Dancing with the Unknown

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Thank the universe, and all of your wonderful well wishes, that my body is firmly on the mend, and I am almost completely done with my seasonal allergy attack. Normally it rages for one week, and then the following week – which is this week – I slowly get back to the swing of things.

Just in time for the annual MONSTER MANIA HORROR FILM & MEMORABILIA CONVENTION, taking place this weekend in Hunt Valley (there will be another one in Oaks Pa November 11-13 just in case you want to check it out but you cannot make it this weekend).

I will be in full attendance wearing my horror t-shirts that I bought last year from the Pallbearer Press merchandise table. Check out their incredible work online: https://pallbearerpress.com/. And, as I did last year, I’ll be sure to bring home some classic horror DVD’s and movie posters as well.

Movie legend Malcolm McDowell (Caligula, A Clockwork Orange, Rob Zombie’s Halloween 1&2), will be on hand to meet fans, along with Doug Bradley, (Pinhead from the Hellraiser films), Jon Bernthal, Oded Fehr, Skeet Ulrich, Alice Krige, Andrew Robinson, Anthony Michael Hall, Chris Sarandon (the cool vampire in the original Fright Night), Richard Brake (Doom-Head in Rob Zombie’s 31) and other notable actors.

Perhaps my journey into horror is pretty typical. When I was a young kid I saw Alien and ran out of the theater halfway through the film, then come home and leave the light on in my bedroom for most of the night. Almost the same thing happened with The Howling. In between those, the Hammer studios Dracula films starring Christopher Lee frightened me when my elementary school showed them in the auditorium during Halloween.

And here I am decades later, scarfing up one after the other A and B rated slasher, supernatural, zombie, vampire, werewolf, and various other creature features.

What’s the attraction? As I sat with my friend and art business coach Scott Burkholder, who is adept at drawing out my best articulation of what I do, I said it is about dancing with the unknown. In horror movies it is about going into the dark, going into the unknown places, the remote corners of the world, to confront the things that will scare the hell out of us, and reveal the truths about ourselves.

It is also about dancing with the things that haunts us.

In horror there is the boogeyman, the ghost, the apparition, the resurrected corpse, the personification of evil and the agent of revenge. There are the things we have buried that we pray won’t come back to get us, the deeds we have done that gives us nightmares, the secrets we hope we can take to the grave.

It is also the blood, the gore, the suspended disbelief – Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, and Jason Voorhees coming back time after time laying carnage in their wake.

Dancing with the unknown can be akin to raw and real self-critique, wrestling with your own demons, confronting the darkness within you. As Friedrich Nietzsche warns in Beyond Good and Evil, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

By the way, the convention will be buzzing with Halloween Ends which opens in theaters on October 14. This is the franchise ending film, the end of the Halloween era, that is supposed to explain how Myers is able to rise and return after being killed countless times in so many different ways. We will finally understand what he was staring at in the last scene in the last film, Halloween Kills, and why.

We gravitate toward what is comfortable, what is safe, and what is reassuring. We believe we need to stay in the light to feel happy and whole. But is there growth in that? It is what we don’t know that we need to confront. It is the darkness where we discover who we are.

In the darkness we are born, and into the darkness we will return.

In every hero’s journey, the protagonist/hero goes into the dark to fight the demon, the monster, the antagonist/villain. This is where they find out what they have learned, where they confront their greatest fears, and discover who they are.

It is also a greater rush to be frightened, for fear is more powerful than love. One may argue the opposite, but there is no greater driver of human beings than fear, including entertainment.

Even in news cycles, the dark stuff always grabs more attention. If it bleeds, it leads. The heartwarming stuff is always relegated to the back, at the end. Check the records, but not one network television program dedicated to positive news has ever lasted. Ever.

https://qz.com/307214/heres-what-happened-when-a-news-site-only-reported-good-news-for-a-day/

So even those who claim to dislike horror movies, draw themselves toward real life horror.

Some would read this and think I am attempting to make a case for horror. Actually, I don’t need to do this. It makes its own case. What I am doing is making more of a philosophical examination of what we as humans experience with the genre.

I am not the only one who is delving to the ethics of horror. There are there are published articles for you to consume, such as, “Ethics in Horror Movies: An Analysis of the Bye Bye Man” by Khara D. Lukancic: https://www.academia.edu/36156051/Ethics_in_Horror_Movies_An_Analysis_of_The_Bye_Bye_Man?email_work_card=title.

So, if you think horror is a marginalized art form, you would be sorely mistaken. It enjoys a robust and international audience, and is growing every year. Numerous film careers have begun in horror (George Clooney, Kevin Bacon, Renée Zellweger, and Jamie Lee Curtis to name a few), and well-established actors are immersing themselves in such roles.

In fact, horror is one of the most profitable genres in the film industry. Candyman, the sequel to the 1992 classic starring Tony Todd, scored more than $27 million in ticket sales its first weekend at the box office. This happened last year during the pandemic when Hollywood was struggling: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/30/candyman-proves-how-profitable-horror-movies-are-at-the-box-office.html

 Dancing with the unknown is not just an individual experience; it is a collective journey, and a global phenomenon. Think about your dance with the unknown in your own life.