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Halloween Grotesquery
Halloween used to be more fun than scary. Ghosts were little more than a sheet with two holes. Little cowboys ran around with cap guns, bang bang, as they trick or treated.
Yard decorations, when you could find them, were almost always benign: a grinning pumpkin or two on the front steps, perhaps a friendly witch propped up in the front yard. Boo!
That was then. This morning as Marie and I walked Bob the Dog, it struck me how much scarier Halloween is these days. It seems to me that adults are trying to outdo one another for the title of Most Grotesque Halloween Decorations.
I think the adult who arranged to have this poor guy hanging by his tongue, his bottom half cut away, wins the title.
But others come close to Mr. Tongue Man. I can’t decide if the skeletal mortician below is scary or just merely clever. Note the bleached-out spider next to the skeleton and the black ghost in the background.
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And here two skeletons on their way to or from a burial site. They seem to have forgotten the corpse.
You don’t come across a werewolf very often on Halloween, but here’s a particularly scary one.
So what do you think? Are Halloweens becoming scarier? I think they are. I blame it on the adults who think that Halloween is their holiday.
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No, there could be many, many other explanations.
I gave out Jack Chick anti-Halloween tracts to the teenagers. Along with old candy! Good times last night!
Spiders don’t have bones.
KentForrester, I especially love the picture of the skeletons carrying the empty coffin and the one with the coach (buggy?). Great post !
Thank, Antonia. The guy must have spent more than a few bucks on those setups.
Back before Amazon Prime et al. saved us all from the tyranny of the TV programmers, the glorious month of October was dimmed a bit for me by nothing but horror movies on the tube. I hate horror movies (and novels). Some of those yard decorations are not in good taste (and why are they up for the whole month? Isn’t a week sufficient?), but the worst judgment in this regard I’ve experienced was skeletons and tombstones and the like decorating a nursing home. Really?
I must have a sick sense of humor. The idea of “skeletons and tombstones and the like decorating a nursing home.” had me laughing.
I don’t ever want to go into a nursing home. But, if I’m put in one, I hope and pray there are skeleton and tombstone decorations put up, inside and out, on Halloween. At least that’s how I feel now at almost 65 years of age with no one trying to get me committed….yet.
As for horror movies, I find I usually don’t want to watch them. But I loved places in the first (early 1990’s ? late 1980’s ?) movie on Stephen King’s The Stand.
I watched a 1987 movie, The Hidden, for the first time recently. For the most part, I absolutely loved it. The man who plays the mysterious FBI agent was amazing. He must have listened to everything Fulton J Sheen said St.Thomas Aquinas said about angels and asked himself: How would a being who was like that act ? Then he used the answer he found within himself, or the culture, or that he was given, to create the persona of the FBI agent, I think.
Those two movies have about as much horror in them as I can tolerate, or care to try tolerating. I don’t mind reading somewhat more horror than that; during morning and early afternoon hours, that is. I wouldn’t read that stuff without the sun spilling in through the windows.
Amen to that!
Maybe I’ll feel that way, too, when the time comes, (hope so!) but when I encountered those deadly decorations, it was my mother wasting away in the confines of the home. She was so painfully thin she could have doubled as a seasonal decoration herself. Because she was a wonderful person, and because I knew she would never leave that place, I didn’t have it in me to laugh. Maybe she would have. She had as much sense of humor as a truly kind person can.
I guess what I fear—-because I’ve seen this—-is the artificially cheery Hell of people denying to me both that I’m declining and dying and that all people, if they live long enough, do; also people denying that, while a lot of us don’t think we know what’s on the other side of death, we do sense there’s something, and sense that it might not be something happy for all of us.
Not that, farther along in my process of deterioration, I’ll want people getting all hush-voiced and funereal, and perpetually returning in conversation to the subject of my decline and impending death. But I don’t want them treating it—-and the reality that it happens to anyone who lives long enough, and the reality that the thought of the end of biological life and what happens after is scary—- I don’t want them treating it like something all of us, including me, have to frantically pretend isn’t there. I won’t want to be comforted so much as I’ll want to be permitted to acknowledge being afraid by people who don’t pretend there isn’t any reason for me, and people in general, to be afraid of death and whatever does or doesn’t come after.
And—-Now this is going to sound strange.—-Halloween gives me hope, because the sense it gives you that something comes after death, even if the “something” isn’t good, is less despair inducing than the idea——shared with me as an established fact by my babysitter when I was about eight——that “you go in the ground and you rot. That’s it.”
On the other hand, I can see why, under the circumstances you describe, the decorations seemed to mock her pain and suffering and your grief over it.
What?!! That’s truly horrifying.