Halloween: Horror and Horniness

 

Yeah, I know… another holiday-themed blog post, even though I usually don’t like making those. But I did one for Easter, where I talked about the Norwegian tradition of the Easter murder mysteries, and I wanted to at least do one for my fave holiday: Halloween.

Yep, Halloween is definitely my fave holiday. And partly it’s because Halloween is a pretty unpretentious and low-effort holiday. Watch some suitably spooky Halloween specials, make sure to have some candy to share out to trick and treaters, maybe pretend to be scared when the kids try to frighten you, and you’re golden. I generally don’t wear Halloween costumes and dress up myself, and it’s been ages since I went to a Halloween party, much less hosted one (I did host one back in college, and that was pretty much a success!) but I wholly approve of the custom. And I really approve of candy. 

But mostly…  I just really like the dark and spooky aesthetic. This might be why I also grew fonder of Easter over the years, when I really embraced all the murder mysteries. Now, I’m not really that big on the PURE horror stories… slasher movies, jump scares and whatnot; if a story’s pure motivation is just to frighten, it quickly gets annoying for me. In my eyes, horror and creepiness is like a spice, or salt… it’s a condiment, not a meal. Add a bit of it when you’re cooking, and you can totally make the meal… but I wouldn’t want to eat a meal that’s nothing but salt and spices.

I think this is why I like Halloween specials of established franchises… because these specials are never pure horror, they’re always their own genres but with added horror… or horror-ish themes, anyway. It’s also why I like horror comedies such as Gremlins… or those really old EC horror comics can be fun, because they’re not taking themselves too seriously, and often have some other theme or goal that goes beyond just creeping you out.

There is one thing, however, that REALLY catches my interest, and that’s EROTIC horror. Mix horror and erotica, and I’m VERY MUCH THERE.

I admit it, I do have a slight horror fetish. Much like my hypnofetish, this is something that’s been with me ever since I was too young to understand what a fetish was. I just always had a fascination with the horror aesthetic, and much like when I saw cartoons or movies where pretty ladies were hypnotized or put to sleep, I… LIKED seeing cartoons or movies where some dark and spooky events were played for the sexual. Of course back then I had no idea I was turned on by it, I just knew I liked it. Especially if the stories had a bad ending… it kind of confused me a little because I have always been a fan of happy endings and I want stories to end in a positive place, but I discovered that the bad endings gave me some kind of thrill that I didn’t quite understand.

If you remember those “choose your own adventures” books, I read quite a few of those when I was a kid… some of the bad endings would stick with me, and I’d remember them more vividly than the good endings… especially if my character ended up transformed or petrified or enslaved for all eternity. Yes, it was a bad ending, but it was the ending I would bookmark and re-read because… I didn’t know why, I just really liked it,

When I was a little older I used to call it a “morbid fascination” because I felt that kind of “excused” it a little. All these horrific things that I wouldn’t at ALL want to happen in  real life, and I love reading about it or seeing it in a movie? Oh, it’s just morbid fascination, you know, I know it’s wrong but I can’t look away… Like with my hypnofetish, this was the source of a bit of guilt… not to the same extent, because liking horror is a lot more socially accepted; lots of people like horror movies and are very open about it. But, well, you don’t generally hear too much about people who are kind of turned on by horror. And as I grew older and managed to shed my teenage prudishness (I was a TOTAL PRUDE in my early teens; I suspect it was just a reaction to my then latent bisexuality and “unacceptable” fetishes), I began recognizing that, yes, in certain circumstances I DID find horror EXTREMELY arousing. 

Not that I ever thought Freddy Krueger was sexy or anything, or that I wanted to make out with freakish horror monsters, but… yeah, sometimes horror really turned me on. I think I was sixteen or seventeen when I first read a few romance trash novels… you know, the sort of books that are often referred to as “housewife porn,” with some rather weird romance setups and some really graphic sex scenes… and in one of them the female protagonist confessed to the reader that being scared made her horny. She used a couple of paragraphs to describe how, in her teen years, guys would invite her to adult-rated movies in the hope that she’d be turned on and let herself be seduced, but that it never worked because none of the guys ever thought to take her to a horror movie. If one of the guys had taken her to a horror movie, she would have been all over him before the credits rolled. Now, this quirk of the female protagonist was probably mostly there to explain why a guy who scared her got her so horny that the pseudo-rape scene was actually really what she wanted… but I did kind of recognize something in myself here.  

Well, I didn’t really recognize myself in the protagonist otherwise, because she was frankly very annoying… over the course of the story she just came across as a bratty child in a woman’s body, just that instead of screaming for sweeties, she was screaming for sex. I really got tired of her after a while. But that particular thing… getting horny from horror… that part I recognized.

And so, I kind of carefully began exploring the world of erotic horror.  I watched a lot of so-called “Euroshlock” movies… European movies with controversial and often horriffic imagery, and tons of sex and nudity. Not all of them could classify as horror, but they were erotic movies that went to often uncomfortable places, and I watched them through in “morbid fascination.” After all, these were art movies, not actual porn, so it was okay for me to watch… right?  Well, my Euroshlock phase ended abruptly when I happened to read an article that went through some of the more famous Euroshlock movies, several of which I had seen and found hot… and the article essentially said “if you get horny from any of these movies, seek psychiatric help.” That one sentence pretty much made me quit watching Euroshlock movies, and steer away from erotic horror altogether. Guilt and a feeling that something was SERIOUSLY wrong with me forced me to seek out more conventional erotica, so that I could tell myself that I was like everyone else…

Yeah. Guilt is a very powerful force. I’m still not rid of it. But I’ve managed to make peace with it, for the most part. After a couple of false starts in the hypno-community (I’ve written about that before too) I finally accepted that part of myself. And yes, I like erotic horror. Just like horror is a nice addition to other genres in those Halloween specials, I find that it makes erotica just a little more erotic for me. And if you combine hypnosis with erotic horror… well. YES.

So maybe that’s another reason why I’ve come to like Halloween so much. I don’t even have to go to a party or dress up if I don’t want to. After I’ve given candy to children and admired costumes and pretended to be frightened, I can spend the late hours of the evening indulging in my horror and hypnofetish. 

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