My earliest recollection of encountering the haunted air of Halloween is from when I was too young to trick or treat, which may have put me in a ghoulish mood. As with most holidays, every Halloween our extended family convened at Nana and Bapa’s house in Northeast Portland, where there were brass rings still embedded in the curb to tie your horse. My mom and I arrived in her Honda instead, and, swaddled in a handmade pumpkin costume, I was carried up the terrace steps. I remember that it was already night, probably only 6PM, but it might as well have been the witching hour. I remember how cold and wet the air felt, even though it hadn’t been raining. I remember being in my mom’s arms and looking up at the sky, and seeing a gossamer webbing of cloud wrapped around the Moon, and the Moon shining through that nightgown shroud a glowing silver. I remember how long it felt to get to Nana and Bapa’s front door, and how warm we were once inside. I remember a sense of relief, as though by stepping through the doorway, my mom and I just narrowly avoided a long, creeping claw reaching down at us from that glowing Moon.
I feel that long, creeping claw every time I do my seasonal flip-through of Haunted Air, but instead of feeling the dread of getting dragged into a crypt, I feel the warmth of a wave hello from a long lost friend. That is, I suppose, the purpose of Halloween. Compiled by former Coil member Ossian Brown, Haunted Air is a collection of vintage American Halloween (or “Hallowe’en,” as the subtitle renders it) photographs from the 1870s to the 1950s. Equal parts folksy and frightening, it is one of the most impressive compendiums of American life during its history when a continental power died and a superpower was born. With an introduction by David Lynch, whose own work crystallized haunted air in celluloid, Haunted Air is a mausoleum in book binding. It’s hard to shake the eerie realization, as I look at photo after photo of some stranger in an even stranger costume, that almost every person in these photos is dead. That baby being held by its mother–surrounded by her husband and five other children posing for a picture outside of their farmhouse, all clad in homemade costumes of ambiguous depiction–is now in a grave that is hopefully visited by its great-great grandchildren. If not, that is tragic, but I get to visit the baby, its family members, and countless other families and friends and neighborhood acquaintances and drinking buddies and partners turned foes each October, frozen in the bright haunted air of America. “A void out of time,” as Lynch says in his introduction, “And here they are–looking out and holding themselves still–holding still at that point where two worlds join–the familiar–and the other.”
Besides Haunted Air and the films of David Lynch, the paintings of Belgian misanthrope James Ensor force us to hold still at that joining point. Ensor lived and died in Ostend, his life (1860 to 1949) roughly overlapping with the timeframe of Haunted Air, and his parents owned a souvenir shop that, among other things, sold carnival masks. These masks, skulls, and other cartoonishly ghoulish faces were the motifs of Ensor’s artwork, the last in a tradition of demonic art. Ensor was a man born out of time but at precisely the right time to capture a transitional rupture in Europe, the result of Haussmann’s demolition and renovation of Paris, a cataclysmic act of urbanism that inspired similar projects around the continent (including Ensor’s Belgium) and spurred the development of the Impressionists, the Decadents, the Surrealists, the Symbolists, and so on. Ensor loathed both monarchy and democracy, was resentful of tradition and suspicious of innovation, and through his work, he attempted to hold still at that point where the familiar and the other worlds joined. When an aged Ensor was asked by Einstein what he painted about, Ensor replied, “Nothing.” He could have said haunted air.
Imagine, then, my delight when I noticed a print of James Ensor’s hanging in Laurie Strode’s bedroom in Halloween. It’s in the scene where she gets a phone call, looks out her window, and sees The Shape (it wouldn’t be very haunted air of me to call him Michael Myers) staring up at her, partially shrouded by a clothesline. The camera cuts to Laurie looking, and then cuts back to the clothesline, and The Shape is gone, startling Laurie. Some argue that this is a continuity error since Laurie never loses sight of The Shape, only we do in the editing, but it fits considering The Shape is the embodiment of haunted air, “a void out of time.” Within the Carpenter mythos, that point where two worlds join is a kitchen knife.
After Bapa died, Nana lived the final two years of her life in a small farmhouse in central Oregon, far from the home with a horse ring out front where I first experienced the haunted air of Halloween. Nana spent her last Halloween in bed, surrounded by my mom, aunts, and uncles, the people who had made that home in Northeast Portland a warm refuge. I remember that it rained especially hard that night. In spite of the maelstrom of haunted air and the long, creeping claw of the Moon, Nana held still at that point between worlds, and passed in the early morning of All Saints’ Day.
Happy Hallowe’en.
— Jacob Everett is the publisher and editor-in-chief of APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL.