Death… It's A Living

I believe that the feeling of uncanniness occurs when we have difficulty categorizing a sensation as either safe or unsafe. It is a discomforting sensation because the need to detect the difference between safe and unsafe unfamiliar stimuli has driven our organismic evolution. To keep us safe more times that not, we’ve evolved a negativity bias that causes us to doubt the safety of unfamiliar stimuli. But rather than run away as we often do when stimuli are clearly unsafe, we might stay and continue to observe uncanny stimuli in order to gather more information. Likely depending on one’s level of openness to experience, some of us are more inclined to be interested in the uncanny, whereas others of us less so.

As I write this, Halloween is only 1 week away. On the face of it, Halloween is as close to a festival of the uncanny as we have in America. But as much as I enjoy thinking about the uncanny, I’ve never been a big fan of Halloween—at least not since I was last young enough to Trick-or-Treat without embarrassment. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it is because while Halloween promises uncanniness as a celebration of the spooky and macabre, it doesn’t often deliver because it lives up to expectations. It is difficult for a holiday to remain uncanny when you know what is about to happen. All holidays rely on social scripts. The Halloweens that have experienced are almost indistinguishable from each other: Children dress up—less and less frequently as something ghoulish—and after nightfall wander around neighborhoods, knocking on doors, and collect candy. In my neighborhood, roughly 80% of the houses will have jack-o-lanterns or some sort of decoration to encourage participation. One house will give out full sized candy bars; another will give out dental supplies, risking the wrath of teens who think that they are too old to wear a costume but not too old to collect candy. None of this has happened yet this year, but I know it will happen. I don’t expect to be unnerved, which is a shame because that can be part of the fun.

Walking the dog through my neighborhood, I’ve been impressed with the amount of time and effort some of my neighbors have invested. I’ve seen full-scale UFO crashes, gigantic spiders outside a house completely covered with faux webs, and dozens and dozens of skeletons dressed and posed in humorous positions. The best yard displays are charming and clever, but I haven’t seen anything that would classify as legitimately spooky or uncanny.

I just checked my news feed (it’s a habit I’d like to break, I had no desire to actual read any of the headlines). One of the links was for Halloween party treats from Food Network. All of the treats are cute versions of things that might have once been spooky or uncanny: skeletons, mummies, zombies, and so on. Halloween seems to get less scary each year.

That said, I don’t suppose anyone has a clue how “scary” the first Halloween was. In fact, there was no real “first” Halloween. Halloween as we Americans know it is a modern version of an amalgamation of multiple pagan and Christian traditions from Ireland and Scotland. Because many of these traditions predate any sort of written record, not all historians agree on the true origins of this festival. However, most seem to think that the ancient Celtic tradition of Samhain (pronounced “Sowen” and featured in the background of the excellent Netflix series Bodkin) was blurred sometime in the 9^th century with the medieval Christian holiday of All Saint’s Day.

Samhain was truly an uncanny day because it marked the liminal period between the harvest season and winter. Many ancient cultures around the world had or have festivals, ceremonies, or rituals associated with the change in seasons. For a traditional community, this would have been a defining time of the year. Because Samhain marked the beginning of winter in a particularly cold and harsh part of the world, it was naturally associated with the coming of the dead. Winter is coming. Therefore, the night of October 31^st wasn’t just the liminal period between autumn and winter, it denoted the opening of a liminal space between the living and the dead.

Many of the dead who returned to the world of the living meant no harm. Many Celtic communities would set places at the supper table for relatives of the near and distant past. Other spirits may not have held the best intent, and like many of the gods, faeries, and spirits of the world’s mythologies they needed to be appeased so as not to curse the living with a longer winter, shortened supplies, or dead livestock.

In some Celtic communities, young men would dress up as these mischievous phantasms and go from farm to farm, asking for a gift that might favor the spirits. It may have been thought that the spirits themselves were confused by the dress-up and, as long as mortals were being shook down for food, happy to pass over without causing any real harm.

These are spooky thoughts, but it is difficult to know how scary living through a Samhain in 234 AD might have been. Was it full of terror, thinking that gates of the afterlife were open and that the dead were back to cause mischief or harm? Was it all in good fun? Surely, no one was really fooled by the ghostly costumes.

What we can say with certainty, however, is that the connection between the festival and the uncanny was explicit. Death itself was the major theme of evening. The dead walked the earth and threatened the living that they would be next. Today, that connection has grown tenuous. Although there are still many Halloween activities associated with the undead, it is no longer compulsory. In fact, if more than 10% of the children who ring my doorbell asking for candy are dressed as something, anything, related to death, I’ll be shocked. Most will dress up as superheroes and Disney princesses. I’ll see three Taylor Swifts for every one vampire.

In 2024, it’s difficult to have a holiday that celebrates the divide between the living and the dead because we never think about death at all anymore. The dead don’t return to have dinner in the houses they died in because they didn’t die in their homes; they died in nursing homes and hospitals, hooked up to machines away from the eyes of the public. We don’t need an uncanny holiday because death is itself becoming foreign and uncanny. We’ve seen thousands of zombies on screen, but only a handful of us have ever seen a real corpse.

That’s why one of my favorite films about death is Stand by Me. It’s not a Halloween film, nor is it even a horror film. And although it is based on a short story by the Santa Claus of Halloween himself, Steven King, it doesn’t offer anything close to the terror that many of his other stories turned films provide. But few films are quite as moving, and even fewer treat death and its associated mysteriousness is such an honest way. The original story was called The Body, and I mention that here because it is a clever misdirection. The plot follows four 12-year-old boys in late 1950s small-town Oregon as they seek to become heroes for locating the body of a dead high-school student. But the body is just a McGuffin, a reason for the four boys to bond and come-of-age. When the boys eventually find the body, one of them (Gordie, played as a child by a pre-Star Trek Wil Wheaton and as the adult narrator by a post-Jaws Richard Dreyfuss) is forced to confront the death of his older brother, who provided Gordie with the attention that his parents never did. But even that isn’t the death that the film cares about.

Stand By Me is really about the death of childhood. This is not made clear until the final two scenes, narrated by Dreyfuss, which explain that after the events of the film, the boys mostly drifted apart as they grew up. The character played by River Phoenix is said to have been randomly killed trying to break up an altercation. As the film closes, it ends with words that grow more poignant for me as I get older: “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?” Sadly, I suspect this is true for many of us, especially those of us who are male.

The change from childhood to adolescence (and the change from adolescence to adulthood, etc.) is never clear. The actual act of growing up feeling neither safe nor unsafe. My own adolescent sons often speak simultaneously of longing for more freedom and independence while worrying about being on their own in a few years. Development itself is uncanny because we are constantly changing. And try as some of us might, we can’t stop.

On second thought, maybe it’s a good thing for so many that Halloween is now so tame and safe. Maybe kids, more than anyone else, need a holiday where things happen just as they expect.

-The Plague Doctor