Halloween has always held a special place in my heart. The decorations, the costumes, and the TV specials were always fun this time of year. I loved dressing up for Halloween (still do when I can). I always had to be either something dead or scary. One year, when I was dressed as a vampire, I scared my next door neighbor so bad that he refused to go trick or treating. I think he was barely one or two years old at the time.
Though I love most things about the season, I’m not a huge fan of haunted houses. Don’t get me wrong, the decorations and costumes are fantastic, but I can’t deal with the sensory overload that sometimes happens to me with the flashing lights and loud noises. Plus I really hate jump scares - they’re not actually scary, just startling.
It’s the Halloween aesthetic that I truest find beautiful. The leaves are changing colors, then falling to the ground. The air smells crisp and a little smoky at times. There’s an ever lingering reminder that with life eventually comes death.
I love it.
If you’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you’d have notice that I really like witches and the Gothic aesthetic. I’m a big sucker for movies like Sleepy Hallow and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (even with the silly accents and over sexual tones). I read the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft over and over again.
Death is the overarching theme of the season with some villainy and chaos on the side. I think there’s a reason the Sanderson sisters are so fondly remembered even though they are planning on murdering children in the movie Hocus Pocus. They’re everything fun and evil about the season. They’re threatening, but not too threatening.
For a while now, I’ve been working on creating a collection of poems that I feel fit into the Gothic style. I’ve written about 30 poems so far and, though I’m n where near close yet, I would like to try to get them published next year. I might even include some ink drawings.
A lot of these poems focus on death and what comes after. I take great joy in playing with expectations such as using limericks, tropically a playful or funny poem style, and use that format as though it were on a gravestone.
I’ve been told by a few people that my work can be delightfully demented.
Or maybe I was using that term to describe my sense of writing style. I don’t always like it when something is scary to be scary or depressing to be depressing. That isn’t how I am always able to work through my emotions. I often twist and bend these expressions to where it might take a bit to realize exactly what I’m writing about.
Death can be absurdly funny, like in the movies Scream, Scary Movie, and Final Destination. There’s a part of me that’s satisfied when the villain is killed off for good to triumph, like in Hocus Pocus or pretty much every Disney Villain ever.
There’s nothing wrong with being fascinated with the darker side of things. True crime stories and ghost hunting shows are still popular. There’s a mortician who hosts a YouTube channel and explains different things about her job (it’s called “Ask a Mortician”. People still visit sites of mass destruction, murder, and battlefields whether as reminders of the past or to satisfy a morbid need.
I’m not sure where my fascination with the darkness in life comes from. It could be that I need to have some kind of exposure to the worst side of nature so that I can appreciate the best.
It’s hard to know what to do with extreme negativity when you’re not regularly exposed to it. How do you empathize with an experience you’ve never lived through, but know that other people have? How is it possible to understand another person’s pain when you can’t comprehend where that pain came from?
Seeking out darkness isn’t bad. I find that it’s just another way for me to make peace with the experiences I’ve witness and lived through.
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Until next week.
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