I told my mom I was excited about the upcoming holidays. She gave me a weird look and asked if I meant Thanksgiving, in two months.
“No,” I said. “I meant…October, and my birthday.”
Or, as I’m calling them now: The Fallidays.
I know September is supposed to be about back to school. I know fall is supposed to be about pumpkin spice and hayrides. But can I just say that just won’t cut it anymore?
I need it to be spooky season – to think about death, ghosts, possession, the afterlife, horror. I need to sit with my fears and anxieties in a new, fresh, more spiritual way after the past two years. I need it to last multiple months, to contain all my fears. Let’s think about how beautiful the trees look…as they die. Let’s get into the muck of our souls. Let’s be afraid.
Of course I’m thinking about this because I recently watched The Haunting of Bly Manor on Netflix. I made my friend (who’d already seen it) stay for the first few episodes because I was too scared to watch them by myself. I still texted her while watching the rest of the series, and she checked in on me to make sure I slept okay.
Remember when I talked about how I like being brave? Horror movies are the one place where I’m a total ‘fraidy cat. I’ve never watched a horror movie the whole way through by myself if I didn’t already know what happens. I’ve never watched one with a friend without grabbing their hand (or at least having permission beforehand to do so, just in case). One time as a little kid, I read an R.L. Stine book of short stories and was so freaked out by it I recycled it so it wouldn’t stay in my house. There was a story in it about two vampire hunters, one of which is saved from being bitten by a vampire by his cool leather jacket – but then his leather jacket becomes a vampire and attacks him! Then it FLIES AWAY before the other vampire hunter gets it!!! I couldn’t sleep because I was sure the leather jacket was going to fly through my window. At least I don’t live in that house anymore so it can’t know where I live…You know. If it was real.
And you know all those murder mystery shows, especially the darker ones like Hannibal…it always looks like fall in them. Mainly because almost all of them are filmed in Vancouver, where the fog sits low on the horizon. But it means fall has always made my skin tingle. The perfume of petrichor and colorful dead leaves and the oncoming chill smells like fear.
For the most part, I’d avoided horror movies during the pandemic. I used to push myself to watch them and feel upset long after. When I heard it was incredibly scary, I dared myself to watch Hereditary, but held my friend’s hand, whimpering, the whole time. (I whimper a lot when watching horror movies.) She found the ending very silly, and I had a stomachache for three days.
Then again, sometimes good can come from these stressful experiences. I ran out of one screening of the movie It (I even went with a friend!), but came back a week or two later after reading the Wikipedia page. (Yes, it was another dare I made for myself.) I ended up making a good friend because of it, all because I asked them in the bathroom, “If you were one of the kids from It, which one would you be?” Feel free to reply to this newsletter with your answer, by the way. To watch the second film, I had a bunch of friends over to watch the first before walking to the theatre together with beer and candy to watch the second. It wasn’t as scary, but maybe that’s because I had five drunk chaperones.
But lately I’ve been hungry for that fear. Maybe because it’s a larger, more visceral version of the old gothic horrors and romances. I’ve been thinking about the old horrors, the ones with apparitions of the soul. Like this list I made back when Crimson Peak came out, or this list director Guillermo Del Toro made. Like these doomed romances I found so funny.
You’ll notice Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is on all three of them. As a teenager, it was a cross between that book and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley for my favorite classic. I suppose you can say I can handle horror and gothic stories in book form. I enjoy the teasing out of someone’s disturbed psyche. I can find it downright soothing. I’m terribly afraid of true crime and serial killers, but one of my favorite books is the terrifying “In a Lonely Place,” by Dorothy B. Hughes, which I picked up because of this article.
But the real reason I loved Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein is because I thought they were hilarious. Hilarious! Reading them as a teenager with other teenagers probably helped. I’ll never forget the incessant giggling and eventual outright laughter of my peers and I as our soft spoken English teacher talked about the other implications of Penistone Crags. “Penis…tone…crags,” she said slowly, as we all stared at her. (For some reason I can’t find this analysis in the first page of Google, which worries me about what kids these days are learning!)
That’s the one way I can fight my fears: with humor. There’s a reason that when my friend asked me what character I related to in It, I said Richie. One reason I like having a friend nearby when I’m watching a horror movie is I like to turn to them and make jokes the whole way through. (This is also why I try to watch horror movies with only the best of friends.) It’s my way of defusing the tension, of going, I laugh in the face of danger, hah hah hah! Yes, one of my life philosophies does come from a kid’s movie.
But I realized another thing that helps me feel better is hearing what other people are afraid of. When I told a friend I’ve realized except for Zombieland, zombie movies make me so upset that I turn them off in the first five minutes, they told me their partner is afraid of ghosts and possession. When my friend who watched Bly Manor with me told me she loves horror movies, it was in stark contrast with when I tried to make her watch a funny anime. “This makes me kind of anxious,” she said, of the frantic, joke-a-minute script. Another friend once told me that hearing people what people actually say about her behind her back would be her “worst nightmare.” Having heard several people tell me what they really think of me, I didn’t know how to respond.
So tell me: what scares you? Have you watched or read anything that mitigated that fear? I’d love to share your responses, but I’d honestly just love to hear them. All fears are welcome; anyone who sends me a vampire leather jacket will be BLOCKED.
My birthday is November 11th, by the way. Veterans’ Day. Now, war movies — the original horror stories, in my opinion — those I can just watch nonstop! We are all contradictions. But ah, that’s another newsletter.