From ghosties and ghoulies,
And long-leggety beasties,
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord deliver us.
-Old Scottish Prayer
Halloween is almost here. Besides Christmas which feeds natural human greed, Halloween is undoubtedly the favorite holiday of children and young people. If my kids had spent half the time and creative energy on their school work as they did on their Halloween costumes, they would all have been their class valedictorians. They started working on them farther ahead than making out their Christmas lists. I don't think the reason for this preference is just the treats that they get when they go trick or treating, nor the dressing up, though those are certainly part of it, but rather that it is more the delicious shivery horror of ghosts and goblins that they know aren't real, but which just possibly, this once, might be.
We like to think of children as dear little innocents who need to be shielded from horror. There are enough painful things that they're going to have to deal with anyway. The least we can do is keep real horrors away from them as long as possible, and refrain from telling them about unreal ones, so for a long time we've been trying to sanitize not just Halloween, but all the things they read and see. Adults try to keep the costumes gentle and they discourage events that might be frightening. It is, of course, nearly always only adults who feel this way. Children adore ghosts and goblins, witches, demons, ghouls, ogres -- all the evils that people our lands of fantasy.
The hope of keeping children insulated from ideas of death and horror is not new. Years ago I saw a new edition of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit. It was very thoroughly bowdlerized. There is no mention of Peter's father's end in Mr. MacGregor's stew pot, and no fear of the pot for Peter. We are merely told that Mr. MacGregor doesn't like rabbits in his garden and that therefore Peter should stay away from it. Well, virtue for virtue's sake is certainly an ideal we should try to instill in our children, but it certainly takes a lot of the fun out of the story. In fact, except for the charm of Beatrix Potter's illustrations, I can't think of any reason that a child would want to hear it at all.
I am not really a good one to talk about the value of horror to the young, or for that matter to anyone else, though I think it's something well worth thinking and talking about, because I have always been seemingly extra sensitive to it to the point that it not only gives me no pleasure, I avoid it as much as possible. In college I had a roommate who did a very authentic Boris Karloff Frankenstein's monster imitation. I would cower in a corner while everyone else was crowing with admiration. I knew that it was really Martha, one of the nicest women I have ever had the luck to be friends with. I have always been in touch with reality to the point of boredom. Nevertheless, I was utterly terrified and would plead with her to stop. It gave me no pleasure whatsoever. Although I love fantasy and often read science fiction, I seldom watch a science fiction movie since they seem to me usually to be horror shows which I simply cannot watch and keep my equilibrium. It has always amazed me that sensitive young people will watch horror movies in preference to almost anything else, and seem to be almost unaffected by them, except to feel the serenity of catharsis.
In spite of my lack of sympathy with their enthusiasm, however, it seems to me that there must be a real use to most people in the fantasy of horror. To hide it or deny it is not only to make stories so bland as to be of no interest to anyone, but also to keep people from dealing with the issues that horror allows them to deal with. If, as I believe, fear is the real basis for human evil, horror movies and stories and events like Halloween give us the opportunity to confront it in safety and practice dealing with it. I suspect that the best Halloween costume of all would be one that objectifies our own deepest fears.
Bruno Bettelheim's book, The Uses of Enchantment, made a strong case for telling fairy tales to children as opposed to the realistic stories that many people prefer to present to them. There can be very useful and attractive realistic stories, but since they are realistic they cannot deal helpfully with the unrealistic fears and wishes that all of us have, nor, oddly enough, is it quite as easy to identify with a realistic hero or heroine as it is a fairy tale archetype. Realistic characters are too real; their characteristics are too specific. That identification with the fairy tale protagonist is what makes them useful. As the fairy tale character succeeds, stupid, naive, small or weak as he or she is, so can the child hearing the story imagine success over the giants and ogres which people a child's world. They do, too. Consider how they must live always with giants looking down on them. There is much for a child to worry about, too, in other things of the world. It is not only not made to fit, being made for grown-ups, but it has many strange and possibly dangerous things in it which a child's inexperience justly fears. Authentic fairy tales always end, "And they lived happily..." either "ever after" or "until they died." No matter what the dangers from magic or monsters, they can be and will be overcome. That is why most of Hans Christian Andersen's stories, for example, are not really fairy tales -- and in fact there are only one or two of them that I would inflict on children at all -- but the modern ones by Tolkien and Rowling are. Children need the assurance that their present weakness is nevertheless sufficient strength eventually to succeed even against the irrational monsters of the world.
Actually, if Rowling fulfills her threat to kill Harry Potter in her last book she will have betrayed the fairy tale genre. She refers to C. S. Lewis as an influence, and it is true that in the last of the Narnia series all our favorite characters are killed and the battle is lost. It may be a good lesson to teach that even with God on your side you may lose the battle and you will die, but it is not helpful for children's fears. It may be good Christian literature, but it's not a fairy tale.
The lesson of victory over evil is also true of the horror movies that are so popular. They have to end with the monster somehow being overcome, and preferably with the most sympathetic characters surviving through all the carnage. It's not fair if they don't, and not as good a film. It's like a detective story where the most attractive character is found to be the murderer, or is murdered. It's just not a satisfactory story that way. Writers and filmmakers can maim, murder and destroy, but they'd better not do that to the characters you're identifying with. Good must win out over even the most horrifying and powerful kinds of evil. The purpose of these stories is not to frighten, but to reassure -- and to teach how to face danger, how to be courageous in a life which needs courage.
However, for the stories to be useful in this way the fear has to be strong and with an authentic source. Otherwise it's fake horror and is merely an amusement. That idea of authenticity is particularly interesting, since we are really talking about fears of the supernatural at Halloween and in horror movies, and for that matter, in fairy tales, fear of things that we know don't really exist. Partly the importance of the supernatural element for reassurance is that its being unreal allows it to stand for any real thing that one fears. However, there seems to be more to it than that. That the fear is supernatural seems to give it an extra tinge of horror, although it is a horror that is almost pleasurable. It is much more frightening and exciting to think of a Count Dracula in Transylvania who turns into a bat, can only be permanently destroyed by being buried at a crossroads with a stake through his heart, and whose bite turns his victim into a like creature, even than a vicious medieval baron who practiced horrible tortures in his dungeon, which may be the real source of the legend. That is almost mundane by contrast, and really quite believable.
To pray for protection against ghosties and ghoulies and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night is an almost general prayer against the scary things in the world. Those things can stand for almost anything, and since you don't really believe in them in spite of your fear, you can deal with them and believe that maybe you can deal with the real things you fear.
Although those ghosties and ghoulies are unreal, they do have an authenticity which many other horrors do not. Perhaps it is merely the weight of tradition -- the fact that they have been around for so many years not to be believed in but feared nevertheless. The very old carries its own awe. It seems much more reasonable to fear an ancient crone muttering curses into her cauldron, a disembodied spirit groaning in the house in which he died, or a banshee wailing before a new death than, say, Godzilla. (Godzilla, I understand, became a hero in his succeeding movies, so perhaps is not the best example, but that is the only monster's name I know, and was sufficiently awful in the first Godzilla movie.) Newly invented horrors are a fear of the moment, but a goblin can be lurking behind any bush on a moonless night.
There have been continuing efforts to sanitize Halloween by those who see in it only the childish desire to dress up and beg for goodies from a long-suffering populace. In our culture of people alienated from their neighborhoods and their past trick-or-treating has become somewhat dangerous, and I sympathize with those who want to find alternative activities on Halloween. However, most efforts in that direction have been strongly resisted, even those of UNICEF who merely wanted to change the begging for candy into begging in support of a cause. I think it is more than simply that children would rather get candy for themselves than money for somebody else, though that is a not unreasonable stance. They would resist anything that legitimizes Halloween since that would take it away from them and put it in the hands of the grownups where everything else is. Part of the joy of it is that they are doing something that would not be tolerated at any other time. It adds an extra dimension to the fears they are confronting. It increases the danger.
Halloween started, of course, as an adult festival. People would dress in frightening masks to try to scare away the even more frightening demons of winter: cold and barren fields and illness. When they understood the natural processes of the earth it lost its legitimacy as an adult ritual, but was too valuable as a way of dealing with evils of unknown provenance to be abandoned altogether. Now it belongs to children who need it as they need stories where Peter Rabbit runs the danger of being made into rabbit stew or giants grind bones to make their bread, or as they need movies like Frankenstein or Aliens.
I think adults need it too, though they can't celebrate it in the same way that children do. They also need to be delivered from things that go bump in the night. Our fears may be more realistic -- the bump might really be a burglar after the silverware who ran into the dining table -- but we have no process to deal with them as children can in their stories, movies and celebrations. Instead of taking their monsters away from them it might make more sense to allow them to share their monsters with us.
A recent study of exceptionally successful people showed that they invent fantasies of their success beforehand. That's what fairy tales are all about. Anyone with no fear of the dark has no imagination, but it might be as well if we could people it with evil magicians and enemy aliens rather than murderers and rapists. After all, we know that magicians and aliens are always eventually defeated by the hero and heroine who then live happily ever after, and they are much more powerful than a mere mass murderer. Nevertheless, they're fearful enough to exercise our fantasy. We need to practice facing the dangers of life -- which have always existed -- with courage.
Perhaps it is because we have refused to do that, have tried to make our children's stories realistic and unscary that we seem so fearful these days, starting at shadows and cowering behind walls and gates. We are even passing legislation to increase our security while violating the most basic protections of a free society. We have had horrible instances of terror directed at this country and at individuals; we see stories of violence and terror daily on the news. We are reacting not with courage but with panic and obsession with making ourselves somehow safe, buying guns and gas masks, neither of which can help. I think we need an adult Halloween to help us tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and to teach us how to approach life with courage. There is much to be afraid of in the world, for adults as well as children, the real and the unreal. We can use fear to defeat itself and to be delivered.