Spooky Things 3: Spooks Roam Free
An abandoned house at the end of a street. Public transportation—in America. You hear footsteps behind you, but every time you turn around no one is there. Liminal spaces. A family member gets diagnosed with an illness. Night sets in, and the objects around you morph into figures. A wolf howls in the distance. You almost fall due to an unseen dip on your path. Something touches your leg while swimming in the ocean. You get a call from your family after midnight—they watched the last episode of the show without you.
October is back, which means it’s spooky time! As the years go by, there’s an odd comfort to traditions. One of the subtler fears in life is the immutable advancement of time. Every moment that’s happened is never coming back, and all the moments to come decrease every day. Recurring seasons, traditions, and feelings can help us forget this and make it feel like forever is a possibility. After life, maybe forever is a possibility. And maybe that’s terrifying in its own way. Well, either way, I figure I might as well savor the moment with some things I enjoy. Thrills and chills await.
There are shows and movies I think that can be fun to see every spooky season. Trick ‘r Treat is a great anthological-style Halloween movie that follows several characters with somewhat interweaving stories across the night of Halloween. It’s always cool to see the same event from different perspectives. A more recent horror movie that did this style well was Weapons, which I think would also be a fun Halloween watch. Re-Animator is an older movie that I think is also pretty great for different but similarly spoooooky reasons. If spooks aren’t for your viewing pleasure, and if you consider Die Hard a Christmas movie, then Arsenic and Old Lace would be a film I’d recommend since the story takes place on Halloween.
Some very spooky shows with a pervasive melancholic tone are The Haunting of Hill House alongside The Haunting of Bly Manor. Both have a lot of the same actors, and were created by the same director. I favor The Haunting of Hill House because it came out first and I like the story more. It’s also got more impressive cinematography feats (cough episode 6 cough) and more satisfying payoffs (cough the Bent-Neck Lady cough). That said, both are pretty much top-tier shows, in my humble opinion. Plus, both are fun to rewatch for foreshadowing and clues prior to story reveals as well as the various hidden “ghosts” in the foregrounds and backgrounds.
Aside from movies and shows, there are some fun scares (or at least creeps) I’ve experienced in video games. I’m a fan of Nintendo games which are fairly family-friendly, but there are still moments or even storylines that are unsettling. I guess something of an odd moment was the Manta boss (or “Phantamanta”) on Sirena Beach in Super Mario Sunshine. The idea of a creature coming from the ocean to attack you on land just creeped me out. Another boss that unnerved me in the same game was the eel boss (or “Eely-Mouth”) in Noki Bay. Having to dive deep to the dark ocean floor to fight this thing was all around creepy. Well, these are a couple of actual in-game scares; there are legends (or “creepypastas”) online that have accounts of unnatural and horrifying events, including some occurring in certain video games. The only one I read was about Animal Crossing, which I found kind of silly but at the same time kind of compelling. It’s probably because I read it when I was young, but it was an interesting idea to somewhat believe that in-game things could affect or blend with real-world things. Maybe the most well-known creepypasta is “BEN Drowned,” a story based on the already pervasively unsettling game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Though, I haven’t read it myself.
Ah, October. The prelude to the prelude to the end of the year. Something that slipped my notice but I’m now sad to see is that NaNoWriMo (the website) is no more. It was nice to have a quasi-hub for various writing projects I’d done, as well as casually participate in a community of other writers for inspiration and whatnot. Alas, it seems the more I get older the more I find the things I fear to be tied to sadness. And on that note, happy Halloween!
