THE AURA OF OCTOBER & HALLOWEEN
The spookiest month October, which happens to be my most favorite time of the year, is in full swing. I adore all the Libra vibes of sweetness and spontaneity because yours truly is an October kiddo and methinks all those Libra hues are perfectly in sync with me.
The charm of fall
Fall is in the air and you can feel cooler temperatures after a long summer and see a tasteful palette of yellows, oranges, reds and browns wherever you set your eyes on. The leaves crunch when you step over them and now you start craving pumpkin delicacies.
Fall is the transition from the bright and sweltering summer months to the quiet, dark and chilly days of winter. This is the perfect time for a freshly baked apple pie.
The nature of spookiness and fear
Now let’s talk about all the heart pounding and hair raising factors so widely and popularly associated with this season, otherwise known as the season for holidays or more precisely Halloween.
Imagine a creepy, dark lane. There is a silhouette of a child like person at the end of the lane. You hear a chuckle coming from that source. All of a sudden, one arm of the person facing you shoots up. Next it starts walking, closing in on you with abrupt movements of its hands, as if they are pulled by strings, although there are no strings attached…
Obviously that is very creepy and such situations and sights can spook us out totally. Real situations, stories, movies and computer games can induce a blood curdling scream or two. They can practically scare the wits off us and knock the sheer breath out of our lungs, to say the least. Things like ghostly kids and clowns are really freaky and uncanny.
The nature of spookiness is a scientific puzzle. The entertainment industry and media have been experimenting and playing with recipes for creepy things for ages and they have been pretty successful at that. While exploring the vast ocean of scary films, one common theme that is observed are creatures that are humanlike but possess something unusual, for example, ghostly children, haunted dolls or dummies, undead animals and humans and definitely demonic clowns. These have a wonderful way of scaring us to the bones.
Horror genre and why we adore it
The horror genre gives us butterflies in our stomach. Tales of monsters, demons, giants, ghosts, ghouls and zombies are as old as human life on earth. We produce a fundamental reaction when pondering about or directly experiencing the vision of an apparition, phantom, evil spirit, or any eerie image. We definitely revere exorcism, voodoo, black magic, evil witchcraft and wizardry.
Whether we love them or hate them is immaterial because we have devoted an entire holiday known as Halloween to these hair raising creatures, spirits, and practices that make us feel uneasy.
It is human nature to get enchanted by apparitions and vampires whose existence defies logic and reason. We love to see movies of haunted houses where ghosts and ghouls are lurking and will jump on us from any corner. The hobgoblin mystifies us.
We want to see bodies rise high up into the air when a sinister witch summons her magical powers of levitation. We adore celestial mediums who are the modes of communication between the earthly world and the spirit world. We entertain beliefs in the occult, voodoo and black magic.
We want to see masked phantoms and the Boogeyman hiding in our closets and stepping out of their vicinity in the middle of the night to scare the living hell out of us. The poltergeists who can invisibly manipulate objects are our delight to behold.
We love hearing stories of possessed dolls and children because those feelings of doom and creepiness are ingrained within our very souls. We have probably played a game of séance or two and the sight of the marker moving on the Ouija board gives us the chills as well as the kicks. An unearthly spirit never fails to shake us to the very core.
Horror and slasher flicks
Horror slasher movies feature helpless people acting on a fight or flight response when encountering cannibals, savages, and barbarians in flicks involving blood and gore like Hills Have Eyes, Wolf Creek, and Feast etc. Many of us adore and worship the Saw franchise like dedicated diehards. When an executioner, slayer, punisher, hangman, or a hit man in classic 2000’s slasher flicks like Boogeyman approach the innocent college freshman girl in her dorm room at midnight, we feel emotionally terrorized ourselves.
These movies incorporate a lot of mutilation, slaughtering, butchering and laceration that are their usual staples to blockbuster perfection and status. We adore those movies because we love seeing people lacerated and hacked up mercilessly by a deranged loner in a small town or a vicious cannibal hungry for flesh and blood.
Who doesn’t adore bloodbath and generous sprays of tomato sauce and red paint aimed at the camera or the sight of the slaughtered, disfigured head and mutilated body of an unfortunate victim discovered by his / her scared to the bones pal? Needless to say, we are all hard wired enthusiasts of death, decay and mutilation.
Horror novels and paperbacks
Horror authors like R L Stine, Christopher Pike, Diane Hoh, Carol Ellis and Richie Tankersley Cusick have crafted middle grade and vintage teen horror novels for us that we love to devour and relish thoroughly. Many of us enjoy point horror novels which are the kinds of horror books published by Scholastic in the 90’s. Moreover these mindblowing authors have also concocted cozy horror novels and old school sixties pulpy horror novels.
Heart pounding book franchises like Goosebumps, Fear Street, Ghosts of Fear Street, Shivers, Fright Time, The Last Vampire, and Spooksville etc have tingled our spines and chilled us to the bones for eons. These books are primarily about haunted houses, haunted dummies, haunted cheerleaders and haunted camps and even a handful of exotic and ethereal vampires etc that make our pulses quicken and make our blood run cold, just reading about them.
You can call them paperbacks from hell or cozy horror novels with spooky aspects. All kinds of spookiness are delivered by these thrillers where the writing flows very naturally, the dialogue is strong and the gripping plots keep you wanting to read the story. The layer of anxiety is never amiss.
Sometimes these paperbacks are cozy mystery tropes. A young girl comes to a small town where a lot of stuff is going on. She has to solve a mystery the town hides. A few more layers may be added to the basic haunting.
Graveyard slaughter, Egyptian adventures, and ancient mummy curses are common themes of these paperbacks. Paranormal elements are worked in. Horror books come with graphic photography such as eyeballs on the cover. These are fan freaking awesome.
There are tales of the demonic seductress who belongs to the night when ecstasy and evil are one. Asphalt battlefields are strewn with bullets, muscle and blood. They come with compelling covers which are really gross stuffs I adore. Even though the images repulse you, you still cannot look away.
R L Stine’s false cliffhangers of something happening which is not actually happening are superb, needless to say. Some passages are very well written. I enjoy R L Stine’s pace and plot twists but when it comes to prose, it’s very readable and flows very nicely. There are some chapters like when the stalker attacks the girl which are extremely well written.
You may think they are trashy but they may be some heavy, dark stories that really surprise you. Brutal, grim, violent. Not necessarily fun books to read. If you are a real creep, you will be scared to hell and your heart will skip a beat on a plethora of occasions.
Stephen King
You cannot talk about the horror genre if you don’t talk about Stephen King, the American horror novelist and short story writer. He revived the horror fiction genre, thanks to his restless and superb imagination. King has explored a myriad of horror themes, starting from extrasensory perception, telekinesis, ghosts, vampires, rabid dogs, to deranged killers, biological warfare and automobiles.
He provides sharp and detailed psychological descriptions, realistic detail, and intriguing plotting. He has the uncanny ability to scare the pants off the reader. His blockbuster works include Carrie, Misery, It, Pet Sematary, Christine and Needful things.
King has sold millions of copies worldwide and his power of writing horror fiction that cannot be contained has earned his name the status of being synonymous with horror novels. He is not only a horror and supernatural fiction author, he also writes suspense, science fiction and crime novels.
Supernatural powers, parapsychology and the paranormal
When we ponder about special powers, supernatural abilities, sixth sense, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, near death experiences, and the like, we get a rush or experience a high arousal state. Musing about after life, parallel world, and other dimensions release chemicals in the circuitry of the brain.
Sir Winston Churchill once reportedly saw the ghost of Abraham Lincoln in his study after stepping out of his bath. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the phenomenal Sherlock Holmes series, interacted with ghosts on a daily basis. Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science and a pioneer of artificial intelligence, believed in the science of telepathy.
These famous people had razor sharp thinking but believed in the uncanny and the impossible. And many of us lesser mortals have joined them from time to time.
Three quarters of Americans believe in the paranormal and one in five of Americans have seen a ghost or supernatural creature of some sort. We can’t shake off the old superstitions and folklore residing in us, can we? There seems to be secret virtues in insidious thoughts and beliefs about the world we think we know.
These feelings, thoughts, experiences and encounters can be explained by faulty activity in the brain. Poltergeists moving objects without touching them have damaged regions in their brains’ right hemispheres that are responsible for visual processing. Sometimes epilepsy can provoke spooky feelings of being stalked.
The faceless shadow or someone lurking in the surroundings are common examples of paranormal activity. Out of body experiences and near death experiences are now accepted as neurological phenomena. Visual illusions can occur when even the healthy brain conjures up the image of mythical beings.
One fine morning when you step outside into your backyard you may see an old man staring back at you. Skulls, ugly animals, and old hags are manifested by the brain due to tiredness, alcohol, drugs, or tricks of the light.
Why do we all love superheroes?
As kids we loved comic books and superhero flicks like hell. We love seeing our favorite superheroes demonstrate live action on the screen. These are true beauties to behold. The messages they disseminate resonate totally with hope and self confidence especially among the quintessential boys and girls next door.
The superheroes portray principles of love, faith, unity, the protection of the universe, and redemption when they transform themselves from an ordinary newspaper journalist to a full blown savior knight in royal blue apparel bent on protecting the earth. We are assured that everyone is special in the universe no matter whether they can run fast or fly or lead normal lives among the lesser mortals.
Whenever we see Superman unrolling his royal blue suit and lifting off into the heavens we feel a surge of adrenaline rush associated with coming to the rescue of hundreds or even thousands of innocent lives about to be slaughtered by bad guys or the wrathful and abominable titan. At that point we fantasize our own selves saving the world from the clutches of dark forces and the bloodthirsty, vicious and wicked leviathan although we are not even interested in helping our moms with the dishes.
We love the quintessential superhero wrecking havoc among the evil sycophants and malevolent and devious villains equipped with the buzz and crackle of the forces of evil. We love to see them torn apart and we don’t mind how much remoteness and charm the superheroes of the likes of the man of steel, the dark knight, Spidey or Captain America flaunt while they are at their archenemies’ throats.
Why do we love to get spooked to the bones?
Halloween is here to stay along with all its frights. The phenomenon that we love to be in a state of panic is not new at all. The enjoyment of fear is associated with a hormonal component. We get a reaction whenever we are exposed to a crisis or threat. Such crises or threats can influence and motivate the love of being spooked.
The moment we feel scared or threatened we feel emotionally more intuitive and physically more powerful. Such feelings are known as adrenaline rush and humans are absolutely hard wired to these kinds of state of high mental arousal.
We love to experience the forbidden, dark and bizarre aspects of the universe. Horror films allow us to enjoy the feeling of fear in a safe way. They also allow us to explore the domain of bad guys without hurting ourselves in the process.
Many of us possess a need to get threatened by sensations which are totally unlike any that we face in real life. This helps us to get more enthusiastic about our day to day life routine. If we can identify with the dark side of ourselves then we feel more psychologically relieved because that is an open expression of our darkest and strongest emotions, thoughts and beliefs residing in us.
Those feelings need to be released from their pent up confines within the bottle that is our labyrinthine mind. The mind is a maze full of twists, turns, riddles and puzzles and getting lost in it is fairly easy and effortless. We let it wander to wherever it wants to take us. In the process, we love to let out a blood curdling scream or two in spite of ourselves.
