It's Halloween week. Do you read horror? Have you written any? Why or why are you not a fan?
It's Diwali week in India - festival of lights, which we call Deepawali in the south of India, where I am. We stopped bursting crackers several decades back, when my nephew was in primary school, and got us to sign an anti-pollution petition after reading about child labour in some of the manufacturing factories. But we do light lamps with oil and cotton wicks and set them out in the garden, and enjoy how pretty they look.
Halloween was not a thing in India in the 1970s, or even the 2000s - but somewhere around 2010 and thereafter it started growing in popularity. It's common in many larger cities to keep out candy for the festival now, though still very patchy. But Halloween plus Diwali is definitely a strange combination. In my mom's apartment complex, the resident Whatsapp group had a hilarious discussion going on about dressing the kids up in Indian finery for the Diwali pooja, or prayers, and offering them traditional Indian sweets - and then taking a half hour break, doing a quick costume change, and then welcoming little vampires, werewolves and witches with packaged candy. Two worlds coinciding, or rather colliding, in the most bizarre of ways!
But the topic of today's post is horror, not Halloween. Do I read horror? No. I get scared too easily, and I know anything I read along those lines would haunt me for life. I am prone to recurring nightmares as it is, and don't want to add any more to my list, thanks very much.
Have I written any? No, and why - see above.
The closest I came to appreciating horror was in high school, when a number of my good friends got hooked onto werewolf stories, and the Friday the 13th series of movies, as well as Nightmare on Elm Street, and the Shining (remember those?). I'll date myself even further by saying that my best friend at the time went into an absolute panic because she was alone at home watching a horror movie, and the tape on her VCR machine snagged, replaying one of the worst scenes over and over while she cowered behind the sofa, screaming for help - until her older sister walked in, and teased her mercilessly, no doubt finding the whole scene hilarious. Until then, I had planned on going to her home to watch a horror film with her. But when I heard this I decided against it.
I've never been tempted to read horror after that, but I did watch an iconic horror film about 20 years back, when I lived opposite a cemetery in Bloomington IN. I was part of the Bloomington Storyteller's Guild, and we told spooky stories in a gorgeously atmospheric outdoor park - very mildly spooky, as there were young children running around, and hot chocolate doing the round accompanied by cookies. My friend Nathan insisted that the best way to wrap up the evening was to watch the Blairwitch Project, followed by a midnight walk in the cemetery. Which, according to him, was a rite of passage in the midwest that I had missed while growing up in India, and needed to be immediately remedied.
So we did. And.... nothing happened. I liked the film, which thankfully suggested more than it actually showed, but we didn't have a sticky tape, the walk was fine, and - all good. (Or I would have killed Nathan. I warned him not to make it too scary).
So that's my opinion on horror, folks. I prefer not to deal with it because I can't deal with the scary stuff!
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