Sunday 10/26/2003 8:51 AM Joe Coluccio

Ain't Walpurgisnacht a kick in the pants?

It's the end of October and, I don't know about you, but I'm looking for a good scream to clear out all that crippling dark that has accumulated since last year. Mostly I crank up the TV and gaze hopefully at the movie channels, but there is much to be wary about in modern horror settings and although I admit that Michael Myers and John Carpenter at least had the virtue of being the first and perhaps the best of the bloodletting which tediously has followed, this nouveau mythology dressed in gore is far too close to the yellow screaming nightly news. And in fantasy too unpleasant to really help me descend into the Inferno.

I was frightened more innocently as a child. When scientists open the hydroponic garden door in the movie The Thing from Another World and you get a quick view of the alien and an even more fleeting detail of two dogs, hanging from the rafters with their throats slit, imagination of the beast feeding left me weak and drained as the hanging Shepherds in my movie seat. Add to that a brisk walk to the corner following the showing to wait for a ride home in a frigid bleak black and white snowy landscape and I was close to comatose as we sped down Verona Road in the overheated Buick Roadmaster.

I could go on endlessly about movies that gave me a rippling frisson. The bleating brass when the Creature from the Black Lagoon appears, the Alien (one of the few modern era horrors that I can watch) in a weird parody of Caesarean section bursting full blown from the belly of John Hurt (I sat next to my horrified pregnant wife and heard a kid behind me whimpering to his mother that he wanted to please leave the theater), and the magnificent synoptic ending in Dead of Night, golfers dummy et al. There was something cathartic and transforming about the fear, heroism and heady rush of adrenaline. Something helpful.

There was also a smattering of dark literature that could be found in the library. My aunt would drive us after shopping every Saturday morning to the Homewood Branch of the Carnegie Library and I would roam up and down the open stacks, my right index finger leading me from title to title down the spines of the books. Somewhere along about the L's I discovered HP Lovecraft. One evening in the dark of autumn I sat in my basement bedroom, my brother and I had been displaced by the arrival of our maternal grandmother, and read, first, The Rats in the Walls and then Pickman's Model. I pulled heavy covers over my head and cowered at the clicking sounds of the furnace cooling in the other room and noticed red gleaming eyes considering me from the depth of the hallway that lead to the back room.

It is a certain restraint and a rage of imagination that is missing from modern horror tellings. The scene is set, the fire is dying in the hearth or campfire, stories are being told and then the proceedings are rendered inconsequential by a swath of blood and gore from a clumsy oaf wielding a machete. This, though possibly the stuff of nightmares, is not the stuff of catharsis and health.It is the junk that we face all the livelong day. Oafs wielding machetes. No adventure is left to follow. The irrational is abandoned and you are drawn to the surface and left strangely to ponder, why would anyone in their right mind go to that lake or woods or basement when they know that others have without any possible redemption been squashed and quartered? The answer is pretty clear, the victims are as psychopathic as the monster. This rude appeal to the rational does not allow for any hero to descend into the underworld and reappear triumphant. Instead we are stuck to wallow endlessly in the red sticky horror of daylight.

I sit here and ponder if I have just written the ravings of an old timer wishing that things can just please stay the way they were. I conclude that there is some of that in me. For the record I know that Walpurgisnacht is not celebrated on or around Halloween. I also know that I am right about these particular demons and the means of slaying them. Anybody got any wolfbane?

In the words of Casper, "BOO!" Y'all!