Monsters

September 29, 2022

I took a break from my regular trashy reality tv circuit this week to watch a scary series on Netflix. It’s called The Haunting of Hill House, and it’s based on a book with the same title by my favorite author, Shirley Jackson. ‘Based’ is a strong word – the story in the Netflix series is quite different from the story in the book, but many of the characters have the same names as those in the book and there are all kinds of little Easter eggs in the series that point back to the novel. Almost every day after work this week, I’ve found myself in my Lovesac snuggled under a fuzzy blanket, with all the lights off in my house, watching the horror unfold in this series. I’ve seen the series before, so some of the intensity is somewhat diminished by that, but the re-watch has gotten me into spooker-mood. Spookers – my word for scary movies, scary books, scary video games, haunting documentaries about serial killers, etc. – make this time of year fun. Who doesn’t love a good monster, afterall?

I read The Haunting of Hill House for the first time last year, and I’m certain that it’s one of those books I will read every Halloween from now on. I do this with Pride and Prejudice at Christmastime, not because that book is remotely related to Christmas in any way, but because the experience is a gift to myself. If you haven’t read The Haunting of Hill House yet, I really recommend it. It’s a quick ~300 page read and very scary, but still chock full of that wholesome charm of the 50’s (collars, poodle skirts, leather jackets, phrases like “jeepers creepers” and “chock full”- I don’t know, I wasn’t actually there). I love the book for a myriad of reasons, one being that the main character’s name is Eleanor, and I’ve always wanted to have a little girl named Eleanor and call her Ellie. In the book, Eleanor (Nell, Nellie) is a young woman who finds herself taking part in a scientific experiment with several strangers.  She sets out on this adventure to escape the monsters of her past (an ailing and abusive mother, a resentful sister), but she finds herself confronted by new monsters when she enters the walls of Hill House. Those familiar with Hill House believe it is haunted, and Nell and her compatriots soon discover that the house quite literally has a mind of its own. This book is marvelous fiction. Please read it. If you don’t want to buy a copy, shoot me your address and I’ll mail you one of mine.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll tell you that the horrifying part of The Haunting of Hill House is that you read the entire book and learn all about the history of the old house and the people who lived there, yet you never uncover the answers to the questions at the heart of the book. Is the house haunted or are the people inside the house haunted? Was the house evil upon creation or did it become evil over time due to the people who lived and died inside? Is Eleanor being haunted by the house or is she being haunted by her own mind? Or is the house saving her from the monsters inside of her mind and bringing her home? At the end of the day, I think the monsters that are the most frightening are those that we can’t understand – the ones that are shrouded in mysteries that can’t be solved with logic or investigation. In The Haunting of Hill House, you never even ‘see’ a ghost or demon or monster- you simply feel the reactions from the people living there. Your mind does these little acrobatic moves to try to fill in those blanks, though. You start using what you know about the history of the house and the people who have lived there over the years, and you start trying to draw your own conclusions. Then you get to page 300 or whatever and realize – Shirley isn’t going to tell you what’s going on. She’s not going to connect the dots for you because she knows that you’ve already done that yourself inside that sick, twisted little head of yours and your version of the truth is way scarier than anything she could write for you.

There’s one monster from the 80’s and early 90’s that everyone has been buzzing about lately. Like many of you, I watched all ten episodes of the Jeffrey Dahmer series on Netflix last weekend and then thought “I should eat something and go outside”. If you haven’t watched it, I guess you have a decision to make. It’s not the sort of thing I would recommend to anyone because it’s just not a pleasant experience. *I have to reiterate that I DO recommend The Haunting of Hill House because I know it is absolutely lovely, scary fiction that you’ll enjoy and will make you think in constructive ways. You will be happy that you read it.* The Dahmer shit…I just don’t know. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it this week, but I’m unsure how constructive or enlightening it has been. It is mostly just sad because it’s not a charming fictional tale. It’s a true story about a very disturbed man who murdered 17 people and mutilated and consumed their corpses all in the name of control. My understanding is that his basic motivation for his crimes was that his sexual partners always wanted to leave eventually after hanging out and he really just wanted them to stay with him. On one hand, you can view that as a depraved desire for control, which it absolutely is. But you can also view it as a result of extreme isolation and desire for cuddles. I mentioned that I’d been in my Lovesac watching scary tv this week – I have to say, I’ve thought to myself a few times “Man I would kill to have someone to snuggle right now… *then when Maudie looks at me confused, I clarify* …preferably a handsome human man.” But like, not literally, ya know? I wouldn’t literally kill for cuddles. But I understand how much we want them. When the actor playing Dahmer in the show presses play on The Exorcist III and reassures his victims that they are just going to have a casual night in – a scary movie, cuddles, beers, some nice, consensual sex – I hear that and think “yeah perfect October evening”. But he just wasn’t capable of enduring the truth that people don’t have to stay with you forever if they don’t want to. Snuggles have to end and that meant a lot of innocent young men would die.

The reason Dahmer scares us all so much is because we don’t understand him. People have studied his crimes and confessions for decades and have tried to figure out the details and circumstances of his life that created this Dahmer concoction that resulted in all the horror he created. No one has figured it out. His father wrote an excellent book in the 90’s called A Father’s Story. In heartbreaking detail, he describes what it was like to juxtapose his own memories of the sweet, shy little boy he raised with the gruesome crimes of the adult that little boy grew up to become. Lionel Dahmer was a PhD chemist, and spends a lot of real estate in his book trying to analyze his own decisions and actions as a father that may have contributed to Jeffrey’s crimes. It’s an incredibly well-written and introspective take on the matter, but of course, like everyone else who has studied Dahmer, he too sort of shrugs his shoulders at the end and says we’ll never know.

We’ll never know all of the environmental and genetic factors and moments and words that combined to brew the Dahmer serial killer potion. That drives us crazy, because we want to be able to prevent people like him from becoming killers in the future. We want to look at our own children and know for certain that they won’t grow up to commit atrocities. We want to send our children out into the world as adults one day and know that they can watch a scary movie with someone they are attracted to without winding up in pieces in a vat of acid. But we can’t know those things for sure – so we start creating what-if’s and hypotheticals in our mind. What if my neighbor, my best friend, my son, my mother…were to become a killer? What if my husband kills me some day? What if my wife kills my children? What if that stranger on the train is a killer? That’s the imagination we all have, and that’s what makes serial killers that have been dead for decades stick out in our minds as monsters. They are dead, they can’t hurt us now. But humans are capable of doing what they did and we don’t know why or how. We are living among monsters that we may never see and we can’t do anything to find them until it’s too late.

I’ve often felt like a lot of the monsters in my head are the direct result of an overactive imagination. I was on a date once, and the guy I was with casually mentioned a girl had recently made him watch Hamilton on Disney+. I asked the right questions (or wrong ones depending on how you look at it) and found out that he slept with her on Hamilton night and was in fact dating both of us at the same time. The difference being that I had asked him to go watch a musical with me once and he said “I don’t like musicals”. My brain started racing with this new information. Rather than just being upset about the very obvious and clear-cut “he’s dating you both at the same time, get out” fact, I fixated on the fact that he was willing to watch a musical with her and not with me. And just like that, a new monster was created in my head – one I referred to in my mind as “Hamilton Girl”. Long after I realized things were not going to work out with this dude and moved on to other possibilities, I kept thinking about her. I bet Hamilton Girl never gets stood up. I bet Hamilton Girl would have gotten a good night kiss. I bet Hamilton Girl never has to go to the bathroom and cry at work. Hamilton Girl has perfect skin. Hamilton Girl is probably in good enough shape to run the Army Ten Miler next weekend. This girl who I know nothing about (other than we have the same taste in men and great musicals) has become this representation of my every insecurity or bad feeling about myself. She’s probably really nice, and would also probably look at my life and feel envious about some parts of it. But my imagination has made her into a monster that I’ll never see. I learned one thing about her and my mind did all the work to connect those dots.

A lot of the fear in my life comes from this tendency to imagine the worst. My boss looks at me the wrong way, and suddenly I’m thinking he hates me now and I’ll soon get moved to another project. I imagine myself going to my favorite used bookstore for the first time in over a year and then wonder what will happen if I run into my ex while I’m there. And what if he’s with another girl, taking her to pick out books that they’ll read together? BUT THAT WAS OUR THING! What if I see them and run away? What if I go to the doctor and they tell me something is wrong with me? What if it’s cancer? Instead of assuming that things will be fine, as they almost always are (I’m a statistician, I should understand this better), I imagine the worst case scenario and sometimes those little scenarios create little monsters in my head that I have to face. Mundane activities become hurdles to jump. Maybe that’s why I like Halloween so much. Just as Christmas is the season for giving and November is a time for gratitude, Halloween is the time for facing your fears head on. It’s about watching the scary movie in the dark with or without cuddles. It’s about wearing the goofy costume without caring what anyone else thinks. It’s about telling Hamilton Girl to get out of your head because you’re awesome too and wonderful company at musicals. It’s about letting the stories about serial killers and abductors and aliens and ghosts scare you for as long as you want them to, but then tuning them out when it’s inconvenient for you to be afraid. I guess it’s all about experiencing fear in a controlled environment so you can try to handle it a little better for the rest of the year. Hamilton Girl and most of the other monsters out there (at least all the fake ones in my head) are all just a bunch of hocus pocus, after all.

I hope you’re having a nice start to your spooker season. If you read The Haunting of Hill House, let me know and we can talk about it.