First-world problems: Going to Fantastic Fest means I miss the very beginning of fall here in the Northeast. I come home and it feels like it’s underway already. That upsets me, as (shock) fall is my favorite season and I like to savor every second. And I don’t mean in a “the stores are full of plastic Halloween shit/lemme get my Pumpkin Spice Latte!” kind of way. I dig fall on a molecular level.
I mean that literally. I once read that back in his golden age, Clint Eastwood shot his movies in the fall because as temperatures cool, the air molecules slow down and visibility — especially across vast landscapes — increases exponentially. “Crisp fall air” isn’t just a temperature thing; it means you can literally see better, see more, and see farther. A handy phenomenon when taking a fall drive to check out the leaves changing colors. If your temps are in the 60s this week, step away from the computer and go see for yourself.
Maybe if I lived in Florida or California or someplace a little more picturesque, I’d be a summer guy. But in the coastal suburb of New Jersey in which I grew up, the ocean was brown, the soil was sandy, the trees were thorny, harsh and unfriendly. The summers of my childhood were not lush idylls, but brown, olive, gray mosaics seen through the haze of those hot, sped-up air molecules. Fall was always when my world exploded into dazzling color for a few weeks, and it couldn’t help but fire up the imagination. I wonder if there’s a correlation between creatives who grew up on the East Coast and those who gravitate toward horror for this very reason.
Fall of course brings other genre goodness our way, and it really is amazing to walk into a Spirit Halloween or even a big box department store and see the holiday given its due. Younger readers might not realize it was not always so, and that while a few decades ago fall might have signaled the beginning of Halloween, it was more akin to hunting season, in that you really had to go looking, and you were lucky if you came home with anything. Our local retail chain was Bradlees, and when Bradlees gave some meager shelf space (I believe the retail term was an “island”) to a few stacks of Ben Cooper or Collegeville costumes, I was in heaven. (The year they first had these new-fangled plastic foam prosthetic kits branded as The Face, I lost my mind.)
There are other random sensory associations with fall on which your mileage may wildly vary, and mine are curated in that way we need to curate the events of our lives in order to stay sane. I don’t, for example, associate fall with the anxiety I felt at the start of every school year, an existential panic attack accompanying the commencement of each new grade, over and over for 12 years. I don’t particularly associate it with loss or tragedy (that’s winter’s domain, in my experience), though folks in my life have indeed passed during the fall season. In my mind and in my heart, fall stays awesome.
There’s just something about fall that can’t be dragged down by personal baggage, something electric and weirdly hopeful about the season that keeps horror fans buoyed. It’s as if the world blossoms into our mood, our color palette, and our energy for a handful of weeks before winter sweeps in to drain everything of color and warmth. It kind of sucks that this raging against the dying of the light is so comparatively brief, but we’re lucky to have it. Here’s to spending these shortened days wisely, and enjoying them fully.
