"Deep Thoughts And Dank Memes
About Halloween And Strippers"
by John Wilder
"When I was a kid, it seemed that Halloween was really about the kids. I would dress up (usually) as a vampire, until I got older. As I got older, it seemed that Halloween tipped from being a holiday for children to an excuse for younger adults to have drunken parties in costumes like “slutty elf costume” and “slutty Handmaid’s Tale costume” and “slutty presidential candidate”.
One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that Halloween is about the darker side. Ghosts and witches and monsters have been a part of the celebration since Pharaoh Bubbahotep got his chariot license. You’ve probably not heard of that Pharaoh before – after they mummified him they kept him under wraps.
The time of Halloween is certainly in line with being a harvest festival – I mean, it’s after harvest in the northern hemisphere, and there’s plenty of evidence that some version of Halloween was observed in ancient times. Whether or not the Christian holiday of All-Saints Day (November 1) was a takeoff from this is up for grabs, but the trappings and idea of this being a time focused on dead humans is undeniably thousands of years old.
But, again, a harvest festival. In the northern hemisphere, plants are dying at this time of year, leaves are falling, and it begins to get cold and dark. This is the foreshadowing of winter, a time where the planning and planting and preparing pay off in order to tide families back to spring when the world comes alive again. What better way to celebrate the idea of dead people and the impending bitter winter than by having a party, getting drunk, and dressing like a “slutty Seal Team Six” member?
Trick or treating itself has been practiced for (at least) five hundred years, including costumes and begging for food. Ultimately, though, the idea comes back around to the idea of what happens to the soul after death – the year becomes, essentially, a proxy for the life of a human, with Halloween marking the time when death is contemplated. And it’s scary to think about death.
Many people like to be scared – that’s one reason why horror movies are so popular. In my dating days, I noted also that the scarier the movie I took my date to, the more amorous they became afterwards. Keep in mind my sample size was mainly limited to girls who would eventually become strippers, but nevertheless, it’s still data. Like grandma always said, “Write what you know, Johnny, even if it involves bad decisions, teenage lust, and women with daddy issues and narcissistic personality disorder.”
So, just like Pavlov’s dog, I began to associate scary movies with good times. But I liked them before that, even as a young kid I’d stay up late to watch B-movies in black and white on Saturday night and feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when the sound of the house settling at night would happen in the dark behind me.
Part of horror for me, though, was the idea of the supernatural. I recall reading Stephen King before he morphed into a parody of someone’s GloboLeft lesbian wine aunt with Trump Derangement Syndrome and the first book of his to profoundly disappoint me was Cujo. Why?
It was about a dog with rabies. That’s it. No evil spirits. No Walkin’ Dude. No vampires. Just a stupid dog with a stupid disease. So what?
Bad things happen, I get it, but horror to me wasn’t Michael Myers attacking teenagers in the night while wearing a William Shatner mask inside-out. No. It was him getting up after taking damage that would kill a dozen men and relentlessly pressing forward. He wasn’t a man – he was a force beyond anything natural, much like my deodorant.
The other part of the horror trope at the time was that the Final Girl, the one who faced down the supernatural bad guy, was virtuous. Who got killed? The kids drinking and making out. Who lived? The clumsy virgin. In essence, these horror movies were morality plays showing that the wicked were punished and that the virtuous were rewarded, a lesson that thankfully went over the heads of the eager and enthusiastic frolicsome fräuleins.
Those morality plays made sense, and the plot, like a tune, had a melody that was familiar and pleasing. Again, for me the element of the supernatural was crucial. One of the things that I realized over time is that the element of Evil implied that there was Good, too. The dark, Lovecraftian world where ancient brooding evil ones who didn’t even pay any regard to mankind in an unfeeling universe hadn’t crossed my mind yet, but that was before I had even met my ex-wife. But a movie like "The Exorcist," was based on the existence of Evil.
And that Evil wasn’t aloof and uncaring. No. That Evil was intensely interested in humanity. Intensely. In fact, humanity was the focus of that Evil in a war that we could only see the edges of, one that was being played out in realms we had only the barest perception of. "The Exorcist" implied all of that, but also more than implied the existence of the other side: Good. With a capital G.
I know that moral relativists hate the idea of this duality of Good and Evil, preferring to live in a world not of black and white, but one filled with shades of gray. Or grey. Or...now why am I thinking about gravy?
Regardless, lots of people were scared by the embodiment of Evil shown in "The Exorcist." I was comforted. My love of horror isn’t about a fascination with death and Bad things – quite the opposite, it’s about a fascination for life and Good things. And most of those girls I dated aren’t strippers anymore, which is a good thing given their age, that they’re now saying: “Sorry, we’re clothed until further notice.”
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