San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
There’s a strange attraction to being scared during Halloween.
Halloweenthemed escape room offers thrills in safe setting
The bloody severed head wasn’t helping.
With the switch suddenly thrown to light the display case, I could see that’s what I was touching, my rubbergloved hand reaching through a hole to grope piles of hair, test tubes and switchblades. The blackening head stared, caught in a silent scream. A baby’s cry pierced the din of clanking chains, and I jumped, my free hand leaping to my throat. Then I turned to the 10yearold girl standing near. She looked as stiff as the fake petrified rats we’d just pawed. “Honey, are you OK?”
I wasn’t asking only to be kind. As two friends rushed around us, searching walls and drawers and closets for clues that would get us out of Clockwise Escape Room’s “Paranormal Experiment” room in San Francisco alive, I was remembering myself at Cora’s age.
At that age, one summer night at 4 a.m., I woke up to horror that wasn’t play: My father’s blood up and down the hallway carpet. As I would learn later, someone had entered our house, taken a knife from our kitchen, and stabbed my father as he slept. My father had chased the intruder down the hall, then collapsed in his bedroom; he was dead by the time the paramedics rolled his body down the hallway.
But the editor who had assigned me this Halloweenthemed story didn’t know that history. He didn’t know I had once given an interview on “This American Life” explaining to Ira Glass that, because of the memories of that night, I didn’t like murder mystery games, and I wasn’t going to play Clue. My editor didn’t know that 20 years ago, in college, I’d gone on the log ride at Knott’s “Scary” Farm, where greengray corpses assaulted me from the shadows — and I’d ended up huddled on the bottom of the boat, in spasming tears.
But now here I was, and by accident one of the friends I’d recruited for this
“escape room” had asked to bring his daughter. Now this child was with me. Why was I doing this to her? Why, as a culture, do we do this to ourselves? Or, as scholar Noel Carroll put it in his 2003 book “The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart”: “Why do people willingly seek out dysphoric experiences for recreational purposes?”
The history of Halloween is not of much explanatory use here. True, its origins trace back to the Catholic Church moving its All Hallowed Saints’ feast to align with the Celtic harvest festival of Samhain, when Celts believed the veil lifted between the living and the dead, and spirits roamed the Earth — but how does that help us understand seeking fear?
Nor does lamenting the American propensity to conjoin All Hallow’s Eve with extreme violence explain the draw. Horror movies are yearround big business, after all, and other cultures are happy to import our goriest Halloween pastimes — in Denmark, at the annual Dystopia haunted house, you can pay good money to have a 6foot5 man wearing a butcher’s apron and a pig’s head follow you with a chainsaw.
The scare tactics at Clockwise Escape, mercifully, never rose to such Wes Craven traumatism. And fortunately, Cora and I had distractions. Shut in that windowless basement room, she and I and my two friends had to decode satanic symbols, blow on candles in the right order, puzzle out a computer password, stab knives into a voodoo doll and in a climactic finish for which I say “bravo” to Clockwise’s designers, sit in a repurposed dentist’s chair to have our brains sucked out of our bodies.
Still, as the final door released us to a musty fluorescentlit hall and a regal game master who had been monitoring our progress led us back to real life with Transylvanian suaveness, I appreciated what Danish professor Mathias Clasen had quantified, again, in a followup to his 2017 book “Why Horror Seduces.”
In a study, Clasen found that some visitors to Denmark’s Dystopia haunted house entered as “adrenaline junkies,” deploying specific mental and physical strategies to intensify the experience. Others walked in as “whiteknucklers,” calling on coping skills to prevent panic or tamp it down. But the two kinds of people walked out with roughly equal satisfaction, high on the adrenaline, serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin other researchers have found that horror triggers.
It’s an ecstatic response to an adaptive exercise: We immerse ourselves in horror in order to practice regulating fear within a safe environment. And 33 years after I woke up to my father’s blood, I could appreciate that again, dopamine pumping as I walked back into Clockwise’s bright lobby, a soothingly asinine Hootie and the Blowfish song playing through the speakers. But 10yearold Cora? I placed a hand on her shoulder. “You found some of the hardest clues!” I said. “Did you have fun?”
Her braces glinted. She had. We had. The human psyche, given the right conditions, is shockingly resilient. It felt good for Halloween horror to be fun and games again.