| There was also a witch in our town. She was a strange old woman who came out only in the early evening. She never spoke with anyone. Wrapped in a shawl, straw hat tied to her narrow head with a scarf, she would pick mushrooms from her lawn and put them in a wicker basket. In the spring, she picked dandelions. My dad assured us she was only a crazy old lady, but we knew better. Kids have been spotting witches for centuries, now haven’t they? They’re good at it. Adults don’t have a clue. So, the seeds of childhood fears--a sum of experience and imagination and all those nasty stories rammed down our throats by children and adults alike?become the flowers of adult phobias. As horror writers, we can exploit the hell out of these things. It’s what we do. We don’t lock our fears down in some moldering earthen box like most adults do, we use them. We make them our little dark friends and we put those wormy bastards to work. Take Ray Bradbury. Some of his best stories-- “The Crowd” and “The Wind”, “The Emissary” and “The Handler”--are pretty much based on childhood terrors. So when, as a child, he was frightened by the wind whipping around his house or how quickly a crowd gathered outside a graveyard following an automobile accident, he recalled these terrors as an adult and wrote them out of his mind. Most adults aren’t that lucky. They never get a chance to exorcise their demons like we horror writers. They just lock them away and pretend they’re not dangerous anymore. But suppressed urges and childhood terrors have a way of crawling back out of their boxes and making themselves known in the most unusual and disturbing ways. So, adult fears then, fed by childhood terrors, are manifold and many. It would take a dozen volumes just to list them. The fear of strangers, however, is still among them. We carry this out of childhood and tend it very well in our gardens of morbidity. As adults we know how scary the world is. We know that the boogeyman is real--he is a rapist, a serial killer, a pedophile, a terrorist. He is a monster that changes shape and intent at will. He is after us and our loved ones. We must guard against him at all costs. In the adult world, unlike its childhood counterpart, the boogeyman is often stopped. He is captured. Put on trial. Put in prison or the asylum. Sent to the death house. Executed. Sometimes he is killed by his own would-be victims long before this. But it doesn’t matter. We know, like a parasitic weed, he will only rise up again and again. And he always does. He lives in the dank subcellar of the race and he always will. Just as the 17th century had its witch-hunts, the 18th its vampire-hysteria, and the 19th century its sexual sadists, the 20th and 21st century have been ripe for the boogeyman…in his current guise of serial killer and mass murderer. Interestingly enough, adults are also afraid of children. They are strangers, aliens. They do not think like us, act like us. They belong to a secret society which we can only view from afar. They are a cult which we can observe but never join, not after puberty. Children often do horrible things to one another and to adults. But because they are children they cannot be held truly accountable. The fears begin. A child can hurt you, but you cannot hurt it back. They have an unfair advantage. And in the darkest regions of our minds, we know this, and it terrifies us. It’s a good terror to exploit. Countless stories, novels, and films have used this effectively. Wicked children rising up against adults. Evil children committing atrocious crimes and shifting blame on adults via sheer innocence. Inhuman children murdering us in our beds. These themes have provided fertile ground for our horror fiction brethren. William March’s The Bad Seed and John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos are two fine novels that come to mind. Both were made into really good movies and have been imitated and re-told ever since. Yes, children are frightening because they are different. And because they are different they are strangers and because they are strangers they are frightening. Again, horror writers make good use of the fear of strangers. Most of Lovecraft’s survivals, extradimensional horrors, and degenerate alien races were supposedly just allegories for his puritan fear of immigrants, of strangers, of the swarthy Europeans and Asians and their Old World religions. Of course, that’s what the experts say and Mr. Lovecraft is not around to debate this. That whole business of attaching metaphor to the great man’s works sometimes gets a little silly and out of hand. |