Halloween has lost some of its dark powers over the centuries, partly because the monsters among us these days don't wait till the night before All Saints' Day to roam freely on the earth.
As a consumerist society, we've embraced the horror genre as a highly marketable commodity--and in doing so we've discounted horror itself.
Movies categorized as "thrillers" rake in hundreds of millions of dollars, which means legions of American citizens pay to be frightened. Except it's not really fear; it's artificially stimulated heart rates and goosebumps in the name of entertainment.
My criticism doesn't fall on the purveyors of ghost stories or horror flicks. I like a good scary story as much as anyone.
Authors like H.P. Lovecraft or Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King, and filmmakers like Alfred Hitchcock or John Carpenter or Wes Craven, all displayed remarkable talent for blood-curdling storytelling.
For those with a lack of talent, lamentably, the substitute all too often is simply gore. Popular "slasher" films often feature ridiculous plotlines and laughable acting but deliver gratuitous blood-and-guts violence.
Thanks to special-effects technology, butchery and carnage is depicted in sickening detail beyond what anyone would have thought possible--or permissible--a half-century ago.
Even so, our free-enterprise system allows us to spend frivolously, and the horror business has as much right to risk capital and seek profits as any other.
What's wrong with this picture--in which a nation that lavishly entertains itself with fantasy fright (retail industry estimates predict a $7 billion Halloween bonanza)--is that it's shamefully imbalanced.
Real horror, which isn't fun and in fact is traumatizing and brutalizing in a way that scars for life, never gets its due on the national stage.
The disparity might not be so bad if it weren't such a plague on our citizens. Just this week, responding to spiking violence and homicides in some major U.S. cities, President Barack Obama displayed an incredible disconnect with reality.
"[T]he fact is, is that so far at least across the nation," he said, "the data shows that we are still enjoying historically low rates of violent crime."
That's a mauling of the truth, unless his intent was to redefine the word "historically" to mean only the last 25 years or so. Violent-crime rates are indeed lower than they were in the 1990s, thank goodness, but remain at historically high levels for the nation overall.
The national rate for aggravated assault (assault involving a deadly weapon) last year was 270 percent higher than what it was when John F. Kennedy was elected president. The rates for rape and robbery are 275 percent and 170 percent higher, respectively.
It's even worse in some states, like Arkansas, where the aggravated assault rate is 528 percent higher than in 1960. Our rape rate is 447 percent higher. Only in politically correct, criminal-apologist liberal wonderland do such figures constitute historical lows.
I've complained before about hate-crime legislation being a pyrrhic political pander, rather than effective policy. Hate crimes get sensational publicity, but are barely specks on the radar of the nation's crime problem.
There were a total of 27 hate-crime incidents reported, from 265 police agencies, in Arkansas for all of 2013. That's just about how many violent rapes are perpetrated against Arkansans every single week.
Hate crimes are defined by motivational bias, which can be difficult to prove in court. We need a "Horror Crime" category that is defined by victim traumatization, which is easy for most jurors to understand.
An unarmed burglar in a garage, who flees immediately at being discovered, causes no horror. But pointing a gun at someone creates soul-wrenching terror.
And in contrast to rare hate crimes, horror crimes are routine.
There wasn't a hate crime reported in Craighead County in 2013, but two horror crimes occurred on Monday night in Jonesboro.
Two women in separate incidents were held at gunpoint and ordered to perform sex acts. Both refused, and fortunately the assailant fled in both instances without physically harming the victims. But the horror they suffered is damaging. They each were confronted with mortal fear, and were but a nervous hair-trigger away from instant death.
We all have the right to live free from such fear, and our laws ought to give weight and justice to horror victims.
Beauty never dies
Maureen O'Hara was the first lady of Irish-Americans. Her earthly reign ended last week at the age of 95, but thanks to her film legacy she will live on for posterity for us to admire and enjoy her performances.
Despite stealing scenes and dominating the screen in perennial classics like Miracle on 34th Street and The Quiet Man (her personal favorite film), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences never saw fit to even nominate her.
Last year, she finally received an Honorary Oscar, becoming only the second actress (to Myrna Loy) to receive an Academy Award without ever being previously nominated.
O'Hara always said she loved the character of Mary Kate Danaher in The Quiet Man, and so did I. It's more than coincidence that my own firstborn daughter wound up with the same name.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 10/30/2015