THE CULTURE OF CREEPINESS: HALLOWEEN, HORROR, AND SPIRITUAL CATHARSIS
by Jack Barnes
Holidays are meant to be a time of celebration for many people. Family is present, food is plentiful, and the cheer of the holidays helps to distract us from the negatives of our lives. Why then is one of the most popular U.S. holidays one that blatantly and proudly embraces death? Halloween is dominated by that which is frightening and objectively shocking, yet when it all comes together it can be one of the happiest days of the year. What is it about Halloween that brings people a sense of joy? What causes people to embrace images of death come Halloween time? How does Halloween offer us a sense of spiritual catharsis?
According to Jim Burklo, Associate Dean of Religious Life at USC, Halloween is a hybrid of two holidays: All Hollow’s Eve — the night before All Saints Day — and El Dia de los Muertos. Both holidays are meant to honor the dead, and from this focus on death we get the images of vampires and undead that we are so used to. These demonic depictions get a majority of their inspiration from the development of the figure of Satan throughout Christian history. That being said, the Satan of Halloween bears very little resemblance to the figure of the biblical era, where he acts more as God’s special investigator. The devil wasn’t even given a physical description until Dante’s Inferno in the early Renaissance era. Despite the commonplace representation of Satan and sin on Halloween, we are not frightened or intimidated by the two, but comforted.
Throughout its history, Halloween has been paired with religious symbolism and biblical themes to add to the scariness of the season. Concerning horror’s role in the Bible, Burklo stated that the bible was full of horror scenes: “Really dreadful stories of mayhem: blood, guts, and gore. And of course crucifixion, the central symbol of Christianity, is a horror show.” Many of the central themes of both the horror genre in film and Halloween overlap with the themes that religion is concerned with. Sin, redemption, the afterlife are all ideas that both mediums explore. Burklo added with the idea that horror is a “vaccination against fear.” When we see something horrifying happen to someone else on screen, we are inherently relieved that it wasn’t us. Our deepest fears are playing out before our eyes and we are living and enduring them. This idea is what fuels the horror stories depicted in the Bible, and also what keeps people coming back to the theater and paying to be frightened. Horror films confront us with the unknown, the frightening, and the irrational. Our fear of death plays out on screen and helps us find a way to come to terms with it.
By making light of death with fun festivities and activities, Halloween plays a critical role of the development of children. Death for once becomes palatable and makes it easily understandable at a young age. Halloween can be a key player in the collective understanding and acceptance of deaths for kids that are exposed to it, leading us to embrace death rather than live in fear of it. Halloween makes the inevitability of death less of something to fear and more of something to revel in as a natural part of the life cycle; all things come to an end. During the season where we dance in the concept of death and put it in its place, we can obtain a deeper understanding of our own finality.
Contact Staff Reporter Jack Barnes here.
