It’s always a little fun to have the wits scared out of you, isn’t it?
Of course it is. That’s the fun we all have with that emotion called fear, and with it being late October, Halloween is but a few short days away, which means a celebration of all things maniac and macabre.
As a kid, you don’t overthink Halloween. All you need to know are the basic rules:
Step 1 – Dress up in a costume, preferably one that isn’t too complicated in case a snowsuit or heavy jacket needs to go over top of it if you live on the Prairies.
Step 2 – Grab a strong pillowcase to be used for storage. Put away that little plastic pumpkin with the weak handle, that’s not going to hold anything of substance. This is a job for long, durable fabric that can take the pure heft of sugary goods.
Step 3 – Endure the school day while wearing your costume, watching the clock like a hawk.
Step 4 – Get home and organize with your friends. Get Mom or Dad to touch up your costume.
Step 5 – Meet up with your friends and head out to collect that sweet, sweet candy all over town.
Step 6 – Sugar coma upon your safe arrival back home.
Step 7 – Eventual trip to the dentist to address the probable cavities stemming from Halloween. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, and it’s listed here courtesy of a revision from parents everywhere.
I loved Halloween as a kid because of the candy and the camaraderie, and now as an adult, I enjoy it because it gives me a great excuse to indulge in all my favorite horror movies without looking like a weirdo that has a pervasive bloodlust.
Hey, what can I say, I like watching brainless teenagers (played by 30-year olds most of the time) being stalked and slain by all sorts of bad guys and supernatural slashers.
These days, that’s MY fun that I have with fear. They’re movies I’ve watched probably 1000 times each, but on the right night, in the right moment and in the right atmosphere, they can still cause goosebumps to go up my arm and make me think something’s watching me outside my window.
Horror movies, and really anything that instills some harmless fear, are just plain old fun that don’t need to be over analyzed.
That being said, what truly IS scary is how some of the most well-known monsters and mad men of the silver screen are based on actual people and real-life incidents.
Freddy Krueger, for instance, stemmed from some troubling real-life inspiration from his creator, the late writer and director, Wes Craven. Krueger, for those not in the know, is the fedora-wearing, red and green sweater-wearing demon who stalks the dreams of young people, slashing poor victims with his glove that is fitted with razor-sharp blades. If Freddy gets you in your dreams, you die for real.
Hard to believe there’s real-life horror behind this character, right? Well, it’s true. Director Craven read a story in the L.A. Times newspaper about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia and made their way to the United States. Things seemed fine for a while, and suddenly the family’s youngest son was having disturbing nightmares. He told his parents that he was afraid to sleep and that if he did, the “thing” chasing him would get him. When his parents were finally able to get him to sleep, they thought the worst was over. Hours later, they heard screams in the middle of the night, and by the time the parents got to him, the young boy was dead. The kid died in the middle of a nightmare.
One of the most infamous horror movies of all time, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, also draws on real-life horror to tell its story. Ed Gein grew up in rural Wisconsin, where after his alcoholic father died, he had an almost disturbing closeness with his mother, Augusta. A loner his whole life, the death of his mother was all but the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as Ed’s sanity was concerned. After a local hardware store owner named Bernice Worden went missing, the trail soon took authorities to the Gein farm, where a veritable house of horrors was found in addition to Worden’s body. I won’t get too descriptive, but Gein was “imaginative” with how he used body parts of different corpses.
It’s crazy that real life can sometimes be much scarier than anything a writer can dream up and put to page.
This Halloween, I’ll still have my fun watching bloody horror flicks, but I’ll always remember that the things that are harmless fun for generations of people sometimes start as a very dark chapter in human history.
For this week, that’s been the Ruttle Report.
