A Good Halloween Post

And not one fucking word about the election! Read to the end for my list of the 13 best horror films.

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I WAS FORTUNATE to come of age before those MISSING CHILD alerts started appearing on milk cartons. This was also a time before the Satanic panic swept across the US in the 1980s, where kids were allegedly being tortured by devil worshipers (who usually operated preschools).

In the mid-to-late 60s, kids ran wild in the streets of our neighborhood at all hours of the day and night. And if being in school throughout the week wasn’t enough, it was our parent’s prerogative to get us out of the house as early as possible on the weekends.

There was an exhilarating gap between parents and children back then, a private space that maintained the sovereignty of both groups—something I no longer witness with my friends who have kids now. Nowadays, children and parents are joined at the hip, where the parents tote an endless supply of bagged snacks for their kids to nosh while everyone stares into their phones.

How do kids free themselves successfully from the hovering presence of adults today? I understand why people in their 20s and early 30s still live in their childhood homes. It’s never occurred to them to vacate.

Halloween was a form of divine madness back then, too. It meant not only rambling through the neighborhood until midnight but also being able to peer past people’s foyers to see the inside of their homes after they answered their front doors. This stealth view into how people decorated their living rooms was thrilling for a gay Cancer kid.

The camaraderie kids experience by roaming around in packs (and adult-free) no longer exists on Halloween. Today, kids are herded through towns, large and small (or worse, through shopping malls), to allow businesses to give out candy (and coupons) to promote their stores.

Apparently, Halloween is now a multi-billion-dollar-a-year bonanza for candy factories and costume shops, where, again, the line demarcating kids from adults no longer exists. That’s a drag.

Kids should be left to their own devices (and imagination) on Halloween; the holiday is crucial for kids to begin familiarizing themselves with life’s horrors and the frightening modes life might assume—ways of introducing them to what is unpredictable and feral.

When your parents are trick-or-treating alongside you, dressed as Bonnie and Clyde, it’s just not the same experience. We need to launch a campaign that returns Halloween’s initiatory potency to wandering, untethered kids, allowing the subversive images that Halloween conjures to seep deep into their child-bones.

Peter Wyngarde (left) and Martin Stephens from 1961’s The Innocents

Some Halloween discoveries for you:

• Author Dennis Cooper’s list of the most terrifying (and gore-filled) haunted attractions across the globe.

• Astrologer Jessica Murray’s wonderful close read on the holiday.

My list of the 13 best horror films:

1. Hereditary (2018, Ari Aster)

2. Night of the Living Dead (1968, George A. Romero)

3. The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin)

4. Halloween (1978, John Carpenter)

5. Psycho (1961, Alfred Hitchcock)

6. Rosemary’s Baby (1968, Roman Polanski)

7. Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme)

8. The Innocents (1961, Jack Clayton)

9. Midsommar (2019, Ari Aster)

10. Alien (1979, Ridley Scott)

11. Vampyr* (1932, Carl Theodor Dreyer)

12. Carnival of Souls (1962, Herk Harvey)

13. The Sixth Sense (1991, M. Night Shyamalan)

Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, 1968

Love,

(*) Make an effort to find this plucked-from-a-slow-burn-nightmare. The Criterion Collection has recently restored it. And you’ll never forget it.

Opening photograph, Diane Arbus, Untitled, (8) 1970-71, from the Fraenkel Gallery.

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⭐️ My new book, I Love You Jeffrey Dahmer arrives soon! ⭐️

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