What’s scary?

We ponder plastic skeletons and other seasonal paraphernalia.

One of our consultants has downstairs neighbors who are very enthusiastic about decorating for the holidays.  Just now his outside wall and adjacent sidewalk are overrun with four-foot-long spiders and other “scary” things.  Skeletons are big this year, not only of humans but of every sort of animal, including horses, dogs and cats, birds and (yes!) spiders.  Up and down the street one can find plastic headstones and red-eyed corpses.  We’ve never been big for this sort of thing, but we recognize the attraction holiday decorating has for some people and we’re quite willing to enjoy their efforts.

Of course none of it is actually frightening.  Even leaving aside the fact that a mass-produced, kitschy polystyrene headstone with “RIP” on it is threatening only to people worried about plastic waste, the skeletons are obviously store-bought.  Even if a real skeleton were to appear on this street it would raise concerns for public health and maybe public order, not generate some numinous dread.  Which is fine.  People live here, and would rather not plan dinner and school homework around the unquiet dead.

But these are symbols, at some remove, of very real and powerful fears.  A human skeleton is indeed a dead person, and for most people to be presented with one in any but the most antiseptic circumstances is deeply unsettling.  The red-eyed corpse recalls many a story of the dead not lying quiet as they ought to.  Rituals to appease the spirits of those who are gone used to be routine, and are not unknown today.  The details of a king’s burial mound or pharoah’s pyramid attest to a lively belief in some kind of activity after death, and a need to control it.

How and why did the skeleton-symbol cease to be scary?  If you asked Dr. Watson, he might reply that people are now civilised (yes, we’ll keep that spelling) and scientific, not irrational and superstitious.  “This is the nineteenth century, after all!”  But trying that answer on us will only elicit (polite and restrained) laughter.  We think there’s enough evidence in the most recent events to show that people have not become particularly rational or scientific.  Skeletons have not ceased to be scary because students learn the chemical formula of polystyrene or stop attending church.  (Please, that last does not equate churchgoing with superstition!  We just mean to indicate a shift from belief to materialism.)

If pressed for an answer ourselves, we have only some guesses.  We would agree with Dr. Watson in that the process (in the urban West) took place in the nineteenth century.  But we’d focus on the availability of light.  When there are streetlights, the night has fewer dark corners for fears to hide in.  When you can summon light from a gas-globe or, later, an electric bulb at the turn of a handle, instead of husbanding a flickering candle, you have more power over shadows.  Things that go bump in the night can be brought to light forthwith.

You have to find other things to fear.