Real Ghosts, Fake Vampires, And An Ocean Without Octopuses
Last Thursday night, I agreed to let the kids watch a Halloween movie. I had wanted to show them Paranorman, which I remembered as being really pretty clever, but it wasn’t available on streaming and so we progressed down a rapidly descending scale of quality until we landed at last on Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation. (I know—it had been a long day.)
Beatrice wandered off to read her fourth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide series in as many days, and I sat with William and Arthur to pretend to watch Hotel Transylvania 3 with them while actually doing crossword puzzles on my phone.
“Is Dracula real?” William asked me when the character first appeared on screen. He then proceeded to ask “is it real?” about every single element of the film. Are cruise ships real? Are wolfmen? Is volleyball a real sport? Is “24K Magic “ a real song? Are there really on-board daycares on cruise ships? Are they really staffed by tuxedo-clad flounders?
Both William and Arthur ask if things are real all the time. For Arthur, the question is largely hopeful. Is Bigfoot real? What about the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, or the prognostications of his Magic 8 ball? For William, it can be a way of soothing his fears. Are vampires real? What about all his other fears: coyotes, octopuses, skeletons, tidal waves? But as he gets older, his relationship towards the question grows closer to his brother’s. He doesn’t want ghosts to be real, but he doesn’t want them to be not real either. Real ghosts are terrifying, but a world without ghosts is worse than terrifying, it is disappointing.
Later in the film, long after I had given up even pretending to watch it, Zac sat with William as the villain, the vampire-hunter Van Helsing, falls off a cliff and lands in the ocean. William watched as Van Helsing sinks to the bottom of the sea and emerges again unharmed.
“Oh,” he said, “I thought an octopus would eat him.”
“It might be too cold in that part of the ocean for octopuses,” Zac said.
And William, who is so terrified of octopuses he won’t even wade ankle-deep at the beach, said sullenly, “The ocean without octopuses is a rip-off.”
I’m acutely sympathetic to this disappointment. As I’ve written about before, one of the hardest tasks of parenting is balancing childhood’s competing claims of fancy and fear. When the boys ask me if ghosts are real, I tell them, “I like to pretend ghosts are real, because I think it’s fun to live in a world that has ghosts in it.”
Halloween is a holiday all about what is not real. Costumes, obviously, and supernatural entities, but also rigged Victorian parlor games, manufactured “Druidic” customs, and thirty years of poisoned candy hoaxes. The more I research the history of Halloween, the more I find even most widely-believed stories about the holiday’s origins are fake, or at least misinterpreted and misleading.
I’m a member of two haunters associations, for hobbyists who spend all year building homemade haunted houses for Halloween night. There are hundreds of such associations across the country, and thousands of Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and even old-fashioned printed zines dedicated to how to make the most realistic-looking effects. There are men and women who spend years perfecting their techniques for crafting fake marble, fake iron, and fake fog, all in their spare time and on a shoestring budget. Then, after spending months carefully carving and painting and buffing and distressing a styrofoam tombstone to look exactly, wonderfully, like a crumbling 19th-century marble monument speckled with moss, they carve the epitaph “I. M. Dead” and ring it with plastic zombie hands.
They can’t help themselves! None of them can! There is nothing about a haunter that is subtle or atmospheric or restrained. No one can even stick to one theme: today I saw a near-life-size haunted pirate ship that was also full of killer clowns? It’s always more than real, bigger and bloodier, too loud and too much.
Fake can be construed as less than real, a thin coat of imitation marble on a cheap piece of styrofoam, or like a pirate ship full of killer clowns, fake can be so much more. What an extravagant idea, to celebrate the fragility of life with a holiday that is so robust and abundant.
Recently Zac asked me if after death I’d rather go to a cartoon Hell, with pitchforks and flames, or into the nullity of no afterlife at all. “Hell,” I answered definitively. “I would always choose Something over Nothing.”
In opposition to death’s nothing, Halloween is so much something. It is goofy and sexy and gruesome and subversive and not infrequently tasteless and stupid but it is not nothing. Death is a still, dark sea, but Halloween stuffs it full of glow-in-the-dark zombie octopuses.
***
I'm Very Excited About
The Lighthouse; scrumpy from 101 Cider House; a radical new take on pumpkin pie; the return of Bojack Horseman
But I’m Very VERY Excited About
Transworld! After three years of trying to secure a press pass, I am finally going to Transworld in March! Transworld is the world’s largest Halloween industry trade show and I’ll be on there talking to the people that decide what’s in stores next October. Not to mention attending the OSCARES, “where the Association rolls out the black carpet and recognizes attraction owners, vendors, and others who have excelled in our industry. Presented by The Haunted Attraction Association at TransWorld’s Halloween & Attractions Show in St. Louis, these awards are the highest achievement in the Halloween and Haunted Attraction industry."
The Fine Print
I have a Ko-Fi page that allows readers to send me small payments to support this newsletter and my writing in general . Remember, every dollar you send is A Vote For Halloween.