Tonight is Halloween, and if I can be real with you here, I’m just not a fan.
I should clarify:I like the dress up part, and I especially like the free candy part, but when it comes to the display of severed limbs on my neighbour’s lawn, I could really do without.
I don’t remember Halloween always being this way. I remember it used to have more of an innocence in it, a playfulness to it all. But now, when I pass by the displays of witches, bloodied corpses and that guy in the fake electrical chair, I’m reminded that I’ve always had an unease around things that point to darkness.
When I was 8 years old, I was at a friend’s Halloween party where her parents put on the 1984 movie Frankenweenie. The plot is exactly as it sounds: a young boy brings his beloved pet wienerdog Sparky back to life after he is hit by a car. While Spaky’s appearance startles many, he is still the same loyal, loving dog he has always been (with the exception of some extra hardware in his neck). It’s a completely reasonable movie if you’re looking to blend a dead dog, scary monster and a heartwarming redemption arc. While the movie was innocent enough, something about it made me feel uneasy. There was darkness beyond the plotline that I couldn’t quite explain. As soon as the opening credit rolled, I felt a pit in my stomach that I couldn’t ignore. And so, as everyone else took in the opening scene, I slinked into another room and played with toys until the movie was over.
The experience with the Frankenstein wiener dog was my first time skipping out on scary, but it wouldn’t be my last. Several instances followed, where I didn’t feel good about what my friends were watching. In those instances, I quietly left the room until the movie was over. This meant that sometimes I ended up playing by myself, and sometimes when I was lucky enough, I got access to the landline and called the friends who weren’t at the party and whose numbers I had memorized.
Thinking back on this reminds me that I always had a compass of sensitivity inside of me. This compass was my barometer and it screamed at me when things felt inexplicably dark. But that all changed when I met a boy.
In Grade 12 I had my first hard core crush. I had other boy crushes before, but this one was LEGIT because, well, number 1. This boy was a real life highschool boy (not the 6 ‘4 red headed late night talk show host I had been previously crushing on) and 2. This boy was inexplicably cute and 3.There was a real life potential, nay, a possibility that this boy could like me back (gasp!).
This was all very exciting, but regrettably, with this possibility of a real relationship, came real compromise. This boy lovvvved scary movies-not the gore and murder type, but the type of scary movies that would leave you so psychologically disturbed that they would rattle your sense of safety in the world and steal 4 hours of sleep from you (at minimum). The first movie we watched together was Donnie Darko, and while for some of you this is child’s play, for me, that mangy gangly mute bunny rabbit was enough to startle me to my core. This would have been a great time to say something to this boy, but I said nothing. I said nothing to this boy. I pretended that I too loved these movies, and I abandoned every urge to show my true reaction, lest he would cancel our movie dates.
I abandoned my intuition and my alert system to impress this boy. I sat through these movies,
Slowly I shut up that inner guiding voice and I found myself tolerating what I used to run from. Eventually, things didn’t work out between the boy and I because I wasn’t being my authentic self to begin with.
So why am I sharing this with you on Halloween? I guess it’s because being confronted with Peter Pumpkin heads has somehow brought this memory rushing back to me and I am reminded how we can quickly abandon what we know to be true.
But our unease will always give us clues. Within us is a deep inner knowing, a compass that should never be squelched, no matter how cute the boy is.