Beware the autumn people

 "...that country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay. That country composed in the main of cellars, sub-cellars, coal-bins, closets, attics, and pantries faced away from the sun. That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain..."

Ray Bradbury, The October Country

If there's an author who manages to harness the mood of the season, it's Ray Bradbury. Specifically his three books: The Halloween Tree, The October Country and Something Wicked This Way Comes. I was never a fan of his sci-fi stuff. Having only read excerpts of it from comics like Weird Science. I haven't read Fahrenheit 451 either. Horror on the authort hand is my jam. Bradbury creates a nostalgia filled world with streets pockmarked with fallen leaves. Something Wicked specifically deals with facing mortality and our own personal fears. My first exposure to the Norman Rockwell-esque Green Town was as a kid watching the Jack Clayton directed film. 

The 80s were a glorious time for kids horror movies. Or more specifically, horror movies centered around kids. The Monster Squad, Beetlejuice, Little Monsters and The Gate featured genuine peril. Fantasy worlds that opened up underneath the bed, in the backyard, in the new house you moved into, or in the town you're living in. You weren't safe anywhere. Not really. Before any of those movies came out however, Disney decided to go dark. Walt Disney had died in 1966 and his son-in-law, Ron Miller became President of Disney Productions and was keen to shake things up. In the age of Jaws and Star Wars, Disney had found itself boxed in. A period of creativity from the late 70s to the mid 80s gave us The Black Hole, The Watcher In the Woods, Return to Oz and Something Wicked This Way Comes. The director of Something Wicked, Jack Clayton, has dabbled in horror before with The Innocents. A bone chilling adaptation of Henry James' Turn of the Screw. 

There are a number of creepy scenes here that struck me as a kid watching this. The spiders in Jim Nightshade's room for one. The funeralesque march led by Mr. Dark. Watching it as an adult, the scene that stands head and shoulders above the rest takes place in a library between Jonathan Pryce's Mr. Dark and Jason Robards' Charles Holloway. Mr. Dark is in the midst of a hunt for the young protagonists Jim Nightshade and Will Holloway. Will's father faces him down. "You are the autumn people. Where do you come from? The dust. Where do you go to? The grave" Mr. Dark describes himself and his carnival as The Hungry Ones. "Your torments call us like dogs in the night." It is when Mr. Dark takes the book out of Charles' hands and tells the old man he can make him young again. To turn the years back to 30. 

There's an inevitability to the cycle of the seasons. Autumn gives way to winter. Grayness. Death. When I think of winter I think of Bergman. Fall is that creeping in of that feeling as we get closer and closer. It's a time to be nostalgic. There's a scene in Mad Men of Don Draper selling a photo slideshow. "Nostalgia, it's delicate but potent." He's goes on to say, that in Greek, nostalgia means "the pain from an old wound." We all have regrets that mark our past. Events that we wish we can do all over again but differently this time. For the residents of Green Town, it's the chance to run and throw a football on the field. To look young and beautiful. To be loved by beautiful women. To be wealthy. 

"It's a time machine." Don Draper continues "Goes backwards, forwards. Takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel. It's called the carousel." At Mr. Dark's carnival, you can ride the ominous carousel. You'll go back. You'll go forward. Until you go quite mad.  Year by year passes us by like pages being torn out of a book, falling to the ground. It is up to us to drive out the dark nights of the soul. 

We're in October country now. If you happen to put you ear to the ground and hear a faint whistle of a train, watch out. It just might be Dark and Kruger's Pandemonium Carnival coming to pay your town a visit.