All Hallows Eve

All Hallows Eve

Tonight is Halloween--the ancient Celtic rituals subsumed in commercial form. Kids have been ringing my doorbell since about 6:00 PM, but I play the cranky old man and don't answer. I don't mind Halloween, but I do mind opening the door a thousand times a night.

The Toothless Old Hag, a.k.a. "Granny," has been answering the door to her apartment across the sidewalk from mine. She seems quite happy to see the children dressed up like ghouls and superheroes. After chatting up the little tykes and their parents, she tells them, "I'm sorry, but I'll have to take a rain check on that." Now it's pretty quiet. Perhaps Granny has an oven full of little Hansels and Gretels already. Gingerbread anyone?

Yesterday, Granny was dressed in a revealingly short, baby-blue sundress. Her bleached-blonde follicles were topped by a pointy witch's hat. This sight was rendered all the more enjoyable by the cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth in the kind of snarl worthy of Dead Elvis on the can.

Horror movies are the staple on cable for the week. Last night I watched Rob Zombie's House of 1000 Corpses. I was surprised that I found it entertaining. The film was set in 1977, the era of classic slasher-dismemberer films like 10,000 Maniacs. What is it about country bumpkins, evil clowns, dark woods and bloody axes that enthralls the public so? "You think we country folk are just stupid, dontcha?" yells the crazed clown at the beginning of the movie.

Further evidence of the link between horror and the extreme right can be found in the following recent article:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article323450.ece

An interesting quotation:

Things started getting particularly gruesome, in a Hammer horror sort of way, in the abortion scene, when cold, heartless doctor characters used an outsize pair of tweezers to pull unidentified bloody animal parts out from between a teenage girl's legs. (This trick, incidentally, is straight out of Keenan Roberts' outreach kit.) Having extracted the foetus - "America's version of the Holocaust," the devil narrators tell us - the doctors then manage to let the girl die too, through inattention. They act like it's just another day at the office.

I believe it's Red State angst, the paranoia of the damned, that haunts these shows. The gothic, guilty, weeping heart of Reverend Dimmsdale still beats in the breast of every Pat Robertson and James Dobson. When you look at them practically foaming at the mouth on the daily cable news programs, you realize they are only one moment of enlightened insanity away from sodomizing Burt Reynolds and a boatful of kayakers in the back woods of Deliverance.

Tonight, the new version of Dawn of the Dead is on cable. Zombies, Rob or otherwise, are always a heap-big pile of undead fun-o-rama.