Skip to main content

Halloween 2025

 I am experiencing Halloween through the lens of a grandma of a 22-month-old girl. 

As a fearful child, I did not like scary stuff. If people in the '60s had put up the kind of "decorations" I see today, I would have been terrified and unable to walk the streets to school. On my street there is a twenty-foot skeleton of a human and a five-foot skeleton of a dog. I'm not sure which is worse. (I may be wrong on the heights, but they are huge.) This house also has two dressed skeletons waving at passers-by. Others have blow-up figures of cartoon characters and typical Halloween personages. In my son's neighborhood there are witches, ghosts, and a slightly demonic scarecrow. 

Annie can't miss them when we take our walk, but I don't draw her attention to them. My son says she isn't scared by them; perhaps she has no context. She is more frightened by the fact that a tree landed on their house last week due to high winds and sent large limbs through the roof in three places (also leading to water damage in heavy rains, despite a tarp). Some of the damage is still visible and she might come running for comfort if she sees it or hears a loud noise. It traumatized her. I cuddle her, which is always a good thing. 

I will give out candy tomorrow night and not be a crank-butt about it.  Sometimes I get a crowd, sometimes not. Annie will dress as a cow (she loves farm animals) and looks like an ad for Chick-Fil-A. 

On the Christianity Today Bulletin podcast, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary spoke on the place of horror movies in Christian teaching and experience. He seems to think we can learn something from them.

I take issue. 

That's not to say I do not watch films, but horror? Well, there's horror and then there's horror. 

Psycho? I don't like taking a shower when no one is in the house because of that one. Exorcist--never. Stuff that is put out today? Are you kidding me? True crime about serial killers? Why would I expose myself or anyone to those images and story lines, even if the bad guys get punished or, as in Exorcist, one of the priests is a Christ figure (or so he said). Rosemary's Baby--a parody of Mary? Saw? Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Friday 13th?  Cheap thrills?

Sure, a good ghost story can entertain. Beyond that, no thank you, and I don't believe I can be convinced that The Substance, Nosferatu or any other vampire tale, and the slew of horror movies (which can be made cheaply) that come out every October have any value. 

Real evil exists; we don't need "framed" evil. 

I don't think a professor needs to be justifying our wasting time on horror that glorifies evil when the world cries out for deliverance from murder, torture, sexual violence, and despair.

CT needs to rethink this. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem of the Day

 Vision Driving on a busy highway designed to relieve traffic on a busier one, My glimpse lands on a mound of color in the turning lane ahead. I see a human body. That is not what it is, but what my mind perceives. The envisioned body is wearing a bathing suit, and it is female. It is deceased of course; half of it is legs with pale skin, half is a mix of red and blue and yellow. My heart tightens; my eyes, which need to look elsewhere, are captured. I go under a traffic light and the pile transforms into a towel twisted into some elongated shape, either thrown and dropped from a vehicle. Why did I see a corpse in the way of oncoming cars? Are my eyes failing me? My corrective lenses? My imagination? My expectations? Is it too much true crime television? Who knows? And what if I had seen a human form that metamorphosed into a towel? --- This is more about a concern of aging, not to show my poetic skill. I write one or two (or fewer) poems a year. ...
Post a Comment
Read more