Sometimes it comes back

What is your favorite time of year? Is it spring, when buds begin to bloom and the days begin to lengthen? Perhaps it’s summer, when the temps are high and outdoor activity is at its peak. For me, it’s when the temperatures start to drop, and I can finally start sleeping comfortably under heavier blankets. It’s when fallen leaves give a satisfying crunch underfoot, releasing an aroma of earth and autumn. It’s when creatures feared and ostracized during other times of the year – ghouls, witches and monsters – can come out and be celebrated.

My introduction to these figures started with unsupervised access to a few cable TV networks, including TNT, USA and HBO. One of my earliest memories of watching a scary movie includes a black-and-white zombie film. I was anxious that, at any moment, a grayscaled-zombie would fling open the back door and attack me in front of the television. But by the next morning, I was alive! What a thrill, and to my young mind, a surprise!

I subsequently watched a lot of bad horror films in childhood, mostly sequels to popular films like “Child's Play,” “Halloween,” “Friday the 13th” and “Nightmare on Elm Street.” Even when I wasn’t watching them, I used to walk to my local video store and visit the horror section. I would pick up the movies with spooky-looking covers, read their summaries and then imagine the stories and gore that each one held. I still haven’t watched “The Company of Wolves,” “Puppet Master 5” or “Dolly Dearest,” but I can still recall the morbid (and campy) images printed on their VHS boxes.

I sometimes saw other kids my age browsing the horror section, but it really ramped up as we entered fall and neared Halloween. I think it’s natural to have a fascination with topics considered taboo, but I don’t think that’s entirely what drew me to these tapes. Was it the brave Thackery Binx from “Hocus Pocus”? Was it the persnickety but athletic Patrick Bateman from “American Psycho”? Was it the two suspiciously close and handsome male friends who ended up as the killers in the first “Scream”? Maybe. Perhaps it was the sense that I, too, was different, and that this difference was enough to make me considered, by some, a monster?

I don’t think I need to reiterate why I sensed this. Even today, we simply need to pull up a website of a conservative news outlet or swipe a few times through the president’s social media to see the distaste for difference and queerness. While these movies highlighted gore and often used offensive language and images, their outlandishness mirrored the same sort of wild jump that one needs to view my same-sex attraction as an abhorrence. But even with this absurdity, I found myself believing them – that I could somehow be as monstrous as a doll possessed with the soul of an undead serial killer. I wonder if that feeling – that we are monstrous – is more common than I imagine?

Now in adulthood, it is annoyingly difficult to move past this thought. It has become so internalized that it persists despite the attempts to end it. But how does one end Michael Meyers or Jason Voorhees? I don’t think cryogenically freezing the thought, setting it on fire or shooting it into outer space is going to work. Even when we feel like we’ve “killed” it off, are we doomed to countless sequels where it comes back, more gruesome and worse than before? Perhaps the “final girl” trope holds the key. Should we embody Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” whose abstinence saved her in the first film? Or should we copy her isolation in the most recent?

I don’t think that works either. Perhaps the key is in family – “The Addams Family.” One of my favorite spooky households, they welcome outcasts whose monstrosities are the very things that make them alluring and celebrated. From their inception, the Addamses have injected camp and comedy into how they move through their world. Can humor save us? Is it what can finally end the spree of a monstrous thought? We’ll have to wait and see … until next time!

P.S.: Come see me celebrate horror and humor this weekend in “The Rocky Horror Show,” which opens Oct 24 at the DAC.