Well, we've pulled through that time of year again. Orange and black, skeletons and ghouls, scary movies, candy, and endless commercials that are just beginning to be replaced by Christmas commercials, and I just keep muting them all. Especially since this year Halloween coincided with election year and it's up to you to decide which was scarier.
Of course all the Halloween decorations are still up, while all the Christmas decorations are taking over the earth...
Meanwhile, I don't like Halloween, because I don't like being scared. A few reasons:
I was introduced to fear and pain very early. When I arrived in this country, I had a very, very, very bad (cigarette?) burn on my chest, and 69 years later the physical scar of it is still there: faint, but it's still there.
My mother loved scary movies and watched all the ones shown on TV and took me to all the movies, despite the fact that they scared me so bad I couldn't sleep. (I didn't mind the Dracula movies - Bela Lugosi seemed kind of ridiculous, if not downright funny, to me... Make of that what you will.) I remember she and I went to see "Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte" (1964, I was eleven), with Bette Davis, Olivia de Haviland, Mary Astor, Agnes Moorehead, and Joseph Cotton in what seemed like an attempt by everyone to kill everyone else, or at least drive them insane.
There's a scene involving a backseat that kept me horrified all the way home, as well as a few scenes involving a severed hand, and that night, as I was trying to get to sleep, the little dog jumped up on my bed and I woke EVERYONE up screaming my head off.
My father, on the other hand, took me to all of the sci-fi movies that came out, including Barbarella ("We won't tell your mother about this one," he said, as I ate popcorn to Barbarella stripping in the airlock) and 2001 A Space Odyssey, which made my much later forays into hallucinogens seem ... familiar, and wondering when the Star Child was going to show up.
Then there's two years of living on the streets of L.A., where predators abounded, in uniform and out.
Anyway once I became an adult and was able to live the life I wanted to live, I almost never went to scary movies. Here's my list of exceptions:
The Haunting - Julie Harris and Claire Bloom together made this in my top five of scariest movies ever made, but the acting was so great that I still don't regret having seen it.
Alien - I avoided opening closets at night for a while. But damn, Sigourney Weaver was GREAT.
The Shining - Stanley Kubrick, Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers... Mm-hmm... Love the photograph on the wall.
Bubba Ho-Tep - Any movie with a black JFK (Ossie Davis), an old Elvis (Bruce Campbell), and an ancient mummy, set in a nursing home has to be seen at least once. And it has its hilarious moments, as well as the ones which make me look elsewhere for a bit.
Anyway, what I really wish America would celebrate is Samhain:
SAMHAIN
It's pronounced SOW (as in cow)-in, a/k/a November in Gaelic. The early literature (from the 9th century) says Samhain was marked by great gatherings and feasts; a time when the ancient burial mounds were opened, the portals to the Otherworld. Some of the medieval tales also associate Samhain with bonfires and sacrifice. There was dancing. Prayers. Offerings.
