halloween: further reflections with very little actual reflection
NOTE: Tomorrow marks one year of blogging for me. Whopee!
Anyway after my rant about halloween yesterday, I have decided that maybe it does serve some kind of function after all. Yesterday I was watching a fantastic documentary called 'the perfect scary movie' about horror films down the years. There were vampires, mummies, aliens, mad scientists, the once-human-but-now-unfeeling-killer machines (Jason, Michael Myers) mankind has been battling with fear from the dawn of time which is where the vampires and every other cosmetically-challenged creature in that list has sprung from. By putting our worst fears into the arts like television, it was a great way to exorcise them. And of course our fears have shifted down the years. Our ancestors living in caves might have been afraid of dragons or other mythical creatures because there was no understanding of the natural world and a serious fear of what it just might contain. But once we could understand the natural world much better, things began to shit and around mid-twentieth century we started dreading other things like aliens. This was tied in with cold war fears and it's no coincidence that the 50's was when alien invasion films really took off- 'invasion of the bodysnatchers', 'war of the worlds' etc which were often a kind of metaphor for the American fear of a Soviet invasion. Parallel to this was the growth of the 'mad scientist syndrome'. The general fear and distrust of science as playing God gave birth to several 'mad scientist tinkers with nature and puts us all in danger' films. We had stuff like 'Frankenstein', 'the fly' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and tons of other films where we learned that we cannot play God or else it wouldn't be pretty. In that vein we also had 'Friday the 13th' and 'halloween' series of films which showed us what would happen if we existed without morals of any kind and developed instead a fondness for butcher knives. Michael Myers in 'Haloween' was the kid who starts killing everyone around him because he is so totally devoid of any moral character that he is like evil personified. Jason is technically dead from the first film so maybe he doesn't count, but we still see him as a human gone seriously bad and annoyingly refuses to die. Does that mean the undertaker has to refund the money? or do they just keep paying him over and over everytime someone thinks he is dead? Ok, im straying from the topic.
Then we had the 'devil is coming' films like 'The Omen' and 'Rosemary's baby' which told us that not only should we keep away from ethically-dubious activities in a lab, but we should also be prepared for someone even more scary than a mad scientist with bad hair and no girlfriend- Satan himself.
What I'm coming to (after this incredibly long ramble which I'm not even going to go back and edit because I'm hungry) is that halloween is a perfect way of us recognizing out fears and then making fun of them. Now that so many of our fears have been demystified, it's all become something of a big joke now and that can only be a good thing. Halloween is therefore a good idea. I'm off to get some chips.
Anyway after my rant about halloween yesterday, I have decided that maybe it does serve some kind of function after all. Yesterday I was watching a fantastic documentary called 'the perfect scary movie' about horror films down the years. There were vampires, mummies, aliens, mad scientists, the once-human-but-now-unfeeling-killer machines (Jason, Michael Myers) mankind has been battling with fear from the dawn of time which is where the vampires and every other cosmetically-challenged creature in that list has sprung from. By putting our worst fears into the arts like television, it was a great way to exorcise them. And of course our fears have shifted down the years. Our ancestors living in caves might have been afraid of dragons or other mythical creatures because there was no understanding of the natural world and a serious fear of what it just might contain. But once we could understand the natural world much better, things began to shit and around mid-twentieth century we started dreading other things like aliens. This was tied in with cold war fears and it's no coincidence that the 50's was when alien invasion films really took off- 'invasion of the bodysnatchers', 'war of the worlds' etc which were often a kind of metaphor for the American fear of a Soviet invasion. Parallel to this was the growth of the 'mad scientist syndrome'. The general fear and distrust of science as playing God gave birth to several 'mad scientist tinkers with nature and puts us all in danger' films. We had stuff like 'Frankenstein', 'the fly' and 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and tons of other films where we learned that we cannot play God or else it wouldn't be pretty. In that vein we also had 'Friday the 13th' and 'halloween' series of films which showed us what would happen if we existed without morals of any kind and developed instead a fondness for butcher knives. Michael Myers in 'Haloween' was the kid who starts killing everyone around him because he is so totally devoid of any moral character that he is like evil personified. Jason is technically dead from the first film so maybe he doesn't count, but we still see him as a human gone seriously bad and annoyingly refuses to die. Does that mean the undertaker has to refund the money? or do they just keep paying him over and over everytime someone thinks he is dead? Ok, im straying from the topic.
Then we had the 'devil is coming' films like 'The Omen' and 'Rosemary's baby' which told us that not only should we keep away from ethically-dubious activities in a lab, but we should also be prepared for someone even more scary than a mad scientist with bad hair and no girlfriend- Satan himself.
What I'm coming to (after this incredibly long ramble which I'm not even going to go back and edit because I'm hungry) is that halloween is a perfect way of us recognizing out fears and then making fun of them. Now that so many of our fears have been demystified, it's all become something of a big joke now and that can only be a good thing. Halloween is therefore a good idea. I'm off to get some chips.
posted by Minzo at 8:12 PM
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