Sexy Halloween
If you haven't heard, Halloween is number two. At almost $7 billion a year in sales, Americans are spending more on Halloween than on any other holiday except Christmas.
Want a 2-foot-tall zombie that pulls off its head? You can get it for $100. A gory severed head? $50. Demented scarecrow, goblin, grim reaper mask? You're looking at about $60.
Sure, it's fun. But why has Halloween and its ghoulish fare gotten so popular?
The horror genre and Puritan morality
Maybe it has something to do with the rise of horror in our culture, especially as embodied in all those fright movies: Scream, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare Elm Street, to name only the movies with multiple sequels.
And maybe the rise of horror has something to do with the rise of . . . sex.
When sexual freedom rose, horror rose with it. Deep Throat came out in 1973 and Texas Chainsaw Massacre in 1975. Both were low-budget long shots that brought its producers millions of dollars. Maybe it was coincidence.
Maybe it was also coincidence that Blood Feast, a movie that signaled the official birth of the gore film, came out in 1965, just as America was beginning its full-scale tumble into the sexual revolution.
But you ever notice how it seems that the pretty and promiscuous girls are always the victims in the horror movies? David Hogan noticed it in his book, Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, criticizing horror films for working “from a surprisingly Puritan morality” that punishes fornication.
Just more coincidence?
I doubt it.
Watch your sin tax
George Sewell once wrote, “Fear is the tax that conscience pays to guilt.”
In our post-sexual revolution culture of anything goes, sin is everywhere. Is guilt too, underneath the surface?
What we have is a permissive culture driving its guilt into fear. As the fear proliferates, it manifests itself in our culture: fear of illness, fear of being poor, fear for one's reputation. Fear pervades our culture.
It's not surprising that fear also manifests itself in popular culture–specifically, horror movies that play off a pervading sense of fear. Pop culture, after all, is largely motivated by profits, and profits result from giving the people what appeals to them. If people are fearful, horror will appeal.
As part of that celebration of horror and fear, perhaps our culture's repression of morality (the flip-side of celebrating immorality) unleashes itself in the form of killing immorality–specifically, in the screen killing of the promiscuous.
Halloween nexus
The screen killing of the promiscuous reveals a nexus of sin, fear, horror, and popular culture.
Once this nexus is understood, the amazing popularity of Halloween is not hard to figure out: In a culture where immorality is celebrated, fear is ensconced. In a culture where fear is ensconced, the things that play off of fear–like horror and gore and fright–will be popular.
And in a culture where such things are popular, the holiday that celebrates them becomes a multi-billion dollar affair.
Too much of a bad thing
Don't get me wrong. I enjoy Halloween and a measure of the horror that comes with it.
But it does concern me that our culture seems to be enjoying it so much. It seems to corroborate my suspicion that Halloween's popularity is tied to the popularity of immorality.
After all, how good is a moral compass that tells us to spend billions on ghouls, witches, and zombies?
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This piece appeared in 2003, at Busted Halo. Unsurprisingly, I've taken an interest in the spate of recent zombie movies: Legend, Zombie Land, etc. In zombie flicks, everyone succumbs to a horrible virus and becomes cannibalistic creatures with no brains, just driven by an indiscriminating lust for flesh. Is it another horror release from the id . . . in this case, a release triggered by the culture of "hooking up" and mass promiscuity? There seem to be horror/sex parallels.
But then how should one interpret those chaste vampires in the shockingly-popular Twilight series? Does that upend the whole horror-id concept?
Good fodder for nerd bar talk.
