By:John Saccenti
It may be the way the sun sets during this time of year. Or maybe it’s the sound of dead, dry leaves crunching underfoot, or the very idea that behind a tree, bush or down some lonely, unlit street there could lurk something from our darkest nightmares. Something that could scare us beyond belief.
For many of us, that feeling is exactly what we’re looking for, especially during this time of year.
Halloween gives us the chance to be scared, and to scare others, for the first time all year without the real fear of what might happen if there indeed was a supernatural serial killer out to get us.
It’s fear without the guilt.
Halloween is the season that lets adults act like children and children dress up like adults, and it comes with all things guaranteed to chill to the bone — flies in ice cubes, plastic bats, spider rings and bumps in the night.
We often tell our children that there isn’t a thing in the closet and there are no monsters hiding under the bed. Yet during October, when monsters walk the nation’s malls with the freedom usually afforded only Santa Claus, it’s OK to think, just for a little while, that imaginary monsters are indeed all around us.
And there is no shortage of opportunities to think that way. Halloween parades at school and a bevy of haunted hayrides are just a few of the “scary” offerings in town. Some of these rides are for kids, with pictures of after-school cartoon characters the only thing to shy away from. Others are geared toward those with a taste for a fright.
And it doesn’t stop there. Some of us go to extremes to get into the spirit. We dress in silly costumes, costumes that are just plain fun and outfits that are creepy or, perhaps, more than a little disgusting.
I recently saw “The Blair Witch Project” for the first time Saturday evening. Its choppy, hand-held camera method of cinematography did little to keep me interested at first. But after an hour or so, I started to get sucked in. I felt panic set in and anxiety take over. I spent the rest of that night brushing my teeth in fear and thinking of ways to stay inside. For some reason that I can’t begin to explain, the next evening I logged on to the movie’s official Web site.
Dark rooms, recently the site of painting and other activities, now looked different. If a light wasn’t on, then I shut the door. I even began to consider sleeping with a baseball bat, just in case the Blair Witch turned into the East Brunswick Witch.
I don’t know why I insisted on watching the movie alone, late at night, and several feet from my basement door. And I definitely don’t know why I made the situation worse the next evening. What I do know is that the feel of goose bumps will feel good — once they’re gone.
No matter what your favorite way to celebrate Halloween is, one thing’s for sure — scaring ourselves is not only fun, but therapeutic.
Stories about kidnappings, freak accidents and human monsters with résumés twice as long as anything Bram Stoker could think up take up too much of our lives. They scare us to death and make us drive our children to school every day, even though destination education is only two minutes away. They make us schedule play dates and structure free time for them to provide supervision and protection from scary things happening.
But during Halloween we can thumb our noses at all that. We dress up and watch things we wouldn’t think about the rest of the year, and let our kids stay up late telling and listening to scary stories.
The process is liberating. So much so that we are even willing to let our children accept candy, pounds of it, from strangers. That’s because we know there’s a bright light at the end of those dark, lonely driveways owned by people we know have transformed themselves into vampires and werewolves only for a night.
Even if cheerier holidays are more pleasant, with their lack of headless horsemen and abundance of tinsel, candles and feasts, we need Halloween.
Embracing things that go bump in the night is ultimately good for many of our souls. And it helps to keep us sane.
John Saccenti is news editor of The South Brunswick Post. He can be reached at [email protected]
