Okay, I admit it, Halloween has never been my favorite holiday. In fact, come to think of it, Halloween is my least favorite holiday, having never quite figured out why so many people enjoy taking a day out of their busy year to celebrate scaring each other. So, this year, before young and old alike get all dressed up as ghosts or goblins or Friday the 13th characters, I decided to do a little research into the matter, and it turns out that human beings (especially men) actually need to have the bejesus scared out of them from time to time. By that I mean that the adrenalin rush that comes from being properly scared is “hard-wired” into us and it actually has served a valuable purpose in making us human beings into a remarkably successful species. But since we can no longer keep our “fight or flight” reflexes in tip-top shape by fending off daily attacks from wild animals with large fangs as our ancient ancestors once did back in the caveman days, we have to find other more creative ways to give us that same high.
For some it is amusement park thrill rides, while for others it is reading a spine-chilling book, or watching a nail-biting horror movie, or going off to fight in a war, or just hanging out in a haunted house on Halloween after the sun has gone down.
When a human being is suddenly scared, his or her senses and intuitive skills are immediately heightened. Our heartbeat goes up, our palms sweat, we get butterflies in the stomach, our skin temperature drops, our breathing quickens, muscles tense up and our blood pressure spikes. And at the moment when we are truly frightened or threatened, we also have increased strength and the ability to respond more quickly to the situation that is confronting us.
Now I’m not saying that we need to have more slasher movies and real-life gore and violence in our lives to feel fully human, but it appears that males in particular seem to have an innate need to see how they will react under stressful and very scary scenarios, almost as if it is a right of passage that clarifies their manhood for them.
Now the flipside to mankind’s need to keep finding new ways to scare himself is that as time has gone by, we have become quite good at it. In fact, studies have shown that some of the very realistic horror movies and violent computer games young people are exposed to nowadays can leave lasting damage that researchers are only now starting to better understand. And for many people, young and old, the long evolution of man’s fight or flight response is a two-edged sword, which finally brings me to my little story.
The other night my daughter dropped by one of my grandsons at my house because he didn’t want to go to a big Halloween party the rest of her family was planning on attending that evening.
“Will said he would rather just come over and hang out at your house tonight instead of going to a Halloween party where there are going to be lots of people dressed up in scary costumes,” explained my daughter. “And for some reason, he especially doesn’t like to be around zombies.”
“I don’t blame him,” I said. “I’ve never much liked to be scared for no good reason, either.”
“I thought about making him go,” she said, “because I want him to be able to confront his fears, but something about Halloween costumes really scares him, so I think it’s just best to leave him with you. Have you ever had an irrational fear like that?”
“Well,” I admitted, “I’ve always been scared to death of clowns.”
“Clowns?” asked my daughter with a smile. “Why clowns of all things?”
“I’m not really sure,” I said, “but I think it goes all the way back to the time my parents took me to see the circus for the very first time. Like Will, I was probably just five or six years old, and it was held in the old Memorial Auditorium in downtown Sacramento. The place was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me, and we had these really great aisle seats that my father was very proud of because it wasn’t easy back then to get tickets to the greatest show on earth.”
“The greatest show on earth?” asked my daughter.
“That’s what they called it back then, and it supposedly had all the best circus acts in the country. Anyway, I was having a really fun time seeing all the elephants and the high-wire acts and everything else when suddenly a bunch of very colorfully dressed clowns ran into the center ring and started shooting off this little cannon. I can still remember all the smoke that came out and the incredibly loud explosions that hurt my ears. And then for some reason a couple of the clowns started running up and down our aisle and before I knew it one of them with this huge red mouth was face-to-face with me and I started screaming so loud my mother finally had to take me out of the place. So, to this day, when I see a clown, I more or less want to scream. What scares you, by the way?” I asked my daughter.
“Well,” she said, “this conversation we’re having about my father being scared of clowns is pretty frightening!”