Halloween’s Degrees of Reality

I have a complicated relationship with Halloween. In fact, if Canada celebrated the Fourth of July, I could truthfully say I hated Halloween… since up here in Vancouver, Canada, we don’t get to shoot off fireworks at any other time. Halloween is the one time of the year that we can buy fireworks, (regardless of legality), and for that reason, Halloween holds a strange, tumultuous place in my heart. I love fireworks, but I hate pretty much everything else about Halloween.

The conventions really get me. For example, I am actively repulsed by horror, and most of the things that are considered frightening. When faced with something ‘scary’, I have a tendency to analyze it and try to figure it out. Why is this thing trying to scare me? Is it trying to provoke my primal fears, or is it trying to startle me? Is it based on something that is not naturally harmful (frogs, bats, rats, and snakes), made into a caricature of itself in a desperate attempt to scare me?

I do not even want to be scared in the first place, and I do not understand why people would want to be. Plus, Halloween is a very odd mix of subjects of horror that are often animals, followed by symbols of harvest time (pumpkins, corn, maize) and symbols of death, none of which are inherently scary. Then they are warped and twisted in a cartoonish way. Even if they do end up scaring you, a good portion of that is because it is inherently startling. Whether it’s the warped features of something that’s ‘supposed’ to be a spider or a witch, or a lawn ornament that comes to life and starts screaming in your face, it startles you – and being startled that way is something that never appealed to me. (Needless to say, I didn’t do well with the smash-hit Five Nights at Freddy’s).

Still, every year when Halloween comes around, I can’t help but question why people enjoy frightening things in the first place. I would argue that most people are excited to be scared on Halloween. Halloween is not scary at all, yet we sell it to our kids as something to look forward to. Where does this titillation come from? What makes people attracted to something frightening?

I think one thing that draws people to these concepts is their abstraction from reality. Everything presented in Halloween iconography is far removed from its real-world counterpart, to the extent where it becomes something else entirely. For example, compare this black cat to one. That ‘something else’ is not present in our world. Humanity has us searching for something we don’t have, something we’ve never experienced, which may be separate from or greater than ourselves. It’s this ‘new thing’, this level of abstraction from reality that we’re searching for. We’re looking for a world with different rules and different boundaries.

An example of that world is Halloween, the movie franchise that spun a dozen sequels and countless imitators. At its core, Halloween is about Michael Myers, an ordinary man (at least in the first film) who dons a mask and goes on a stabbing spree. We’re given the impression that Michael has no motive, and that he kills because he’s a representation of pure evil and cruelty. At the same time, he’s only human. He isn’t a freakish Creature from the Black Lagoon-type monster who kills because it’s the function of a monster to do so. He’s just a human who simply lacks the basic ethics and morals that are central to our humanity. It’s possible to diagnose him as a sociopath, a psychopath, or any number of different medical terms, but in the world of this film, I believe that Michael Myers is a human that is one level removed from reality; abstracted from our concept of what a human should be.

If this is our first level of abstraction, what is the next? Michael Meyers is a human that doesn’t act human, but he’s still something that we could imagine exists. A further abstraction from that would be taking that initial premise and adding something that clearly does not exist, an extra level of reality that we have experienced, but do not know very much about and cannot explain properly. The perfect horror-movie monster to explain this already exists: Freddy Kreuger from A Nightmare on Elm Street.

Freddy Kreuger is an amped-up version of Michael Meyers; he’s a sneering serial killer that targets the weak and vulnerable, and, most importantly, he can kill you in your dreams. He has the supernatural power to pull people into waking nightmares and then violently murder them; any damage he inflicts on them in a dream also occurs in reality. Unless you’re a lucid dreamer (or one of the main protagonists), there’s a very good chance of you being killed inside your dreams.

This is our second level of abstraction. We’ve all had dreams; we all know what it’s like to experience a nightmare, but we’ve never had anything that exists in a dream become reality. This time, not only is there a malevolent force that we can’t understand, but part of the world (dreams and nightmares) are not understandable and not privy to us. Just imagining ourselves in a situation like that is enough to make anyone feel helpless.

Our third level of abstraction comes when the hostile, unknowable force stops depending on the whims of an agent (like Freddy Kreuger) and literally becomes the world around us. A good way to describe this would be the H.P. Lovecraft story The Color out of Space, which was recently remade into a mediocre sci-fi movie starring Nicholas Cage. Another would be SCP-3005, a beautifully written horror piece illustrating what happens when an entity alters everything it interacts with.

At the same time, I can understand why people would be drawn to these concepts. Things we do not understand about the world lead us to want to try to solve them. When we do solve them, or protect ourselves and our way of life (or both, in the plot of most horror movies), we get this wonderful, incredible sense of accomplishment that leaves us feeling much more satisfied than when we started.

I believe that we don’t really want to be afraid. We want to see things that we do not understand, come to some form of understanding, and then feel the satisfaction of overcoming them. I don’t know about you, but every time I realize the laughing witch on my neighbour’s lawn is just a robot, I feel relieved.

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