Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Halloween 2020
Fun with death and fear, anyone?
PORTERSVILLE, Pa. — The setting: a rolling patch of Pennsylvania farmland, about 15 miles from the little town where “Night of the Living Dead” was filmed. The moment: Halloween season 2020, a moonlit Friday night.
She strides up to the hayride and beckons you to the dimly lit tent behind her. Her eyes are hollow. “Blood” streaks her nurse’s uniform. Across her forehead is a deep, oozing wound.
“This is the corona tent,” she says. “I’m Nurse Ratched. We’re gonna test you all for the corona.”
On the truck, the voice of a teenage girl slices through the darkness: “I TOLD you there’d be a covid section.”
This is Cheeseman Fright Farm, one of those stylish Halloween attractions that emerge from the shadows in the United States of America when the leaves start falling and the days grow shorter. On this night, it is the place to be: By 8:45 p.m., a line 400 strong — some wearing face masks, some not — waits, at $20 a pop, to be carted off into the darkness and have creatures in various stages of decay leap out at them for the better part of an hour.
Good fun? Other years, sure. But this year? This 2020 that we’ve clawed through 10 months of so far, through pandemic and uncertainty and racial injustice and sometimes violent unrest and unthinkable political divisions and, and, and, and ALL of it?
In a year when fear and death have commandeered front-row seats in American life, what does it mean to encounter the holiday whose very existence hinges on turning fear and death into entertainment?
What happens when 2020 and Halloween collide? Can being scared — under certain, controlled conditions — still be fun?
CULTURAL CONTRADICTION
When we are afraid, we have sought out fear. For a century, that’s been the odd contradiction in American popular culture.
In 1931, when the Great Depression was at its height and American society seemed fragile, Universal Studios uncorked the first of its iconic horror films, delivering up Bela Lugosi as Dracula and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.
In the 1950s, when American life felt finite, with nuclear menace from without and subversive threats from within, science fiction produced “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Thing From Another World.”
But usually the fear Americans have chased is different than — although certainly related to — the fear present in our lives.
Today, in a nation that has buried more than 225,000 of its own from covid, how does the iconography of death play — the tombstones and caskets and decaying corpses and the feeling, however fleeting, that you might not make it around the next corner?
“This year is very different,” says David J. Skal, who chronicles the American fascination with horror and is the author of “Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween.”
“We have to process all this unpleasant cultural stuff. But it’s easier to do when you’re not looking at it too directly,” Skal says. “I hope there is some kind of catharsis that comes out of Halloween this year.”
Yet with so many Americans affected by the events of this year, is that the kind of release people seek?
“There’s a real dichotomy right now,” says Matt Hayden, co-owner of Terror Town, an Old West-themed horror village in Williamsburg, Ohio. “If you’ve been directly impacted by serious illness or loss, we’ve heard from people that this isn’t something that appeals to them this year.”
That’s not the majority. Hayden reports record attendance this year, people who want to swap that dull, pounding fear for something immersive and cinematic — to lose themselves in a storyline for a moment.
“They can come to places like this,” he says, “and separate themselves from this year and what it’s been.”
TWO KINDS OF MONSTERS
The coronavirus might be 2020’s newest bogeyman, but other, older ones are just as menacing. Even beyond covid, there’s enough fear and death in American life to go around this year.
“This year is very different. We have to process all this unpleasant cultural stuff. But it’s easier to do when you’re not looking at it too directly. I hope there is some kind of catharsis that comes out of Halloween this year.”
— David J. Skal, author, “Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween”