Another Week Ends

1. Your neighbor’s twelve-foot-tall Home Depot skeleton has a name — did you know that? Skelly the skeleton has become the status symbol of choice in my Halloween-saturated neighborhood, along with similarly sized reapers, scarecrows, and werewolves. (Tell me you live in an affluent neighborhood without telling me you live in an affluent neighborhood, am I right?) As Halloween celebrations accelerate in the same commercial direction as Christmas, the New York Times asks “Have Halloween Decorations Become Too Scary?” If I wasn’t personally changing my daily school commute to spare my preschoolers from a particularly scary house in town, I might have dismissed the article. Who needs another anecdote-filled contrarian invitation to worry about something new? It turns out I’m not the only one. Alyson Krueger explores:

Being a little spooked is part of the delight of Halloween. But lately, some say genuine jump scares are abundant — on stoops and front lawns, looming in doorways and hanging from rafters — as household decorations seem to have become more gory, more violent and unsettlingly realistic.

It has caused neighbors to lodge complaints, and others to wonder about the twisted impulses that may be lurking in the collective American psyche.

“It bothers me because I think it says something about the character of our culture,” said Regina Musicaro, a licensed clinical psychologist who practices in New York City and specializes in trauma. “It feels what is being prioritized is being the most outrageous, and I think we need some self-imposed restraints on what we put out there because it reflects our thoughtfulness.” […]

Do adults participating in the fanfare still have an obligation to keep things kid-friendly? And then there’s a larger question about social responsibility. Is it a parent’s job to protect children from seeing scary things, or should the entire neighborhood pitch in?

In my mid-twenties, Halloween was my jam. Like “couples costume trophy from the local bar” jam. Pushing 40 with two small kids, the acceleration is getting to me. Yes, the acceleration of violence and gore that Krueger highlights, but everything else too. Cosplay and expensive deluxe costumes killed the DIY fun of a homemade costume. There’s no longer just trick-or-treating, but also a slew of multi-weekend harvest festivals and trunk-or-treats and costume parties thrown by every kid-facing organization in town. Candy has gotten so expensive … did you know they’re not even putting two Starbursts in the same package anymore? They’re wrapping them individually! And did you know that the reason Kit Kat is producing green and white chocolate-themed candy bars is because cocoa prices have skyrocketed, and it’s a cost-cutting measure to keep the bags of candy somewhat affordable?

2. That said, the reason for the acceleration of violence and gore in Halloween celebrations may have to do with the turbulent times. Coltan Scrivner suggests as much in the Atlantic when he argues that behind our fascination with the macabre and horror is morbid curiosity, which he thinks is a psychological coping mechanism. He would know: Scrivner’s research on the subject was done in the Recreational Fear Lab, a Denmark-based research lab that’s exploring how to turn fear into a psychologically healthy (dare we say healing?) emotion.

In March 2020, right around the time the coronavirus was declared a global pandemic, the decade-old film Contagion spiked in popularity. In the film, a (fictional) virus called MEV-1 wreaks havoc on the world. Those infected develop a terrible cough, fatigue, headache, and fever. Travel is banned, businesses close, stores are plundered for household supplies, and word of supposed miracle cures begins to spread as scientists race to develop a vaccine.

Pandemic-themed films weren’t the only ones that viewers were obsessing over at the time. In 2020 and 2021, the horror genre as a whole accelerated its ascent in terms of market share. Apparently, scary times called for scary pastimes.

Perhaps people were seeking out simulations of the event that they were living through as a way to understand how it might play out. But that doesn’t explain why so many people were watching slasher and zombie films. On the surface, the impulse to terrorize ourselves in already terrifying times seems counterintuitive, but it jibes with what many horror fans have accidentally discovered and have been discussing online for years: Scary-safe experiences, such as horror movies and haunted attractions, appear to have some calming effects. […]

My theory for these findings is that engaging with fictional scenarios of danger lets us safely experience fear and anxiety, and become better at regulating those negative emotions. Then, when real danger presents itself, we feel prepared—if not for the specific scenario, at least for the feelings it unleashes. Otherwise put: Scary-safe experiences serve as a kind of exposure therapy, getting us more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

What if a whole group of people loved horror, experienced that sort of exposure-therapy relief that Scrivner describes, and wanted to then share that relief with the whole world? That’s about as charitable an explanation as I can think of for why people would sink $300 into their Skelly.

3. It’s enough to make a parent of young children exhausted, but that’s not the end of it. Don’t just spend the money and avoid the spookiest houses, but inspect the candy for drugs and razor blades, wear reflective clothes because kids get hit by cars, and also: don’t let them get hyped up on too much sugar. Except every single one of these Halloween myths are just that: myths. As Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz outlines at Slate, we humans are pretty bad at cause and effect. The data and biology prove that sugar doesn’t cause a physiological spike in energy, even though we see that kids clearly get amped when the candy is consumed. It turns out it’s not the candy that makes the kids amped, but the circumstances that candy is given: birthdays, holidays, and other special occasions.

That proves it: The sugar/hyperactivity myth is all to do with expectations. It’s a remarkable insight into how bad we are at assessing evidence in our own lives. Everyone thinks that sugar makes children hyperactive, so whenever kids are bouncing off the walls, we assume that it’s the sugar. Even though I know for a fact that this entire idea is untrue, I still find myself waiting for a huge surge of screaming followed by tantrums whenever my daughter has a cupcake. And sometimes she does exactly that, because toddlers get excited when they’re given treats, and usually she gets a cupcake at a party, a setting where all the other kids are also pretty excited anyway.

The problem, fundamentally, is that we are all human. Humans are great at ignoring evidence when it doesn’t match their beliefs. There are undoubtedly people reading this article right now who are shaking their heads and thinking that this guy has no idea what he’s on about because whenever my kids get candy they become uncontrollable fiends. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!

There’s nothing quite like personal experience to make people confident, certain, and wrong. The entire purpose of scientific research is to remove the human element from the equation. People just aren’t very good at knowing what’s true without a framework that removes all of the, well, humanity from the equation. That’s what scientific experiments are meant to do.

Yes, OK, let’s cast some suspicion on our personal experience and let the data tell the story. But also, candy doesn’t have to be ingested to alter a kid’s mood. Like Pavlov’s dog, the mere mention of it makes their synapses fire on a whole new level. The sweets may not cause hyperactivity, but they are an occasion for it, nonetheless. In this way, the “no candy” law increases the “sugar high” trespass. The more candy is off-limits, the more coveted it becomes, the more parents are led to believe it can lead to bad behavior.

Still, if we’re shedding one more thing for parents to feel guilty about during our one night of annual freedom from dietary rules, then let the kids have that extra Reese’s Cup. 

4. All that Halloween demand is exhausting, but thankfully, I don’t have an Eight Sleep bed, the Skelly of sleep-enhancing technology. When Amazon’s web-hosting services glitched earlier this week, we all experienced our hiccups, but people with these top-of-the-line smart beds may have gotten the worst of it. Nancy Walecki reports on the matter in the Atlantic:

On Monday, the future glitched. Eight Sleep’s features run on the AWS Cloud, so when one of Amazon Web Services’ data centers went offline at about 3 a.m. ET, the sleep system went haywire. Eight Sleep generally warms when the user is drifting off, then gets cooler as they enter deeper sleep. Santiago Lisa, a software engineer in Pittsburgh, told me he woke up because his bed was stuck in deep-sleep frigidity. He tried to warm it up using the Eight Sleep app, but no dice—the app was down. Then he tried the system’s manual buttons. No dice there, either — they also require the Cloud to function. Jordan Arnold, who works in the video-game industry in Washington State, told me that his girlfriend couldn’t sleep because her side of the bed was stuck at its highest temperature, 110 degrees Fahrenheit. She slept on the couch. Other poor souls, who had put their bed in a sitting position to read and were now stuck there, spent the night in the world’s most high-tech Barcalounger. A Jetsons vision of the 21st century did not include Mrs. Jetson stuck in an upright and locked position because her bed could not connect to a data center in Northern Virginia. […]

The more technology in a sleep routine, the more possible points of failure. Our bed might not connect to the cloud and remain stuck at an incline. We might open our phone to summon the soothing voice of Matthew McConaughey and instead be spirited away by Instagram. Technology, one of the main reasons we can’t sleep, has entered the last part of our life that is usually free from it. Before Eight Sleep announced its new offline mode, some Reddit users discussed “jailbreaking” their bed so that it could function without the AWS Cloud. A simpler hack might be to let our bodies do what they’re already primed to do. Even when his Eight Sleep malfunctioned on Monday and remained at frigid temperatures, Lisa told me, “I ended up sleeping. It was just cold.”

Walecki uses the word “cyborg sleep” to talk about this expensive and technologically assisted desire to rest well, which sounded dystopian to me until I realized that my CPAP machine probably numbers me in the trend. The irony that we are replacing the easiest thing our bodies do with more technologically advanced and less reliable gadgets highlights our discomfort with our bodily limitation. There’s something tempting about being able to control our world during the time our bodies make certain we have no control.

5. In humor, the new season of SNL has provided a bunch of laughs over the past couple of weeks, including the “Work Birth” sketch (above), the “Appliance Store” sketch (below), and “Surprise” (linked). It’s a sign of being online too much to have opinions about new cast members, but so far, things seem to be right on track for them.

Also in humor this week: “IT Guy Had Affinity for Cords at a Young Age,” “French authorities won’t charge Louvre thieves on grounds the crime was really cool,” and “Alexa explodes after Canadian replies to query with, ‘Oh, yeah, no, for sure.’”

6. A remarkable interview with actor Sir Anthony Hopkins came through this week from the New York Times. The whole back-and-forth is worth a read, in which interviewer David Marchese begs for some deep validation about life and work while the impish actor playfully denies it. (Would you call any of the films you’ve made important? “No.”) A few highlights include his thoughts on family love and estrangement, his epiphany at Laurence Olivier’s funeral, and his deliverance from alcoholism, shared here.

I’m always slightly reluctant to talk about it because I don’t want to sound preachy. But I was drunk and driving my car here in California in a blackout, no clue where I was going, when I realized that I could have killed somebody — or myself, which I didn’t care about — and I realized that I was an alcoholic. I came to my senses and said to an ex-agent of mine at this party in Beverly Hills, “I need help.” It was 11 o’clock precisely — I looked at my watch — and this is the spooky part: Some deep powerful thought or voice spoke to me from inside and said: “It’s all over. Now you can start living. And it has all been for a purpose, so don’t forget one moment of it.”

It was just a voice from the blue? From deep inside me. But it was vocal, male, reasonable, like a radio voice. The craving to drink was taken from me, or left. Now I don’t have any theories except divinity or that power that we all possess inside us that creates us from birth, life force, whatever it is. It’s a consciousness, I believe. That’s all I know.

And as for life lessons in his old age, Hopkins shares this:

Sir Anthony, I realize I’m dancing around a question that I’d like your answer to. Do you think your life has had meaning? The only meaning I can put to it is that everything I sought and yearned for found me. I didn’t find it. It came to me.

7. Let’s not forget that the costumes and candy are the precursor to the bigger deal: we’ll give the last word to an All-Saints’ appropriate reflection from Eric McLaughlin, a doctor in Burundi whose daily stroll takes him by a graveyard memorializing the bodies of his former patients.

I pause in my walks and remember these people and their deaths. Josué was our cashier, wheelchair-bound since before I met him from some old injury. He was smart and kind and unfortunately couldn’t feel the infection in his legs until it had overwhelmed him.

Silas was a pastor, gentler than anyone could expect from the years he lived as a refugee in Tanzania. He was sick for years, and though I had a suspicion of his diagnosis, I had neither the tests to verify nor a treatment to help him.

Justine had something wrong with her liver, but I wasn’t able to find out what exactly, and her sudden decline surprised me.

Jean Philippe’s sudden death remains a mystery to me to this day.

They were young. None of them near what I might consider retirement age. Pondering the graves around me, I am confronted again and again with the fact of death. Death has come and taken them from us. When might it come for me? […]

As for death, Christians look for its coming, difficult though that may be. A 2019 study in the Annals of Palliative Medicine reported the results of a survey of hundreds of people asking their preferred way to die. Overwhelmingly, respondents wanted to live a long, rich life and then die in their sleep. Why is this idea so appealing? The study suggests a variety of reasons, but I think most come down to a preference for living as if death is not waiting for us.

Here in Burundi, death is common and sudden, including among the young. Funerals are attended by the hundreds, and I expect few reach adulthood without having sung in a funeral choir. Nevertheless, I find here much the same sentiment about death that I find in America—the same avoidance those researchers found. Even here, where the subject is unavoidable, talking about death is met with the same hesitation. Even among many Christians, I find the same futile wish to spend life ignoring its most inevitable event. […]

For centuries, many Christians carried on the tradition of memento mori, the Latin reminder that we will all die. They would engrave a skull or some other symbol of physical mortality to regularly confront themselves with the fact of death and the need to prepare to meet it. Perhaps these Christian forebears would endorse my habit of taking a regular constitutional past the graves of my friends.

Here I find myself wanting to suggest that Christians should be marked by having no fear of death, but perhaps this is not reasonable. Even defeated, death marks such a transition—such an unknown—that fear seems inevitable.

What matters, I think, is less the absence of fear but the presence of hope. Is our faith in Christ’s promise of resurrection more than lip service? We don’t know much about the other side of that door, but if Christ is raised, then life is there (1 Cor. 15:12-28). Life in the presence of our Savior.

Strays:

• A bit of self-promotion from yours truly, inspired by Mbird, in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette today: “Where to find the devil at work on Halloween.”
• This craft-beer-loving, homebrewing dad nodded enthusiastically to “Wacky Labels and Silly Names Are Killing Craft Beer,” especially the bit about the IPA arms race. It’s another instance of acceleration gone awry.
  • Our own Nick Lannon was the first to claim that Halloween was more Christian in its ethos than Christmas. This from 1517 expands on that idea, with an especially lovely section about king size candy bars.
• Apologetics this week from Arthur C. Brooks: “Life is incomplete and nonsensical without a belief in the reality of the unseen.”