Spiders and things…

This opinion column concerning American culture’s need for over-the-top scenes for a scare during Halloween was written for the Oct. 10, 2007, issue of the Belmont Vision.

It’s still early in October, but I recently experienced my first haunted houses of the season – of my adult life for that matter. In middle school about 10 years ago, my experience involved fake spider webs, lots of plastic spiders and schoolmates with scary-at-the-time masks. I knew professional haunted houses had to be more terrifying than that, but I had no idea just how extravagant haunted houses are these days.

Of course, there’s the grim music as you walk into the haunted house, signaling you’re moving toward certain

doom. And zombies, ax murderers and monsters are around every corner, drooling over the chance to jump out and make you squeal. Those things are to be expected. But people left on operating room tables moaning and seizing while they bleed to death? The doctor gripping the mutilated baby he just stole the life from? The torture devices used for those alien experiments? Are these horrifying portrayals really necessary just for people to get a good scare?

Why must our worst dreams be put into a three-dimensional interpretation so people can get a quick rush of adrenaline? I’m not condemning haunted houses by any means. In fact, the experience was kind of exhilarating – as soon as I made it safely out the back door without having to worry about clowns chasing me. But why does it take the most gruesome, terrifying scenes to make the haunted house worth the money? Granted, I’m a media studies major. But I think the media has to take much of the blame for our addiction to gore. We see images of death on TV or hear about people killed in the most brutal ways to the point that it no longer fazes us when it flashes on the screen. It takes much more to get a rise out of us because we are so desensitized by what the media is showing us.

One of my favorite songs on radio right now is Trace Adkins’ “I Wanna Feel Something.” He sings about the exact same predicament. “Last night I watched the evening news/It was the same ole’ nothin’ new,” he belts. “It should have cut me right in two but it didn’t/I don’t know why it didn’t.”

And I don’t know the solution to desensitization either. The media should not stop reporting deaths or stop showing scenes from war just because it doesn’t emotionally affect the public anymore, nor should the public stop caring about deaths just because they’ve seen it thousands of times before. If anything, we need to make sure we do understand just how horrible and violent the world is becoming. We need to put ourselves in the shoes of those who experience this hostility to even begin to comprehend how bad it truly is. If we don’t, who’s to say it won’t get worse?

Haunted houses aren’t the only proof that we’re becoming a society that is no longer emotionally attached to a great deal of the world around us. But, during this time of year, the haunting season, they do exemplify the idea best. Get your annual fix from costumed ghosts and goblins if you must, but remember that there’s horror upon horror in the real world every day.

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