Good fun? Other years, sure. But this year? This
2020 that we’ve clawed through 10 months of
so far, through pandemic and uncertainty and
racial injustice and sometimes violent unrest
and unthinkable political divisions and, and,
and, and ALL of it?
In a year when fear and death have
commandeered front-row seats in American
life, what does it mean to encounter the holiday
whose very existence hinges on turning fear and
death into entertainment?
What happens when 2020 and Halloween
collide? Can being scared — under certain,
controlled conditions — still be fun?
When we are afraid, we have sought out fear. For
a century, that’s been the odd contradiction in
American popular culture.
In 1931, when the Great Depression was at its
height and American society seemed fragile,
Universal Studios uncorked the first of its iconic
horror films, delivering up Bela Lugosi as Dracula
and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster.
In the 1950s, when American life felt finite, with
nuclear menace from without and subversive
threats from within, science fiction produced
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and “The Thing
From Another World.”
But usually the fear Americans have chased is
different than — though certainly related to —
the fear present in our lives.
Today, in a nation that has buried more than
225,000 of its own from COVID, how does the
iconography of death play — the tombstones
and caskets and decaying corpses and the