Many writers have tried to establish a connection between handing out sweets/putting lanterns out and the ancient offerings we conjecture might have been offered to the spirits on dark autumn nights long ago. The drive behind these narratives is to validate Halloween, to authenticate it as an echo of ancient religious activity.
Which is missing the point on a huge scale. The emotional force that drives dressing up scary/transgressive and wandering around in the dark and the cold is not an echo or a memory of anything; it's precisely the same function. We can't know what went through the head of anyone who may have hypothetically followed similar ritual patterns 1500 years ago (or whenever). Who are we to say that they believed fervently, evangelically in the power of the spirits of the dark, in the cold days when the leaves change? Might they not have just been enjoying a night in that liminal half state, when ghost stories might just come true and it feels like a celebration is all the more needed?
RuPaul Charles once said that he disliked Halloween; he felt that it was marginalising and reducing the power of dressing up. To paraphrase, we're born naked and everything else is drag. Therefore, to just have one night when it's OK to assume another form is to diminish the importance of costume, of drama. Or, as one might say, every night should be Halloween.
He could well have a point; looking at the average Halloween night out, there seems to be precious little in the way of scares. Likewise, the costumes aren't always as frightening or transgressive as they might be; they allow a certain degree of illusionary freedom, to dress as a different gender to that which the individual does not always identify with, or to dress in a manner that mainstream society might view as unusually sexually provocative. In other words, a certain licence is granted, albeit an illusionary one; it should go without saying that, as RuPaul might argue, anyone who needs to wait to Halloween to express their sexuality (or any interpretation or exploration thereof) in a manner of their choosing is deeply unfortunate (again, I might add a caveat that many people are restrained in this by other social factors around them and that occasions like Halloween could allow a freedom denied by forces outside the control of the individual. In other words, you can drag up without getting beaten up).
Might Halloween become truly transgressive? I don't have the time or the academic might to explore the concept of the masked, transgressive, frightening, healing shaman figure in enough detail, but, all the arguments above notwithstanding, there is something to be said for the idea of the night where everyone becomes a masked shaman. It just needs to be a little scarier, is all.
Halloween not scary enough? Samhain night? Two rhetorical questions designed to provoke a cinematic answer.
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| Took my time, didn't I? Watch the Magic Pumpkin. |
Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. Oh, what could have been! John Carpenter is an unfairly maligned figure in cinema. There's a much repeated line of argument that his best work was done by the mid 1980s and the rest has just been a sad decline. Nonsense. There's something interesting, or disturbing, or original in every film he's ever made. Ghosts of Mars is a space western with zombie Martian demon monsters. The Mouth of Madness is genius metafiction for Stephen King obsessives. If you've not seen Cigarette Burns, go and find a copy now, it's only an hour long.
Anyway, having made Halloween and defined the slasher film forever, Carpenter wanted, not unreasonably, to move on. He returned to what was beginning to look like a franchise, but had no interest in Michael Myers stabbing people up anymore; his idea was a truly fantastic one. Every year, make another Halloween film. Release it around Halloween (duh). Every film to have a completely different plot and, somewhere in the movie, you can catch a glimpse of the previous Halloween film playing on TV or something.
(It just occurred to me that having to write "every movie to have a different plot" as though that's a wild and unusual idea says something rather dull about the movie industry, but, self-referentially enough, making that point is in itself a cliche, so this paragraph is now infinitely regressing and you will never finish reading it.)
So, Halloween 3 is a fine tale which I will not spoil more than is necessary. Suffice to say, we have a man who is very angry at the commercialisation of his favourite celebration and plots a horrible revenge on American consumer society. Now, again without spoiling too much, let's not pull our punches; his planned revenge really, really is horrible. Perhaps it's because this is the first horror film I ever saw, but this film crosses that boundary into a quite astonishingly dark place, if you let yourself think about it too much. Admittedly, some of the execution (of the executions, heh) leaves a little to be desired, but many of the sequences have a shocking edge that gets right under the skin.
As it were.
Interestingly, it's one of the films where everything isn't the walking dead; the monsters here are truly monstrous, but they're in disguise, in suits and ties and smiles and the glad-hand. Underneath is a seething mass of corruption. When you watch the Magic Pumpkin, it's all going to come to the surface. The surface of you.
What's the point of this entry, beyond weird rants about dressing up, clockwork murderers (seriously, watch it, you'll see) and trying to avoid the word "I" as much as possible?
October is my favourite month of the year. No surprise. Probably said it before. This year, the world seems a bit oppressive, both figuratively and literally. The savage removal of the rights of the individual, piece by piece; I'm watching as the trade union freedoms that generations of my family fought for are being ripped away. The schools system that I pretty much live for is dying right in front of me. The poor are being told that no-one cares and it's their duty to sweat and die, so that the world can carry on exactly the same as it did last year.
It all got a bit much. Alongside lots of other things, some of which were a bit Autism related. I just hit the point of figuring out "aha! I've actually got a really fucking serious disability and, oh, by the way, lots of those issues you have that you've always thought you might be able to deal with and get over? Nah, that's just your brain doing what it's always going to. Enjoy those team meetings when you not only want to scream, but you have to bite into your lip and clench your fists to stop yourself 'cause that feeling's never going away".
In the light of all that, you know what made me feel better? What gave me back some fighting strength? What's putting me back on track?
I watched Night of the Living Dead. And realised something.
I'm not normal.
I'm transgressive in so many ways.
People are offended by me, for lots of reasons that I'm still feeling a bit sensitive about, so we'll leave it at that for now. Let anyone else be whatever they want to be, but I'm the zombie, I'm Halloween. I've got a pumpkin for a head and I'm the living dead, I'm Ghoulhardi and Ivy Rorschach.
Not bowing down to gods and spirits but acting like we're both, because we're all so much better than we think we are. And the scare stories won't get us to behave, won't get us to follow the dress code and the gender code and the keep your head down code, no, they'll be real scare stories about ghosts and skeletons that remind us that this is a very short life indeed and we intend to make it merry. For EVERYONE.
And this is Halloween and I'm going to celebrate it so much that Halloween runs right through until September 2016.
So Ghost Transmissions: next time, I'm unpicking one of the real greats of horror cinema, and a movie that's got a lot more to say than you might think: tune in next time for PHANTASM!
Pleasant screams, monsters.
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