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rfmcdonaldHallowe'en started off as a festival linked with the breaching of walls between the supernatural and natural worlds and the resulting unheimlichness, but it's since become a matter of fun without any fear.
In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?
(Well, it has in most places.)
As one reader noted, some time age--a decade, with Buffy?--vampires stopped being monsters of the id and are instead now mostly exotic sex partners. The rehabilitation of zombies I've seen in mainstream fiction--even teenage fiction!--would have surprised most people five years ago. Yes, I can see how the mute isolation experienced by zombies could map onto high school, but still. Is it that the exotic just isn't as intrinsically terrifying as it once was?
There's still room for terror in our lives, in those moments where the wall between the expected and the unpredictable breaches and we're left to cope with what's erupted into our world. It still happens.
My most terrifying night? The early morning of the 5th of February, 2002, easily. In the first hours after I'd recognized I had a sexual orientation, I felt ashamed that I hadn't recognized it before. Pushing past that shame for a moment, I realized that I needed to enlist the help of other people to try to manage this, since even after the past couple of years of slow twitchy improvement I was lacking. Who did I know in town who'd be able to help me, immediately and as a friend?
Oh.
"Dear God, what have I done to myself."
And you? (If you dare.)
In The Know: Has Halloween Become Overcommercialized?
(Well, it has in most places.)
As one reader noted, some time age--a decade, with Buffy?--vampires stopped being monsters of the id and are instead now mostly exotic sex partners. The rehabilitation of zombies I've seen in mainstream fiction--even teenage fiction!--would have surprised most people five years ago. Yes, I can see how the mute isolation experienced by zombies could map onto high school, but still. Is it that the exotic just isn't as intrinsically terrifying as it once was?
There's still room for terror in our lives, in those moments where the wall between the expected and the unpredictable breaches and we're left to cope with what's erupted into our world. It still happens.
My most terrifying night? The early morning of the 5th of February, 2002, easily. In the first hours after I'd recognized I had a sexual orientation, I felt ashamed that I hadn't recognized it before. Pushing past that shame for a moment, I realized that I needed to enlist the help of other people to try to manage this, since even after the past couple of years of slow twitchy improvement I was lacking. Who did I know in town who'd be able to help me, immediately and as a friend?
Oh.
"Dear God, what have I done to myself."
And you? (If you dare.)
