by Grant Maierhofer
Where we live in Idaho the smoke from the wildfires suddenly overtakes us late in the summer. Yesterday, while driving, my phone kept blaring alarms that a city nearby needed to evacuate due to the threat. Being outside even for a bit your throat begins to hurt, and the vaguely pleasant smell of the early phase of the fires is lost in a scraped feeling around the tonsils. When we moved out here, the smoke often got so bad they’d cancel class, and advise everybody to stay inside. The air had a reddish hue to it, commingled with the gray. This return each year reorients me to things, to our history here and the years we’ve spent building, rebuilding.
***
We’d moved into a small apartment, weeks before my wife would find out she was pregnant, and then she’d have to fly back to Rhode Island to finish out her degree. This mixture of the sensory experience of life out here is now blurred with my psychic experience, my emotional sense of things as they’ve transpired these years, almost a decade of living far from my hometown, both of us across the country from family, but freed up, slowly, too, to make our own tolerable existence on terms we feel comfortable with. There exists some easy temptation to slide, to return back to mental states which seem to have sustained me in the past, but I think I’m skeptical of them in a way that didn’t previously exist; the impulsivity, the anger, the extremity is given shorter mental life than it might’ve been given even two years ago, because I’ve seen, in a demonstrable way, that those things aren’t sustainable, and aren’t nourishing in quite the same way that present living can be.
***
I get confused when I try and think about what shape this all took for me before, and for some reason find myself now compelled to think of it in much the same way that John Carpenter conceived of the Michael Myers character in the original Halloween, wherein the character is frequently referred to as "the Shape”. I think I mention this because I’ve found horror films a constant source of emotional grounding in my life, both while I’ve been extremely depressed and not, though nowadays there’s far more comfort taken from them than there ever would’ve been when I was younger. In Carpenter’s film, in particular, I like the idea that the Shape becomes a kind of Rorschach image for whoever’s looking at it, being this effective blank, wearing mechanic coveralls and an anonymous mask that looks like no human face.
***
It’s no secret, of course, that depressives tend to enjoy horror films, much in the same way we can tend to enjoy anything vaguely Gothic, centered around the fall, around Halloween, around black metal, around any sense of evil. What I find interesting now is I’m no longer a teenager, drawn to something apparently simply because it seems “fucked up,” or different, or strange, or scary, or like it provides a compelling experience. I’m interested in it now because it seems to offer an environment one can enter, something highly palpable and immediate, not at all like an amusement park—it’s never exactly the “thrill” I’m interested in—but rather the sense of operating in an environment where the parameters seem clearer, the dangers are more exact. The worlds, too, seem somehow more inviting, warmer, which seems counterintuitive. Perhaps it’s the music—Carpenter, famously, once showed a cut of Halloween without music, and his viewer thought it ridiculous; he then added his compositions, the eerie piano and synth music that’s become a mainstay of any Halloween party playlist, and his viewer couldn’t believe how different, and how effecting, the experience was. Perhaps it’s their context—they’re almost always a mixture of young people, trying to have fun, and older people, envious of the younger people and perhaps bitter at their jobs, and everyone craving what stability’s on offer; mixed with a killer who’s been cast out, rendered vile, or simply exhibitionistic in their attempts at murdering as many people as they can. Perhaps it’s habit, or repetition, or the image—the opening sequence of Candyman, filming cars on Lakeshore Drive and throughout Chicago, with Philip Glass’s piano music over everything, puts me instantly where I was when I first saw it, eight or nine years old, in a dark basement, and the mixture of the music with what I’m seeing doesn’t make me nostalgic so much as actually transport me to who I was then, captivated by the possibilities not of violence, but just how scared, how destabilized from my existence I might get.
***
With the Shape, what I see is the kind of looming threat at the edge of all suburban life, which is oddly transcendent of its strictures and small concerns—if the Shape needs to travel a short distance, it walks; a long distance, it steals a car, murdering its driver; if the Shape needs a weapon, it grabs the largest thing at hand, most capable of inflicting death—and the ways in which something might quickly become inverted, might sort of betray us, and almost immediately our psyche can become something threatening, untrustworthy, because of the anonymity of the figure therein, and the fact that we only see him unmasked as a small, confused child, and a grown, scarred ex-inmate of a mental facility, i.e., the Shape is the thing, and even in the first film the biographical relevance is quickly dwarfed by the extent of the Shape’s potential brutality, and as the film transpires it comes to serve only as a potential locational cue for those attempting to hunt it before it kills them. It’s odd, but when I watch people talking about horror films on YouTube, or when I have conversations with friends or family about them, or even simply think of them on my own, here, I feel as though I’m talking about depression. I grew up in a community not dissimilar from Haddonfield, in the Midwest, where the primary concerns were school, extracurricular events, chasing girls, and talk. In prior horror classics there was frequently the sense of people out of their element—the narrative mode of “a man takes a journey”/“a stranger comes to town” is particularly befitting when thinking of such films—and just as the Killer was seen as something exceptional, the context typically would be as well. In Carpenter’s film, though, the only thing really exceptional is the sense of horror the Shape can become capable of instilling.
***
I remember when I first saw it, watching both Halloween H20 and the original with my cousin, when I was maybe seven or eight years old, perhaps nine, and it was then that I started to perceive more complexity in psychic life, both its richness and the threat it seemed to pose to human being. I don’t know what to make of the notion of the violence in the films, and in a way I have to admit it’s probably the least interesting component to me, though I wouldn’t suggest it could easily be removed and still bear the same weight as the experience when it’s left in. Those visceral moments, though, the sort of ecstatic stabbing, the frenzied, crescendoing music, sudden chords of extremity, strike me as infinitely less interesting than the slow, creeping sense of dread, if for no other reason than I can remember being a teenager, walking through the city, and wanting things to feel that way—and really, in wanting them to feel that way, making them feel that way—and being in my twenties, walking through Chicago, or walking home in Idaho from class, and either listening to music or listening to the surrounding world, and it seemed as though no artform had so captured that feeling, the mixture of hyperawareness of one’s surroundings and the sense of a real horror, a black, spectral negativity permeating not just my brain but the consciousness of the surrounding world, but it wasn’t, and it isn’t, as if I wished or wish to fully blot that out, to cancel it out, so much as being able to let it exist there, in utter blackness, and realizing that perhaps it bore no more weight than its counterpart, or its many counterparts, the varied lightnesses of the world. When I walked it could be solely black, solely anger or misery coursing through me, frustration at my state, or misery at it, frustration at my life, frustration at money, at my father, misery at publishing, misery at writing, at America, and what I think I’m beginning to trust about my present state is my life is not entirely bereft of those feelings, not even a bit, it’s just that they’re often shot through with a seemingly higher consciousness that won’t let them spiral uncontrolled, which perhaps even ties back to the present day, the current world, and the looming threat of these fires, and the feeling in my throat of being scraped, and the doubling and tripling of this awareness in the lives of our kids, which doesn’t put me into some sentimental mood, but sharpens everything, and certifies any act which needs to be taken, when I can remember in those years, the early falls, through grad school and through my first years teaching, where the mood could be consuming, and the only slight warmth would come at the trading off of liking the smell, and the warmth, and the sense of walking outside and being hugged by smoke, but knowing people were dying, and knowing my students who weren’t in class might be out fighting the fires, none of it could be managed, none of it was manageable and it was all too much.
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Grant Maierhofer is the author of Peripatet, Shame, and others.
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