dark swallow the fog, making the liminal apparent.
As a little girl, my cousin Antonella, who lived next door, and I would soak up this time of year with spine-tingling glee, letting all things spooky take over our daily lives. We saw witches in clouds, felt monsters around leaf-covered street corners, and magic in the pumpkins we picked. We watched scary movies. Oh, how we watched scary movies. I’m old enough to remember movie rental stores, where you walked in and pulled VHS tapes off the shelf, then paid about a dollar or two to rent them. We had one on main street in our town. We’d scrounge up whatever change our fathers had inadvertently lost beneath the seat cushions of the sofas, skip into town, and buy as much candy as we could from the convenience store, and then slingshot fly across the street to rent movies.
We looked for horror, gore, spirits, ghouls, ghosts, witches, potions, magic, spells, monsters, howls, murder, afterlife, crystal balls, fortune tellers, tarot card readers, psychics, clairvoyants, true stories of regular people who became possessed by evil spirits, the priests who came to expel them, haunted houses, spooky graveyards, the folklore of the girl who’s killed on prom night in your hometown and every October 31st you can find her, still dressed in white on the side of the road looking for someone to give her a ride. We held hands and melded our imaginations every chilly, autumnal October and let our spirits dwell in the mystical, the otherworldly, because this time of year we had permission to do so in a way we didn’t seem to all year round.
The clerk behind the counter would rent us all the R-rated horror videos we wanted, as long as we never ventured behind the ominous curtain that hung at the end of the carpeted aisle where only men seemed to pass through (I remember it as a coarse serge pukey gray color, but maybe that’s just imagination overlaying memory), on occasion sighing and saying, “Make sure your parents come rent these for you next time.”
My mother was an over-the-top decorator for holidays (the reaction, in my humble opinion, to an upbringing of poverty and lack), and Halloween was no exception. She spared no square footage of the front of our home or yard. She hung ghouls and goblins from the roof, cobwebs over the front door step, bats and pumpkins and spiders from every crevice of the front lawn. Black-cloaked mummy-faced, gangly skeletons, witches with ugly grimaces, you name it, we had it. My father saw such decorating as women’s work, and he loved that he’d married one with such verve for elaborate display around the home, so he humoured her; hanging a hook wherever she demanded, stringing up a strand of spiderweb wherever she ordered him to. A month or so before he unexpectedly died, they purchased a huge, blow-up front-lawn decoration (when these things were new on the market!) of a grim looking skeleton driving a large black hearse. She planned to add it to her Halloween menagerie in just a few weeks.
My father died in early October. Not that year, I don’t think, because I wouldn’t have been up for any kind of scary halloween viewing, but the next, Antonella and I tried to watch our Halloween movies again, reveling in the fear and gore like we used to. But we couldn’t. Our stomachs couldn’t handle it. Our minds were too bruised by real death, real ghosts, real haunts, the real, true liminal, that enjoying it amplified on the screen in tandem with a storyline was impossible.
A few weeks after we buried my father, I drove my mother back to the store where she and he had purchased the grim looking skeleton driving a hearse. She wanted to return it. We stood at the register as the cashier processed the return, the oversized box with the spooky depiction of what sat inside at our feet, and my mother, looking down at it, tears in her eyes, said, “It’s not funny anymore.”
And suddenly, it really wasn’t. In the blink of an eye the macabre and the ghoulish became grotesque and unsettling. While I can handle a bloody scene here and there all these years later, my taste for the dark and bloody (FORGET about a true-story horror movie where people are murdered!) has never really rebounded. My mother, too, never returned to the days of skeletons and mummies haunting our front yard. Death was now unnervingly real; the prospect of unsettled spirits a reality we lived with, as my father died fairly young and without being ready to. Like most things in life, everything’s fun and games until someone loses an eye. Or a loved one.