In Defense of the Macabre

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6 minutes

“Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?”
-The  Tyger, William Blake

 Halloween is now two weeks past. Leaves are falling from the trees. There is a crisp, smoky smell on the air. Of all the seasons, Autumn seems the briefest, blending into the times before and after, and partly defined by them. For a few weeks, perhaps a month, Autumn will really be Autumn. In their final burst of color, the trees give their sweet protest of the coming death, their commentary on the macabre. 

I would like here to reflect on that grim thing, both in nature and in human culture, and to offer it some kind of defense. I think, or at least feel, that the creepy, the grim, and even the horrible, has a real but limited place in the present order of things, and that it is alright, on occasion, to celebrate it. So, in no particular order, and with no suggestion of a grand theory, here is my defense of the macabre. 

Terrible Creatures 

There’s a species of spider in South America that is the size of a dinner plate. Several, in fact. The one I’m thinking of is covered in fur-like hair, has huge black fangs, and eats mammals and birds. Spiders as a class are terrible enough things. Walking hands, with teeth, and many eyes. Everything about them is unsettling, so it seems almost unfair that some are large enough to eat your kittens. But there it is.  

Certain fungi infect and zombify their insect hosts, forcing them to behave in strange ways, and even to walk to precise locations. There the insects freeze in place, and wait as fungal appendages grow from their own appendages, putting forth fruiting bodies filled with spores. 

Then there are wasps who sting caterpillars, leaving them alive, but crawling them with eggs. The wasp eggs hatch inside the caterpillars, then proceed to eat their way out of the still-living flesh. Lovely!  

Now you can object to this sort of thing all you want. But God made it, and, somehow, it is good. Chew on that for a moment. No pun intended.

 Eerie Places

 My university town had a large graveyard. It was an old town, and the thickly wooded and hilly grounds had been filled over the decades with the fleshy remains of tens of thousands of its residents. Maybe millions. The cemetery was long enough in the tooth that its various sections were like geological strata.  

My college friend and I liked to wander into the deepest, darkest sections, where the gravestones were small and broken, and the names no longer visible. There we took out our journals, and wrote poetry, or sketched the gnarled trees, and the broken stones.  

Once we explored the place at night, long after it was closed. There was a large group with us, and someone -- a cemetery newbie, probably -- set off an alarm. We ran, scattering in the darkness, trying to find our way through the dense trees and clinging brush. The prospect of being caught or arrested was, of course, scary. But the alarm, that blaring, man-made thing, actually mitigated our fright. The cemetery was the frightening thing; and being scattered, and isolated under the gaze of the shifting trees. 

Scary Stories

 There is some good in being frightened. Death, being a doorway through which all men must pass, needs to be seen in order to be remembered. Yet death is an evil -- at least I think so. I do not go in for the new age idea that death is just part of life, and something with which we should all get comfortable. We should not be comfortable with it, but we should confront it.  

A good scary tale has at least one virtue: It confirms the healthy human instinct, a memory of Eden, that human death is an abomination. Human life was meant to go on ever-increasing, for the human heart has no end-point, no telos, but God -- and God as no end. The human person, without God, is a miserable contradiction. But man without God makes other things God, and this is no less true of religious people -- who should know better -- than of irreligious people. Scary stories help us to remember that all of our idols will be smashed; even the noble ones. Nothing that is not everything can escape that dark entropy. 

Now not all frightening tales are good, because not all of them do the important work of shocking us out of complacency. Not all of them show us death in order to help us accept its reality, and turn soberly to confront it; and find life. Many show us death in order to celebrate it. In effect, some tales work to prepare us for a coming, endless despair. I will not argue that every scary tale must be some kind of fable. Goliath Spiders are not fables, as far as I know. They are just horrifying. We can take a ghoulish delight in their predation -- as long we’re not on the menu, of course -- without needing to justify that strange delight. But there is definitely a point when such joy-in-the-horrible becomes, well, horrible.

 Many horror films and books are like this. Their fun is mostly the guilty kind. Some characters go off to do things they shouldn’t do. The camera pans lovingly over all their wicked little deeds until just before something goes bump in the night. Then out comes Nemesis, the terrible reminder that the wages of sin is death. We are then invited to enjoy their terror, their panicked fleeing, their hopeless final moments as the fruit of their wickedness consumes them in awful ways. The evil continues until the protagonist turns and faces the Monster. But even after it is slain, we know it’s not really gone; perhaps because the sins that gave rise to it have not really been repented.  

Now there is some good in that narrative, but it’s not quite enough. For one thing, the novelist or director is not asking us to change. On the contrary, he shows us the sinful reveling with as much gusto as the demonic response that follows in its wake. For another, the authors of such stories enjoy too much the wicked beings they’ve embodied on screen. In a way, looking at wickedness is the point, and the fable of sin is the excuse.  And some ultra-modern tales of horror dispense almost entirely with the fable, indulging in the victims’ pain, suffering, and hopeless horror for its own sake, and celebrating the infinite possibilities of wickedness. 

All of this is a way of saying that horror is a very flawed genre, most especially when the bad guys win, and when that is the point. Yet I think the genre can be redeemed. The way to do this is to show the horror, and then show how it can be conquered and killed, so that it will stay dead. Only an interior change will do that trick. 

Scary Costumes (In Defense of Dressing Up Like a Monster on Halloween)

 Let’s just get this out in the open: trick-or-treating is fun. In my opinion, it’s good wholesome fun, though some good people disagree. Most of them are serious Christians, like me. From their point of view, the cultural celebration of Halloween has two big problems. First, it commercializes and effectively suppresses the actual meaning of this Holy Day. Second, it invites people to celebrate darkness and evil as good, fun, and harmless things. I will address the second objection first. 

As I noted above, the macabre is part of creation. Not all of it is evil, even if it seems evil to us. There is a certain amount of danger and darkness built into creation, because this world, though good, is not all good. That is, it is not God. The world has been created in a “state of journeying,” and that journey apparently includes animal and plant death. There was death in nature long before the Fall, but it was not positive evil. It wasn’t wickedness; just the “natural evil” of things that are not meant to last forever passing away. Floods, volcanic eruptions, and forest fires, destructive as they are to man, are in no way moral evils. The same is true of nature’s many little monsters. So it is bad theology to object to the macabre because it is macabre; to insist that everything be sweet, and nice, and whole-some seeming. 

 To the second objection, there is the fact that Christ has conquered death, and put his enemies at his feet. I do not fear ghouls, goblins, and witches. In a sense, they are figures of fun, because now they are powerless -- at least, they are powerless over one united to Christ. It is good to “fear the one who can cast body and soul into Hell,” but, according to the same passage, we also should not fear. If this is be a paradox, make the most of it. Fear comes from our imperfect love; from making the horrible more real for us than the good. It is that element to which I object in some horror stories, but the same fear seems to haunt some Christians. It is as if they believe that by dressing up as a ghoul, they are giving ghouls power. On the contrary, within certain limits, by dressing up as ghouls -- or by hanging them up from the trees outside their homes -- they are making them mockeries; figures of fun. I can laugh at the skeleton, because the last enemy to be conquered is death.  

Now, as I said, there are limits. It is possible to celebrate evil because it is evil; it is possible to delight in the twisted and horrible. I would not dress my children as actual demons,  but I don’t think it follows that they must go about on Halloween dressed as saints. Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of whether Halloween has become too secularized, or too dark, it seems unreasonable to me to insist that it lack a healthy secular component. Christians who take this approach seem to imagine there was some purer time in Christian history when all pre-Chrisitian or secular elements had either been repurposed or eliminated. But I’m not sure when this Golden Age was supposed to be. Human culture is always a smorgasbord of disparate elements, and their current practice and meaning is not necessarily identical to some previous incarnation. The question is not, “Is Halloween currently celebrated in the best possible way,” but “Is it alright to let kids dress up in moderately ghoulish attire for one day out of the year, so they can participate in a fun communal activity?” In light of all the above, I think the answer is clearly, “yes.” But I’m not going to argue about it. Rancor over what to me is a fun and harmless holiday seems...well...a bit macabre.

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