On Spookiness

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FROM OUR ARCHIVES: Eliza Brooke on the autumnal line between actually scary stuff and the cozy unease of ghosts, pumpkins, and flickering candles. This piece was first published on October 19, 2022.

I don’t have much in the way of hobbies, but I do have a personal passion for spookiness. Every October, I pore over old Halloween editions of Martha Stewart Living; I watch The Nightmare Before Christmas with my sister and treat it like a deranged sing-along; I go for walks in cemeteries to soak up the atmosphere. I keep the spookiness simmering throughout the year: I once made a life-size rendering of Max Schreck’s Nosferatu out of construction paper for Halloween, and he became a permanent decoration in my apartment, looming awkwardly like a roommate’s new boyfriend, forever unsure if it was a good time to use the shower.

As much as I enjoy the gentle unease of spooky aesthetics, though, I hate outright scariness. Don’t want it, can’t do it. My boyfriend recently recommended I read the Stephen King vampire novel Salem’s Lot, and I had to stop after just a few chapters because I got too wigged out by King’s descriptions of the long-abandoned Marsten house, which exudes a sense of clammy dread. My aversion to fright has been a persistent problem. Seven years ago, I watched two minutes of a horror short on YouTube in the middle of a newsroom sometime around lunch. I don’t want to remind myself of the details, but it had something to do with a woman trying to go to sleep, except a demonic being keeps appearing as soon as she turns the light out. I believe it was later adapted into a movie starring the Australian actor Teresa Palmer. Whatever it’s called, it still comes to me at night when I have to get up to pee.

“It’s kind of funny how you love spooky things, but you can’t do horror,” my boyfriend said when I told him I was quitting Salem’s Lot.

It is funny, and kind of humiliating. Liking the spooky but not the scary seems a bit juvenile and poserish, like buying a vintage band T-shirt just because it looks cool. It also has the annoying effect of preventing me, a culturally interested person, from fully engaging with the horror movies that have become a fixture of the highbrow film world—see: A24’s Hereditary, Saint Maud, and Men—and a huge moneymaker for streaming platforms. (For the record, I did watch and enjoy Robert Eggers’s The Witch, but that’s only because I know what it’s like to be a teenage girl in Massachusetts.)

This strange split in my feelings has led me to the following conclusion: The spooky is fundamentally distinct from the scary, and provides something unique to our imaginative lives. Scariness spikes your adrenaline and sets you uncomfortably on edge, but spookiness piques your interest in a quieter, warmer way. Why is spookiness so enchanting and delightful, then? Why does it feel like it lives inside my heart, giving off a warm glow like a jack-o-lantern on a chilly October night? I suspect that spookiness is a lot like love, in the sense that everyone experiences it in a way that seems so private, so specific, that they believe nobody else feels it quite like they do.

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