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Why Halloween is Not About Death

I love Halloween, and not just because it is the day right after my birthday, although I am sure that is part of it. Having been born in late October, I do see Halloween as a wonderful swirling blend of colorfully wrapped boxes, cake and candy.

But I also associate Halloween with early creativity. During the Octobers of my childhood, I only wanted to draw Halloween-themed pictures: bluish nightscapes, golden-mooned, that oversaw foggy cemeteries full of witches, ghosts, and vampires.

But drawing Halloween scenery was not enough for me. When I was in the fifth grade my brother and I set up a haunted house where I lived because I was unhappy with the one at my school Halloween carnival. Full of creepy noises and home-made props, it is one of the fondest childhood memories I have. 

Beyond amateur theatrics, some of the first stories I wrote were horror stories, inspired by Stephen King movies. Even now I enjoy watching horrors movie around Halloween, although not everyone understands why I would.

Maybe they wonder what kind of person wants to watch characters succumb to grisly mock deaths from the clawed appendages of hideous monsters. What kind of warped survival-averse person enjoys fear? Likes death?

It is a fair question, but it makes the wrong assumption. I am no fan of torture and death. On the contrary, I love horror movies because I hate death. As a child I had frequent nightmares, especially after my step-grandfather died.

I had been close to him, but the thought of him coming back as a soulless monster like I had seen in horror movies fueled my imagination and induced nail-biting insomnia. I would imagine his ghost hovering dead-eyed outside my window, enveloped in fog, like the vampires in a Stephen King movie.

Stephen King was not entirely to blame. My own nightmares were as scary, if not scarier, than his. But his vision gave voice to primal emotions that made my nights restless.

Although I no longer worry about the undead, in many ways my adult life has been driven by fear: fear of losing the people I love, fear of rejections, fear of seeming to reject those I adore; fear of failure; fear of the sharp pangs of regret that are ever-present despite my best efforts to avoid them. But all of these fears are intangible, so it is hard to do anything with them.

Horror movies condense these fears into a terrible kind of poetry that, while intangible, is easier to grasp than the vague, free-floating anxieties that color my days and inhabit my dreams.

Not only do horror movies condense anxieties into a more manageable package; they also offer a consequence-free way to experience fear.

I love that while watching horror after horror unfold on the screen, I am perfectly safe on my sofa; if it gets to be too much, I can always close my eyes.

I like survival horror video games for the same reason. Games like “Silent Hill 2” offer a close-up and interactive way to approach fear safely. The monsters are hideous, with their bloated and deformed-looking bodies, belching, hissing, and lumbering. But if the monsters get too close to me or my avatar, I have the controls.

I have the power to pause them in mid-growl or mid-drool; freeze them where they stand; turn the game off if I like. A nice fantasy.

I wish I could do that with my real life fears.

That being said, I do have limits when it comes to viewing horrific spectacles on screen. Some horror movies seem to relish sadistic torture, such as one movie where a character was forced to cut off her own leg to save her life. Those kinds of movies are too disturbing for me to watch. When it comes to horror, I prefer the fantastic to reminders of the kinds of cruelty inflicted by real people.

I do not enjoy horror movies now as much as I did as a child, and usually I only watch them in October to celebrate the nostalgia for the days that I did.

All fear aside, I enjoy the campy side of Halloween: the bowls full of jello eyeballs, the Styrofoam headstones, mangled rubber rats, and the dangling plastic skeletons used as door decorations.

From early childhood I have viewed Halloween as a toy store full of stage props, or a theater where anyone can become an actor in the strangest traditional holiday we have.

Halloween is fear made festive. Bring our the costumes and caramel apples; take an amusing walk on a darkened foggy trail full of growling actors, revel in chocolate; turn pumpkins into grimacing heads with carved faces.

Those kinds of festive touches make it clear that Halloween is not really an exaltation of fear, but a moral triumph over it.

For me, fear comes from my ultimate helplessness over so many things, death being only one of them. My ever-present anxieties form a tapestry against the daily drama of my life. But Halloween has stretched taut the tapestry of fear and cut from it something fun.

Halloween says look, this is what fear looks like, this is what death looks like in your worst nightmare, but instead of worrying about it, we are going to dress up as other people or creatures and eat a lot of candy. To harness the power of fear for the purpose of fun is a testament to the genius of human imagination.

Despite its origins in the primal emotion of terror, Halloween transforms the fear of death into a celebration of life; gives children the power to haunt rather than be haunted; and turns fear on its head to reveal a kind of playful humor.

That is why the beauty of the holiday is unrivaled by any other.

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