be as dreadful as any seven-eyed monster with
three-inch teeth.
Esther Jones, dean of the faculty at Clark
University in Massachusetts, studies medical
ethics, speculative fiction and African American
literature. To her, 2020’s blurred lines are part of
what makes this COVID-inflected Halloween —
and the notion that fear can still be fun — into
an unusual moment.
“Halloween, for one night, you know it’s coming.
You’re going to immerse yourself in this fear
and this release. And the next day you’re back
to normal,” says Jones, an associate professor
of English. “We could kind of go along happily
assuming what we believed to be true — that
we are resilient and strong and infallible.”
But 2020 “has turned over the rock. It’s removed
the mask,” she says. “Everything that we thought
was so strong and resilient and would not
change is changing in front of our very eyes.”
So 10 months into this wretched year, what
do fake blood, zombie mannequins in the
supermarket foyer and hands clawing out from
front-yard Halloween graves in the suburbs
really give us?
“In light of 2020, playing with fear and death
acts as kind of an escape from fear and death.”
That’s how Ben Lish, 17, a senior at Hampton
High School north of Pittsburgh, explains the
allure of a place like Cheeseman Fright Farm,
which he visited this month.
Across the nation in California, horror lover
Melody Bentson offers a similar assessment. “It’s
fun to look in the face of something that’s dark
or scary and come out the other side,” she says.