It’s that time of year. Crisp mornings, mist on the grass melting into an airy blue sky. Sun warming red and gold leaves before the wind whisks them off the trees and piles them thick on the ground. One of the most beautiful times of year.
And what do we do with it? We turn all that lovely colour scheme into black and orange. With flashes of blood red.
Black witches’ robes and hats. Black bats, cats, spiders, cauldrons. Black vampire capes, matched with luminous plastic teeth dripping scarlet. And orange, orange, orange everywhere, in the form of pumpkins, real and plastic. Shops are full of them. Clothes shops display children’s tee shirts, trousers, sweatshirts, jumpers, only in those colours. When my children were young and happened to need new clothes, I knew there was no point even looking until halfway through November.
goes back a long way.
Photo by Mike Jones: https://www.pexels.com/photo/
young-girls-in-witch-costumes-covering-faces-with-balloons-9740365/
Halloween: not an attractive colour palette
I’m not a fan of Halloween (can you tell?) but that’s for aesthetic reasons, not religious ones. After all, dressing up as devils and witches and dancing around on All Hallows’ Eve goes back a long way in Christianity, all to mark the devil’s last grasp at power before being vanquished by the forces of good the next day. I just wish the colour palette was more attractive but I suppose that is the point.
I also lament how that thrilling literary genre, the ghost story, can get boxed in to one particular time of year. Yes, dark, stormy nights, blazing bonfires, owls hooting from lonely, dilapidated houses silhouetted against windswept moorland – all these create a spooky background for a bloodcurdling tale mmwahahahahahaha.
But even more chilling, in my view, is the fear that can creep up on a bright summer’s day, in beautiful countryside, where things are… just not quite right.
Picnic at Hanging Rock: a terrifying film shot in bright sunlight
Trees waving when there’s not a breath of air. A patch of sunlight in the woodland that is cold as ice. Footsteps running ahead of you in the dew-soaked grass that turn back as you turn back. Think Picnic at Hanging Rock, in which the depiction of those young girls in white, Edwardian lace dresses under a deep blue sky alternates with shots of the huge, looming, strangely marked stones to build up the atmosphere to a terrifying pitch. My scariest recurring nightmare as a child – so scary I had to learn to wake myself up from it – involved nothing more than a dream of paddling in warm, sunlit seawater, knowing that something dreadful was about to happen.
Not just the haunting
That’s why my children’s ghost story, The Fall of a Sparrow, is set, not as the nights draw in and the wind howls around the chimney pots, but among the fresh green leaves and flowers of an early English summer. As 11 year-old Eleanor struggles to find her feet in a new school far from home, she’s pleased yet puzzled to be claimed as a friend by a strange, gawky little boy who follows her around, begging her to play with him ‘like you used to’. Then puzzlement turns to horror as it’s clear he knows things about her he can’t possibly know, things no one should know… Unravelling the mystery lures her into a dark web of family secrets, drawing her into deadly danger.
See, it’s not just the haunting. It’s what’s behind the haunting that builds the fear.
Griselda Heppel 