Halloween—a Post Mortem

I confess the block I live on didn't do much of a job this Halloween. It was drizzly, the World Series this year involves the local Mudville Nine, and with one thing and another I only bought candy, and didn't get around to making a jack-'o-lantern. And nobody else on the block did either. The young women down the street put out a bowl of candy because they weren't home. Nobody else but me gave out candy personally. So when one woman surveyed the block and said "Where's the Halloween spirit?" I didn't have a ready answer.

But I was certainly in the Halloween spirit that morning. I got up early, made coffee, sat in my darkened living room with the cat and watched the 1963 version of The Haunting on my laptop. I'd seen it once before, when I was just a kid, and remembered this one scene very vividly. If you're not familiar with the movie or the Shirley Jackson novel The Haunting of Hill House, the basic plot is the investigation of a possibly haunted house by an anthropology professor, a relative of the house's owner, and two other people who've been involved with paranormal incidents. One, a mousy woman named Eleanor, has experienced a poltergeist and may have the ability to move things with her mind. Mostly she's lonely, and wants to belong somewhere. The other paranormal person is psychic. She's a wonderful character, alternately friendly and mean. She has a certain adolescent resentment of pretense, and she's capable of lashing out at any moment, and it makes sense—she knows what everyone is thinking, and thus humanity doesn't impress her much.

One thing I didn't pick up on when I was a kid is that the character, who's named Theo, is obviously a lesbian. She stands too close to Eleanor when they first meet, purring with overfriendliness. This happens on a couple of occasions, and in one scene she paints the mousy woman's toenails for her and plies her with brandy, both things Eleanor has never experienced before. "By the time I'm through with you, you'll be a different person," Theo says. Eleanor acts oblivious to the come-ons, but she's really not: In a tense moment, when Theo accuses Eleanor of falling for the handsome, kindly Dr. Markway, Eleanor lashes out herself, calling Theo "unnatural" and "one of nature's mistakes." This being 1963, what's being stated obviously also has an escape clause—Eleanor could be talking about the psychic abilities. But Theo becomes nervously defensive, although she's been quite open about the mind-reading. I was fascinated with this—it's as though the characters in the film are mouthing the words "She's a lesbian!" to the audience behind their hands so the censors won't hear. Theo is played by a young Claire Bloom, and she's a hipster, with clothes by Mary Quant. And what's really interesting is that Shirley Jackson got annoyed with a British critic who said Theo from the book was a lesbian—Jackson insisted she merely meant to portray her as a generally ambiguous person. So the film folks deliberately put the subplot in. It just seemed cool to me—it was 1963, but this character is there, part of the landscape, living her life and it's mostly treated as an unremarkable thing.

The story is ambiguous in a fun way generally, with great black and white photography, excellent acting, and some genuinely creepy moments. And the scariness is mostly in the atmosphere. Stephen King says that if body parts aren't bouncing off gore-spattered walls, you're dealing with "terror," not "horror," but I don't think anyone else would make that distinction. To me, it's just smart, economical storytelling.

Anyway, at one point the group is downstairs in the parlor, and the poltergeist starts up, making a hammering sound that echoes eerily through the house. And what I remember from the first time is that the anthropologist Dr. Markway, although naturally apprehensive and rattled, nevertheless listens to it with a rapt, almost avid fascination. This is what he came to find, of course. But when I first saw the film it was the scariest thing of all. You know that thing that most of us don't really want to know? He wanted to know it, he really did. I regarded his desire to know what lies beyond with a twinge of pious horror (or terror, if you insist, Stephen) the way the Puritans regarded having ants in your pants. It seemed like much too big a risk to run. It's funny—it's just a fleeting moment in the film, but it obviously left a huge impression on me.

And while I was watching it the other morning, with the living room lights on to push away the blackness outside, the cat crouched, stalking something. I followed his gaze and saw a centipede several inches long emerge from behind a chair. It happens that centipedes totally creep me out, the foul little mechanistic soulless horrors, and they bite people and cats and other mammals and I hate them. I grabbed the nearest blunt instrument, pushed the cat roughly away, and started slamming away at the horrible little beast. It took eight or ten whacks before I really got the damn thing. Brrr!

So that's where the Halloween spirit was, lady. In my living room that morning, watching a spooky film and killing large menacing arthropods in the predawn blackness. Sufficient to the day was the evil thereof! Mwa ha ha ha ha!!! And I had oodles of fun passing out candy. So it was a scary, fun day. And that's how my Halloween was.