Halloween isn’t Scary Anymore

Long ago, October 31 was a night of ghosts, ghouls, vampires and other horrors from the dark closet of the human mind. Begun in the British Isles by the Celts, the fog and the dark and the cold (and perhaps the invention of distilling) put people in a foul and despairing mood. With Christianity’s arrival, All Hallow’s Eve became a church holiday focused on the mortality of all mankind – which is certainly no cheerier. Mercifully, commercialization came along to render it a bit more fun, with Trick-or-Treaters bothering the neighbors for junk food. But in the last 30 years, goblins and banshees aren’t anywhere near as scary as the evening news.

By the 1980s, a great many people had spent their entire childhood, adolescence and young adulthood on the razor’s edge of the Balance of Terror and Mutually Assured Destruction. Knowing that the Comrades had nuclear subs off both coasts and the flight time of nuclear warheads was measured in minutes, some didn’t sleep very well. Especially when two words were put together: “president” and “Reagan.” Fortunately, Mikhail Gorbachev believed his own bollocks as much as Mr. Reagan believed his and neither side resorted to wiping out mankind in a fit of poor sportsmanship.

However, the human race is capable of anything but acting like grownups all the time. And so when four airplanes commandeered by poor Muslims for the amusement and self-realization of rich Muslims like Osama bin Laden smashed into lower Manhattan, a new fear worse than Dracula became real. Sudden, violent death returned to the back of the mind. Not that it had ever really gone away, but the awareness had.

And now, birds are dying in Asia, and the entire human population can only be saved by Tamiflu -- which is in very short supply. Except that the H5N1 virus still hasn’t mutated to an airborne bug that can be transmitted among humans. As Stephen King, John Carpenter and Clive Barker know, anticipation of the evil is even more terrifying than the actual event.

Bela Lugosi just doesn’t get the job done anymore. Nor do his successors: Jason, Freddie Kruger and Michael Myers (not the Austin Powers one, the other guy). “Saw” or its sequel, Chainsaw Massacres, Rob Zombie videos, or Dean Koontz novels are pretty lame compared with pandemics, suicide bombers and the still-unsolved anthrax mail case. In the immortal words of Grandpa Simpson, “I’ve coughed up scarier stuff than that.” The most frightening thing in the world today is either the front page of the Washington Post or the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Samhain ain’t nuthin’ by comparison.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
Produced using Fedora Linux.

Home