“An army of nightmares, huh? Let's get this party started.”—Cabin in the Woods
“Death comes to us all,” I told the couple. “Chop, chop.
No point delaying the inevitable.”
It was dark, and the screams of other victims could be heard echoing
through the labyrinth, along with breaking glass, mad laughter, and animal
squeals.
“No, you go first,” laughed the woman, throwing her
gentleman in front of her as they faced a dark corridor lined with femur bones. He smirked, but the smirk metastasized to a rigor mortis as the sudden blast of an alarm caused him to stumble. “I don’t want to go first. You go first!”
They shuffled their order for a bit, alternately laughing and squealing,
but eventually the gentleman led into the dark.
I turned to the next victims.
Hour after hour, night after night, this same little skit
plays out in a hundred variations.
People show up to the haunted house I work at and demand to experience
fear. To be anxious. To feel, for the space of 20 or so minutes,
that danger is just around the corner.
And when you don’t deliver, they become irate. (I remember receiving much verbal abuse at my
last haunt over insufficient terror. It
had extraordinary production quality, but being outdoors, there was nothing we
could do about the Manhattan skyline silhouetting every sneaking spectre,
spoiling the surprise.)
At first glance, this is pure madness. Many people (including myself, at times) see
very expensive professionals who prescribe very expensive medication that they
may have less anxiety in their lives.
I have a theory as to why people seek out danger on Halloween,
but first let’s make sure we have all the information. Let’s look at two other ways people seek
out danger: slasher flicks and what most people call scary stories, but I’ll
call “Halloween tragedies.”
By Halloween tragedies, I mean a story where the protagonist has many opportunities to turn back, but still
marches towards his or her doom. I’m
thinking of “Jerusalem’s Lot” or “The Shadow of Innsmouth” or “The Tell-Tale
Heart.” In Lovecraft’s “The Shadow over
Innsmouth” for instance, the protagonist receives repeated warnings not to dig into
the mysteries of the town, and ends up discovering his own doomed heritage as a
result of the failure to heed these warnings.
He doesn’t die, per se, but the self he knows does end. King’s “Jerusalem’s Lot” has similar warnings,
and more direct consequences. As for Poe’s
unreliable narrators, I think we are all familiar with their foolhardy commitment
to homicide despite many opportunities to repent. In a classical tragedy, everyone of significance
dies at the end except the audience. And this relief we feel as the audience at having “survived” is what some interpret as the source of Aristotle’s catharsis. We feel hope and anxiety for the wayward
protagonists until the very end, and then, suddenly, it’s over and we have triumphed
by virtue of still existing while the protagonist we journeyed with has not. More on this in a moment.
Note: None of these ideas are original with me except for the term "Halloween Tragedy"
Next, slasher films, for instance, Cabin in the Woods. (I’d give a spoiler warning, but--let’s face
it--if you are reading my blog you’ve either seen Cabin in the Woods or never
will, so let’s continue.)
5 annoyingly pretty college students spend their summer
break at a cabin that turns out to be….blah blah blah, you get the idea. The twist is they
are being watched by a shadowing pseudo-government cabal, who orchestrates their grisly ends as part of a yearly sacrifice to stop the world from ending. Two of the teens survive, the sacrifice
fails, and the world ends.
The most disturbing interpretation of this piece is the one
Jody Foster’s character gives us in the movie itself: the teens are being
punished for being young. This suggests
that when we watch characters in slasher films die, we are subconsciously
punishing them for not sleeping with us.
Too Freudian for me; I don’t buy it.
It also doesn’t explain haunted houses, unless people are punishing
themselves. (Well, there are haunted houses for that, but that’s a whole
different thing which I suspect has little to do with the haunted part).
No, you will not get an image to accompany that joke.
I think that the film is a metaphor for slasher films (I hasten to add that this idea is not original to me). The “sacrifice” (i.e. movie) must go off
without a hitch or the world (i.e. the studio)
will end. The 5 teens are the
sacrifices. We, the audience, are the old
gods. Through their deaths, we feel our
world will always continue, because like Halloween tragedies, we are still alive
at the end.
Does this explain our desire for danger, that is our desire
for haunted houses, slasher films, and scary stories? Is it a desire to cheat death? Partially, but that cannot fully explain it,
or else we would get the same feeling from reading stories of natural disasters
in the news. There is some indefinable
spiritual quality to the practice danger of Halloween. It is more than just surviving. It is triumph.
My thesis is this: our triumph over danger on earth foreshadows
our perpetual triumph in heaven.
The thrill we get from the danger of horror is the desire to
face our demons (i.e our sins) and be triumphant. We don’t enjoy seeing other people fail, we
enjoy seeing the scenario in which they fail and imagine ourselves doing
differently.
So no, I don’t think we kill the blond girl off for sleeping
with a guy who wasn’t us. I don’t think
we gleefully watch the scientist open the obviously cursed box because he’s
smarter than us and we enjoy watching him do something dumb. I think we watch these people die because we want to live forever. The feeling of triumph horror gives us foreshadows
our immortality. It is a deeply muddied
desire, seen through the metaphor of shadow and violence, but it is there. When the final day comes, and the dark spirit
of danger is perfected, we will call her once again by her true name:
Nike! Victory!
Calm down, my neopagan friends. I'm being metaphorical. For now. We'll address demons, angels, and gods in another essay.
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