In the Not Too Distant Future

October 31st, 2007Blog0 comments

Happy Halloween, people! I’ll be celebrating the old fashioned way: Summoning demons in the woods. If you have a spare ram’s head you can join me.

Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame is starting a new project with a bunch of old hands from the show. This project is called Cinematic Titanic and promises to be big. BIG! I’m very excited to see what these folks come up with.

I watched MST3k fanatically in high school. It was one of the things that taught me how to be funny. And I mean modern, adult funny. Before then I was all about the fart jokes. Afterwards: Pop culture references and observational humor. Now: Character-based funny. In the future: Fart jokes again. It’s the circle of life.

Since most of our cultural holidays are about appreciating someone or something, I like to take the time to think over that thing which we’re all celebrating. What is Halloween? What’s it all about? Is it about worshipping the dark lord satan and tending the incubus? I do that every day, so what makes Halloween special?

In my analysis, I think that Halloween is about the celebration of our triumph over fear. There are a lot of things to be afraid of in this world, from evil paintings to evil clowns. In fact it blows my mind that evil clowns have their own Wikipedia entry. Who on earth wrote that? Wikipedia just lost some credibility points in my mind. But that’s a digression.

Anyway, fear and Halloween. On this day society sends its children out into the night to knock on strangers’ doors to collect candy. Normally this is the last thing you want to do. This is like having a holiday where everyone wears underwear made out of bacon and runs through a lion preserve. But on Halloween it’s okay — we are flaunting our power over fear. The War on Terror is literally being won on this very special day.

And the costume bit: If I remember correctly, in the long-ago people would wear costumes to outwit the devil and his minions; now we wear costumes to evoke a part of our personality (usually the sexy part) normally hidden. It’s a day when we can finally dress like a slut (even though we clearly don’t have the bod for it, but hey — it’s Halloween). Also closeted gay men can dress fabulously and once again make us wonder why they just don’t come out of the closet already.

It’s a magical night. Fear can be a great thing — it’s a powerful motivator for wanting to become stronger or wanting to get stuff done. But what other holiday celebrates fear in this way? The only other one I can think of is Thanksgiving, which is all about pure, unadulterated fear. And turkey.