Surviving Halloween, pandemic-style
Halloween is the stuff of tricks and treats and horror. But it is to our shared sadness that the horror of a pandemic — and how it is has been handled — rages with more fury than any ghost or otherworldly creature.
Edgar Allan Poe published his scary, plague story “The Masque of the Red Death” in 1842. “No disease had ever been so fatal, or so hideous,” he wrote. “Blood was its avatar and its seal.”
Plagues in horror movies films have also had a long history. In 1926 s “Faust,” Mephistopheles brings with him death and disease. Not surprising, perhaps, given that the old devil is the Lord of the Flies.
Four years earlier, in one of the creepiest movies ever made, the vampire of “Nosferatu” traveled with rats that spread disease throughout a German city.
In 1964 s “The Flesh Eaters,” one of the first “gore” movies, hungry microbes rapidly devour the skin and innards of victims. Flesh-eating viruses returned in the 2000s in “Cabin Fever.” And let’s not forget the Hong Kong-made “Ebola Syndrome,” released in 1996. (Only viewers with strong stomachs need apply.) The infected become bloody messes, the sight and the site of horror.
In these strange and unfortunate times, let’s add to our filmography 1995 s “Outbreak,” with Dustin Hoffman.
For decades, zombie movies have regularly used disease to explain how their monsters came to be.
In the first season of “The Walking Dead,” the surviving characters strike out for the Center for Disease Control (CDC), hoping — as we hope now, in 2020 — that it will provide real answers, the truth, rather than spew communicable falsehoods from Donald Trump, the Lord of the Lies.
To be sure, the Black Death seems as scary now as when it spread across Europe in the 14th century. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. To hear “Bring out your dead” is horrifying, unless you’re watching a Monty Python comedy.
No wonder Poe determined that a plague could frighten his readers. The Red Death came like a “thief in the night,” to steal away with yonder lives and souls.
Looking for a scary movie to watch on Oct. 31? Roger Corman’s lush and largely faithful film adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” (with Vincent Price as Prince Prospero) is currently streaming on Shudder.
Poe also wrote the poem “Alone” (1829), in which a cloud assumes the form of a “demon in [his] view.” And let’s recall that the tradition of the jack o’ lantern comes from Ireland, from a doomed lost soul, condemned to wander the Earth all by himself.
To be separated, apart, alone: here is another kind of cabin fever.
To be on the other side of a glass window in a nursing home from one’s relatives, to be by oneself in an ICU unit in the fleeting moments before death: that is real horror.
In Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death,” the arrogant character Prince Prospero plans to hang the Red Death high, at dawn. But his bluster is of no more value or strength than Trump’s. The Red Death personified brings forth a reckoning, with Prospero left dead on the floor, his character’s name nothing more than bitter irony.
Poe’s story concludes ominously: “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” And in one of his poems, he painfully described his “most immemorial year,” which does sound a lot like 2020.
But Poe’s loneliness — trapped as it was in a sepulcher by the sounding sea — need not be our inheritance. Here is my sincerest hope and my determined belief.
Life resumed after the Spanish Flu of 1918, as did moviegoing. Yes, the ravages of the plague sadly took many lives, as well as many businesses, including many movie theaters.
And yet the movie theater industry as a whole lived on, just as it survived other diseases like scarlet fever and polio.
To quote an exasperated Jeff Goldblum from “Jurassic Park,” “life, uh…finds a way.” Pandemics are true horror, but they do pass. They will pass.
As for Halloween of 2020? Alas, we remain stuck in the trick, in the banal but horrifying reality that this pathogen has delivered. Masks must be worn this year, three-ply over the mouth and nose.
My beloved mother cannot pass out candy, for fear that she and the little kids might spread and contract coronavirus.
But our treat will come, even if it sadly comes after much more tragedy and death. We will prevail. A long and sad and scary road lies ahead, but we will be together again, including at movie theaters. Here’s to you, Halloween 2021!